24 ms·

Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

438 points by colinprince 10y ago

soared 10y ago
You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources. If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email and build a "look a like" audience of people who are similar to your customers. A company called cartalytics will let a brand purchase lists of people who have bought a specific product in the past 6 months and show them ads. Ex. If you've bought a big mac (with a credit or debit card) in the last month, I can show you McDonalds ads.. but they are super expensive.
- confounded 10y ago
  Tangential question: Do you know if it's possible to identify financial institutions which don't sell this kind of data? Credit unions?
  - polyomino 10y ago
    Up until a few years ago, credit card networks had divisions that were trading on transaction data, but they've had to shut those down. So now they sell the anonymized data to prop trading firms and advertisers. I think cash is your best bet.
    - confounded 10y ago
      Hah, I actually did a small project on some of this data for one of those companies. Pretty amazing what you can get out of 50 char descriptions at scale. Do you happen to know the law that caused them to stop trading PII? Is it only the networks, as opposed to the issuers who trade information?
  - soared 10y ago
    Small credit unions would be your best bet, but I'm not aware of any specifics unfortunately.
    - rhinojosa 10y ago
      The problem is small credit unions still use co-branded cards with Visa/MC, etc who sell your data. I believe AMEX is your best bet for privacy, because you are already paying a premium to them, or good ol' cash money.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > match your customer with data about them from countless other sources With so many data sources, it should be easy to find proxies for protected classes (race, sex, etc). Indirect discrimination was (and still is[2]) used to enforce racial segregation ("redlining"[1]). Facebook was recently caught[3] enabling direct discrimination. I wonder if your roommate cares that his company is probably doing the same thing indirectly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [2] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2015/HUDNo_15-064b https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas... [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...
  - soared 10y ago
    We both discuss how our jobs will step over moral lines on occasion. It is something I don't like, but not something strong enough to make me quit. If I were in charge I wouldn't be supporting some of these types of advertising.
- mathattack 10y ago
  I think you mean Cardalytics. The amazing thing is that hedge funds trade on aggregate credit card purchase data.
- maglavaitss 10y ago
  "Everyone is doing it" sounds wrong on so many levels.
  - Chronic2h 10y ago
    Go ahead and take the moral high ground here. No one is stopping you. But you'll be broke as hell if you do (or run out of funding).
    - maglavaitss 10y ago
      As someone who's been bootstrapping his own startup for the past ... 6 years and refused VC money (not for moral reasons), I have to take it. I still refuse to implement Google Analytics and integrate FB/Dropbox/Google in any of the projects I'm involved with. Moralist? No, I'm just not into feeding the monster.
      - dabockster 10y ago
        Got a link to your startup?
    - wheelerwj 10y ago
      maybe that's not the worst thing.
    - confounded 10y ago
      Total rubbish. Targeted advertising is not the economy.
    - moonshinefe 10y ago
      Fatalism.
- ForrestN 10y ago
  Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...
  - nilved 10y ago
    They do.
    - Rmilb 10y ago
      Source?
      - spodek 10y ago
        Source that they don't? I'd presume that they do absent a credible source they don't.
        hueving 10y ago
        They don't offer any services that would benefit from it.
        esert 10y ago
        They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/
        username223 10y ago
        Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.
        esert 10y ago
- leesalminen 10y ago
  My first time creating an ad on FB was startling. I didn't know all those targeting options existed. But, they've worked extremely well for my niche SaaS. We currently focus 60% of our ad budget on FB.
- sixothree 10y ago
  With it being so rampant, why is it so difficult to discover what people know about you. And what are the barriers to changing this?
  - confounded 10y ago
    Regulation. Consider EFF membership. https://eff.org https://eff.org
kminehart 10y ago
That might explain a pretty creepy thing Facebook did the other day to me. I just created a new Facebook account after maybe 4 years of radio silence. Two years ago, I had a job doing IT contracting; often I would go to businesses and repair laptops or run cable to a COM room. We had very very few residential clients since they weren't worth our time; the few that we did have were really just courtesy for doing business for so long. I went to one residents home a SINGLE time, hardly interacted with the man, and he definitely did not know my last name. Guess who pops up on my "Suggested friends", with no mutual friends or place of work or any similar "liked" pages? Yeah, that one client. Similarly, we worked in a small office in a cold storage facility, and Facebook also suggested that I add their accountant as my friend. It's really creepy, but if Facebook was able to know that I worked at that employer then it's possible that it was able to make the connection.
- O5vYtytb 10y ago
  They know your location and proximity to other facebook users.
  - soared 10y ago
    This is the actual answer. Your phone tried to connect to their wifi and knows they've also connected to that same wifi. With few other quality friend suggestions, these ones popped up.
    - rl3 10y ago
      Or, if one or both parties were running the Facebook app with location services enabled, it could also have been GPS too. I wrote about this a few days ago.[0] Basically, new Facebook accounts that you run on the app with location services enabled will provide creepy location-based friend suggestions by default. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252568
    - kminehart 10y ago
      This is fairly old but if you're curious I have since gotten a new phone and have not connected to their wifi; it was likely their contacts that were uploaded to Facebook which included my number.
caconym_ 10y ago
> Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out (though, these days, probably not creeped out enough to do anything about it). I expect that another example of this would be the ability of their facial recognition system and the breadth of the database behind it. Users are Facebook's product, and they should expect to be treated as such. The Facebook site and associated services are just infrastructure designed to a) collect information on users and b) give advertisers optimal access to those users. edit: also, obviously, Facebook is not the only company engaged in this sort of thing. It's all around us.
- wmccullough 10y ago
  I'm starting to wonder if we the people need to begin creating a sousveilance system to track public officials and corporate heads.
  - caconym_ 10y ago
    I really think what we need is to be willing to pay for the things we use so that we aren't aggressively productized for the benefit of the entities who cover that cost "for us". I stopped using Facebook not because I was worried about privacy (although that did help) but because it was just a waste of time. It wasn't doing anything positive for me. All the features that I had once enjoyed had been removed or drowned under a torrent of advertising and aggressively "curated" (calculatedly manipulative) content. Like, how about this: I pay $1 per month and I get a product that's actually built with me in mind, for my benefit, that I enjoy using. I recently switched to Fastmail (while I don't hate Gmail, it's not been great recently) and guess what: Fastmail is better, clearly more interested in catering to me, and it's dirt cheap. A product built for me... imagine that! Crazy talk, really, in today's ad-subsidized world.
    - xg15 10y ago
      Except that the ISPs, automakers, IoT venders, etc are tracking you too if they can get away with it. It's perfectly possible today to pay for a service and be the product.
lalos 10y ago
Sort of related, have people noticed or have they officially announced that they are tagging photos on the alt html field with a description of the actual photo? It's pretty accurate with texts like "two people smiling, with baby".
- petters 10y ago
  https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the-hood-building-accessibility-tools-for-the-visually-impaired-on-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the-ho...
bogomipz 10y ago
>"For instance, opting out of Oracle’s Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires “sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification” in postal mail to Oracle’s chief privacy officer." This is outrageous. Why is the onus on a user who never gave permission to a data broker in the first place? They deal in digitial domain when it comes to selling your data when it comes to consumers rights and concerns they operate exclusively via snail mail? Don't expect this to change any time soon. These brokers have the US Electorate in their pocket. Bought and paid for.
- ljk 10y ago
  iirc it's the same for facebook: if they think you're using a fake name, you'll have to mail them your government-issued identification to get your account back.
  - chipperyman573 10y ago
    You just have to upload it, not mail it in.
  - pzh 10y ago
    And you can send them any blatantly fake/photoshopped ID, supposedly issued by a random country's government, and ultimately they'll accept it. If it doesn't work at first, just keep reposting it, and it will.
    - pluma 10y ago
      However that's a criminal offence in some countries (because you're forging official documents or maybe even impersonating someone else).
- nxc18 10y ago
  It isn't your data. It is their data about you, which is a very important distinction. Facebook and Oracle aren't the bad actors here, if you think there is a bad actor. The baddies are the people giving Oracle (and others) that data about you. (And now I have to hang my head in shame for saying something that sounds like it is a defense of Oracle. They're baddies for many, many other reasons, just not this one)
throwaway4897 10y ago
I'm operating on the assumption that some day soon there will be a market for personal services. I know it sounds crazy now but people also thought no regular person would ever need a personal computer. IMO the next computing revolution is in personal appliances with OS (but black box, plug-n-play to regular foks) that serve up usable voice recognition and other SaaS stacks that replace the "free" data black holes currently in use.
alanh 10y ago
Ironically, I cannot read this article as I am immediately redirected to https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229862657130557&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2Fr%2FiPrOY23SGAp.js%3Fversion%3D42%23cb%3Df21dff110d4cfe%26domain%3Dwww.propublica.org%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.propublica.org%252Ff944895a89fb34%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=0&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Farticle%2Ffacebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them%2F%3Futm_campaign%3Dbt_facebook%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&type=box_count&utm_mangled=fuckyeah https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229... (likely due to a script having a bad reaction with one of the browser extensions granting me a small illusion of privacy)
PrimeDirective 10y ago
I'm sorry but NO DUH
pwnna 10y ago
Speaking of which, perhaps someone can shed some light on the suggested friends feature. Many people suspected it uses GPS/Wifi to perform location based friend suggestions, as well as contact book uploading. However, it doesn't really explain my own case: I recently encountered a friend suggestion for someone that I only know online (IRC and later, Google Hangout). I don't really know who they are other than a name (as exposed by GHangout). I've never met them as they are in a completely different country. I don't have the facebook app and the messenger app is forbidden to read my contacts as per CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard. I fail to understand how FB can suggest this? The only possible reason I can think of is when they searched my name on Facebook. How else can they do it?
- lathiat 10y ago
  they could have uploaded their contacts with you in it (e.g. by e-mail address) it's also conceivable to me they could be doing it using cookie tracking somehow.
- nl 10y ago
  If the other person has your email address in their address book and FB has access to it then you will be suggested.
- junto 10y ago
  If they have your email address and they leaked it, then the same applies. You get reverse suggestions. The sad thing is that you can be completely privacy conscious, but if just one of your friends, family or acquaintances uploads their contacts, and you're part of that upload, they've screwed your privacy via the back door.
emptybits 10y ago
> "He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook." The link provided is: https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_permalink https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_perma.... LOL. The amount of personal information requested at those "opt-out" links is suspicious and/or ironic. Examples of information requested to "opt-out" of the USA partners' reach include: Social Security Number (!), date of birth, "all variations" of full name, all recent mailing addresses, ... (!!)
- yalooze 10y ago
  I thought that at first too. But they want to make sure they're removing the correct person. I don't know how else they could do it.
  - ljk 10y ago
    they could make it opt-in from the beginning, but that'll never happen
  - username223 10y ago
    They're surveillance companies, so they could probably figure that out based on device fingerprinting if they wanted to. Or they could just remove every record matching the request, since no sane person actually wants to be in their database. But of course neither of those things will ever happen, for obvious reasons.
- xg15 10y ago
  I like it when a company whose sole business model depends on pervasive surveillance states "we take privacy very seriously"...
owly 10y ago
1. Of course! 2. It's not too late to delete your account. Go for it! 3. Block it all! https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
- politician 10y ago
  Unfortunately, one should not believe that deleting your account removes the underlying data. The actual operation is probably more like, "set a bit that prevents anyone from logging in to this profile."
  - dade_ 10y ago
    True, but I deleted my account 2 years ago, so at least they have a lot less info during that time. Also, I don't miss it at all, not even a little bit. I think it offers no value for my time, let alone data. I am not sure why I am still on Twitter, but Snapshot has been entertaining and LinkedIn invaluable.
    - lisper 10y ago
      > at least they have a lot less info during that time How do you know? If FB can't be trusted to actually delete your account (and they can't) how can they be trusted to stop collecting data on you?
      - x1798DE 10y ago
        Presumably if you've cleared your cookies and you use an adblocker, their ability to reliably track your activity goes way, WAY down. In addition to the standard protections of the adblocker and privacybadger, I also generally set a full block on all content from facebook[.com/.net] and any identifiable facebook subdomains. I really have no use for facebook, so it is zero imposition on me, and if I ever want to view something on facebook, I can open up a new private window in an alternate browser as a one-off (or, if I'm feeling paranoid, spin up a VM).
ForrestN 10y ago
There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at the moment. Now that it's fairly clear that the service doesn't serve any unique, unambiguously positive purpose, what world-changing mission can you possibly decide that Facebook is achieving these days?
- ljk 10y ago
  i'm guessing to work for facebook the employees probably know what they're signing up for so it might not feel like "the wrong side" for them
- deepsun 10y ago
  I have a friend at Facebook. Yes, they do understand that some data they collect is pretty ... private. But since it's good for Facebook -- it's good for them. In all personal discussions they defend the company to the point that I started feeling like there is some mind-washing going on. Of course it's just a feeling, but my point is -- they don't think it is bad.
  - pmyjavec 10y ago
    Same, I have a friend who works there, often tells me about how good his stock prices are etc, never ever heard him talk about ethics, it's just not even on his radar. The other day I installed messenger (in the hope I never have to login to FB web again) and received a message about 15 seconds later saying, "Good boy, that's good for my stock prices" ha. I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something?
    - hueving 10y ago
      >I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something? Pretty standard amongst companies to discourage employees from talking politics about the product.
mattbee 10y ago
Facebook have to respond to Data Subject Access Requests in the UK, which oblige them to send you every piece of personally-linked information - for a maximum £10 fee. I did this with my bank a few years back and got back a box file full of credit scores, lending decisions and other stuff they'd never normally expose. Facebook's data for a busy user is going to be enormous by comparison - has anyone done this lately (and published / summarised the results?)
- xg15 10y ago
  Max Schrems filed a request via the irish Data Protection Commission a few years ago and explains the returned data at [1]. Since then, however, the commission seems to have simply stopped processing requests, without any legal justification to do so [2]. [1] http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html [2] http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...
j2bax 10y ago
Is there anyone out there making a paid, zero advertising/data collecting social network? What if this service allowed you to buy access for 50 of your closest friends and family? I would think if it was executed properly and you provided a standard "I'm deleting Facebook and here is why, apply to join my paid for network group" post people would consider making the jump. I know there's a lot to Facebook and I wouldn't expect some new company to stack up feature for feature. Just give me chat, text/image posts and the wall and I will be happy that I can keep up with my close friends and family. I wouldn't be entirely surprised or disappointed if Apple attempted something like this on their Messages platform but I would just hope they'd make it accessible to all phone/computer/tablet users.
- swiley 10y ago
  There's still email and personal web pages.
  - jpetso 10y ago
    Both of which are indexed by Google, unless you're hiding website content behind a login and avoid sending emails to Gmail users. Not much better?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  There's Ello[1] but it's not going anywhere. [1] https://ello.co/ https://ello.co/
- frik 10y ago
  Facebook will censor/shadow-ban such a "good bye" post. It won't show up at most of your friends news feed. You also cannot advertise a competiting social network. The same goes fr private messages to more than a few people. Even if you try to write a seperate message to everyone, if it contains the same link or a similar text body, most of your friends will never see te message you wrote. That's all automatic. And for photos, they have a semi-automatic review process in place, with an army of contracted FTEs working in low paid countries to scan photos (there was a news story about that recently). I wouldn't be surprised if their other properties like WhatsApp and Instagram are monitored and censored/shadow-ban in a similar fashion nowadays.
linkregister 10y ago
When I read this article, I was expecting to see a description of what they collect from users. But the real controversial and creepy part is what's available from the data brokers. The fact Facebook is aggregating all this to make for better advertising options is discomforting, to be sure. The most concerning aspect of the article is that these data brokers are able to correlate my purchases. It seems inevitable that insurance companies will take all of these individual data points into account: "We're sorry Mr. Register, because you buy McDonald's every week we'll have to raise your life insurance rates."
- sixothree 10y ago
  I'm curious if it could be possible to buy this data on one's self. Maybe someone could start a company that would allow you to find out this information.
fritzw 10y ago
This became painfully obvious when LinkedIn's algorithm started making extremely circuitous connections that freaked people out. People in a relative manner are painfully stupid, algorithms are ridiculously capable. The result is freak out. Facebook being psychologically aware, protected its users from the truth before it could be known. It was long ago that google's Eric Schmidt said "we are on the verge of predicting our users thoughts" google is just as slick as Facebook.
- laxatives 10y ago
  LinkedIn's incredible algorithm was reading your contact book without your permission before those kinds of permissions existed or had any sort of granularity between none and complete access.
bigmofo 10y ago
How do the data brokers know whether one shops at dollar stores? Who is leaking our inforamtion to the brokers? Is the store or the credit card company releasing information to a third party? Store gets the customer name from the credit card. Credit card company knows that a transaction took place at the dollar store. Any other possibilities?
- throwaway12145 10y ago
  Visa requires at least some of their banking/prepaid partners to periodically upload customer data to an Acxiom FTP site. It's considered a "compliance" ask. Source: helped write a microservice for said FTP upload.
creepydata 10y ago
It's creepy how much companies know about you. When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They also marked me as "Active Duty Military or Dependant" (hubby is in the army so I became a "dependant" when we got married). So the only logical explanation is transunion can access DEERS, but I would hope the DoD doesn't allow random private companies access to DEERS... They DO have a website where you can lookup if someone is covered under the SCRA but dependants aren't covered under the SCRA and don't show up when queried (I tried). Again this is my credit report. I didn't report a change in my martial status to any of my financial institutions. Not banks, not credit cards, and we already had a joint account for two years before we were married.
- bumblebeard 10y ago
  >Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They are constantly checking public records like this and that's how they would have found out. Still a little creepy though.
  - creepydata 10y ago
    There are records, of course, but it doesn't seem like marriage records are public records in my state. The state says nothing on their website about obtaining these records other than going to city Hall in person with your ID and that's only to obtain your own marriage certificate. I think they also said something about responding to requests about genealogy requests but only for very old marriage records. There's not an online database of marriages like there is with everything else public in my state. Nothing publicly available for public consumption that I could see. I can't see if my friends are legally married but I can easily see what they paid for their house. Divorces are public though and very easy to find on the court's website.
- aub3bhat 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
quadrangle 10y ago
I know this is too late to get noticed much, but here's the truth: This is a race-to-the-bottom. Everyone in this whole area has to compete with whoever is the scummiest exploiter unless they really go out of their way to sell their service with privacy and ethics as the top feature. So, some ethical niche services can exist, but meanwhile, everyone else is screwed, and network effects make any niche thing stay pretty irrelevant. The only way to avoid races-to-the-bottom in a competitive market is with real enforceable regulation that outlaws the worst shit and requires truly effective disclosures otherwise. That's not easy, sometimes it's impossible, and it often has major negative side-effects and problems, but whether or not we determine that regulation is worth it or not, we know that races-to-the-bottom are a real thing, so we can give some leeway that each company isn't actively trying to be malicious — they are just competing in a race-to-the-bottom situation (and we can reject the dogmatic free-market people who deny that this and all sorts of other natural market-failures exist).
- Taek 10y ago
  I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more. And if you do win the regulation battle, you only win it for the current generation of tech. There will be more, and every decade the power of information collection will get stronger. I believe that we need to embrace the loss of privacy and ask ourselves how to transition to a world where one's personal history and daily life is freely available to the general public. I give it 30 years until we get there. The tech is certainly not going away.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    The way I see it is until someone truly hacks Facebook and the data is used for really malicious purposes. Killing actual humans/ destroying bank accounts there is not enough of an incentive. If US didn't bomb Japan, the general public would not have the same fear of nuclear weapons that we have today.
  - 10y ago
MarkMc 10y ago
> Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver's license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers. So what exactly was the problem? She doesn't have a driver's licence?
- malz 10y ago
  Maybe she didn't want to share a lot of personal documents with companies that profit by selling her personal information. Obviously there's no reason for them to require a driver's license except to make it so inconvenient to opt-out that nobody does it.
throw2016 10y ago
I think this forum has to recognize a lot of work being done in the valley especially Google and Facebook is ethically questionable and seeking to brush it under the carpet or 'normalize' it perpetuates a dissonance. For starters the whole mythology of liberal freedom loving nerds sits in stark contrast to the reality of actively developing and enabling authoritarian technologies. The curious consequence of the willful ignorance on one's own actions is the continued posturing and stark dissonance in expecting ethical behavior from other segments of society. If you can't behave ethically you can't expect it from others. That level of dissonance is untenable and ultimately every intelligent person has to realize not recognizing and confronting unethical behavior is a race to the bottom and will reflect in every aspect of life around you.
antoniobg 10y ago
Who thought they did?
chriswwweb 10y ago
It's funny that a newspaper criticizes Facebook's data mining practices ... but when I opened the article on their website, my privacy badger addon told me that 16 scripts had been blocked (facebook!, twitter, google analytics, chartbeat, outbrain, pardot, ...). Then I read through the article and half way down they throw me a huge banner in the way telling me to like their page on Facebook :/ So basically they preach something and do something else, they are really a bunch of hypocrites!
- username223 10y ago
  This could also be seen as a newspaper operating as it should: one group is paid to report news, another is paid to sell ads, and they don't talk to each other. Things are more complicated in real life, more so now that the news people are under pressure to "generate viral content," but having creepy trackers next to an article about creepy trackers isn't necessarily hypocrisy.
discordianfish 10y ago
I understand the general privacy concern but what exactly is the critic here? That facebook aquires data from external source? Aren't those external source the real problem?
NumberCruncher 10y ago
It is easy to forget that FB is a media company and as such it is not only making money by selling ads but also by manipulating the masses. They may focus today on serving ads making $3.6 billions annually. Tomorrow they may focus on something else for example on serving fake news for manipulatig elections and making 10x more. The data they collect is only a means to an end and I am afraid I won't like the end when it arrives.
- dhruvghulati 10y ago
  Good point. Their whole business model relies on addiction to the intoxication of getting likes, shares, approval. If fake news stories that achieve those better do the trick, it goes against their business model to prevent it.
paingoomandalay 10y ago
Please my accout given than to me.This accout Pangice Dalay hack to me This gmail name gvatamore1122@gmail.com hack my accout paingoomandalay .Please!
mikebay 10y ago
Why would NSA / CIA share anything with you ?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
optionalparens 10y ago
Some day I'll need to reclassify all my cyberpunk books as non-fiction it seems. We are nearly at the point of having real-life equivalents of things like information brokers and a Central Intelligence Corporation. The funny thing is the real companies I've seen are more creepy than the over-the-top portrayals of your typical dystopian corporate future. Worse yet, they do a better job of automating it all vs. the typical human intelligence or hacking missions in those types of books.
Karunamon 10y ago
Why is it obligated to? No, really. Why? Why on earth is it a problem what a company does internally with its own collected data? Why is this only being directed at Facebook?
mungoid 10y ago
I cant speak for other countries, but why do American people seem to trust companies more than they do the government? I mean, it is completely known that companies are here to make money, and publicly traded companies are here to please their investors so they will do whatever it takes to do that. They study us, classify us, categorize us, manipulate us. They spend billions in research so they can make that 'perfectly tailored' ad to get us to buy their product. They are constantly buying our data and selling our data, JUST to make their investors happy, and we seem to always just shrug it off. 'Meh.' I am honestly more ok with the government having this data to keep tabs on me than these hundreds of other companies treating my personal info like it's a trading card.
- chrischen 10y ago
  I think the reason is that government is vastly more powerful than any single company.
  - mungoid 10y ago
    Yeah that's definitely true, and it is what makes me question a lot of why they do what they do and distrust it generally. But would it be better if a company was vastly more powerful than the government? Actually, I think some companies kind of are in some aspects. They may not have the military, but some definitely have a hand on the reigns.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  The relationship with the government and companies is different. I moved to Norway a few years back, and married a Norwegian man. He has trust in government that me, as an American, simply doesn't have. But to be fair, nearly every time I've contacted government - even being searched at customs and going through immigration - has been a decently pleasant experience. Things just get done. It isn't perfect or anything, but it seems to work. Whereas in the states, it seemed like every effort was made to screw me over - from the government. Companies, on the other hand, didn't want the bad publicity, so tended to treat folks slightly better. Another aspect to this is things like health care and infrastructure and things like that. Part of the company relationship - jobs, anyway - is healthcare and decent pay. There isn't much of a safety net, so folks rely on companies' and churches' charities to keep them afloat. Americans see companies bring them the things for life where here, a lot of that stuff is simply provided by the government.
pschastain 10y ago
I haven't had a Facebook account for years, and my phone number was never associated with it. Yesterday I visited the site on my laptop to look up the page for a tavern that's re-opening. 1/2 hr later I got a text from 32665 with a Facebook confirmation code. WTF; creeped the hell outa me. I replied with "stop" and received verification that "Texts from Facebook are now turned off." I visited their site again to request whatever data they have on me, but even though I checked the "I don't have a Facebook account" button for the request they insist that I log in to finish the process. Not sure where to go from here with it. [edit] grammar
intrasight 10y ago
If everyone (like me) installed an FB ad blocker, then they'd not get a return on their investment for buying that 3rd party data.
tripzilch 10y ago
> One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of their social security number to obtain their data. This is just one of the many WTFs that Facebook apparently actively supports. In what world, what possible explanation was this ever a good idea? Or a reasonable idea? Either the US SSN is like a password (it's not) then how did Acxiom get their hands on it, or it isn't (correct) and it doesn't serve the purpose for identification. Letting this sort of crap run wild also affects what is considered "normal" or common privacy in other parts of the world, like the EU, it slides the window. Continuously pushing the boundaries against people watching helplessly as layer upon layer of foundations of surveillance are built. Authorities don't do much until adoption is way beyond the curve of network effect, or they do it weirdly. And by then people think it's normal or acceptable. Already now, on countless popular sites, advertising transgresses heavily on not only guidelines but also law. Medical claims, product placement, child advertising, you name it. What can we do to not make the lowest common denominator decide what's normal?

438 points by colinprince 10y ago

You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources. If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email and build a "look a like" audience of people who are similar to your customers. A company called cartalytics will let a brand purchase lists of people who have bought a specific product in the past 6 months and show them ads. Ex. If you've bought a big mac (with a credit or debit card) in the last month, I can show you McDonalds ads.. but they are super expensive.

confounded 10y ago
Tangential question: Do you know if it's possible to identify financial institutions which don't sell this kind of data? Credit unions?
- polyomino 10y ago
  Up until a few years ago, credit card networks had divisions that were trading on transaction data, but they've had to shut those down. So now they sell the anonymized data to prop trading firms and advertisers. I think cash is your best bet.
  - confounded 10y ago
    Hah, I actually did a small project on some of this data for one of those companies. Pretty amazing what you can get out of 50 char descriptions at scale. Do you happen to know the law that caused them to stop trading PII? Is it only the networks, as opposed to the issuers who trade information?
- soared 10y ago
  Small credit unions would be your best bet, but I'm not aware of any specifics unfortunately.
  - rhinojosa 10y ago
    The problem is small credit unions still use co-branded cards with Visa/MC, etc who sell your data. I believe AMEX is your best bet for privacy, because you are already paying a premium to them, or good ol' cash money.
pdkl95 10y ago
> match your customer with data about them from countless other sources With so many data sources, it should be easy to find proxies for protected classes (race, sex, etc). Indirect discrimination was (and still is[2]) used to enforce racial segregation ("redlining"[1]). Facebook was recently caught[3] enabling direct discrimination. I wonder if your roommate cares that his company is probably doing the same thing indirectly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [2] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2015/HUDNo_15-064b https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas... [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...
- soared 10y ago
  We both discuss how our jobs will step over moral lines on occasion. It is something I don't like, but not something strong enough to make me quit. If I were in charge I wouldn't be supporting some of these types of advertising.
mathattack 10y ago
I think you mean Cardalytics. The amazing thing is that hedge funds trade on aggregate credit card purchase data.
maglavaitss 10y ago
"Everyone is doing it" sounds wrong on so many levels.
- Chronic2h 10y ago
  Go ahead and take the moral high ground here. No one is stopping you. But you'll be broke as hell if you do (or run out of funding).
  - maglavaitss 10y ago
    As someone who's been bootstrapping his own startup for the past ... 6 years and refused VC money (not for moral reasons), I have to take it. I still refuse to implement Google Analytics and integrate FB/Dropbox/Google in any of the projects I'm involved with. Moralist? No, I'm just not into feeding the monster.
    - dabockster 10y ago
      Got a link to your startup?
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    maybe that's not the worst thing.
  - confounded 10y ago
    Total rubbish. Targeted advertising is not the economy.
  - moonshinefe 10y ago
    Fatalism.
ForrestN 10y ago
Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...
- nilved 10y ago
  They do.
  - Rmilb 10y ago
    Source?
    - spodek 10y ago
      Source that they don't? I'd presume that they do absent a credible source they don't.
      - hueving 10y ago
        They don't offer any services that would benefit from it.
        esert 10y ago
        They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/
        username223 10y ago
        Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.
        esert 10y ago
leesalminen 10y ago
My first time creating an ad on FB was startling. I didn't know all those targeting options existed. But, they've worked extremely well for my niche SaaS. We currently focus 60% of our ad budget on FB.
sixothree 10y ago
With it being so rampant, why is it so difficult to discover what people know about you. And what are the barriers to changing this?
- confounded 10y ago
  Regulation. Consider EFF membership. https://eff.org https://eff.org

kminehart 10y ago

That might explain a pretty creepy thing Facebook did the other day to me. I just created a new Facebook account after maybe 4 years of radio silence. Two years ago, I had a job doing IT contracting; often I would go to businesses and repair laptops or run cable to a COM room. We had very very few residential clients since they weren't worth our time; the few that we did have were really just courtesy for doing business for so long. I went to one residents home a SINGLE time, hardly interacted with the man, and he definitely did not know my last name. Guess who pops up on my "Suggested friends", with no mutual friends or place of work or any similar "liked" pages? Yeah, that one client. Similarly, we worked in a small office in a cold storage facility, and Facebook also suggested that I add their accountant as my friend. It's really creepy, but if Facebook was able to know that I worked at that employer then it's possible that it was able to make the connection.

O5vYtytb 10y ago
They know your location and proximity to other facebook users.
- soared 10y ago
  This is the actual answer. Your phone tried to connect to their wifi and knows they've also connected to that same wifi. With few other quality friend suggestions, these ones popped up.
  - rl3 10y ago
    Or, if one or both parties were running the Facebook app with location services enabled, it could also have been GPS too. I wrote about this a few days ago.[0] Basically, new Facebook accounts that you run on the app with location services enabled will provide creepy location-based friend suggestions by default. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252568
  - kminehart 10y ago
    This is fairly old but if you're curious I have since gotten a new phone and have not connected to their wifi; it was likely their contacts that were uploaded to Facebook which included my number.

caconym_ 10y ago

> Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out (though, these days, probably not creeped out enough to do anything about it). I expect that another example of this would be the ability of their facial recognition system and the breadth of the database behind it. Users are Facebook's product, and they should expect to be treated as such. The Facebook site and associated services are just infrastructure designed to a) collect information on users and b) give advertisers optimal access to those users. edit: also, obviously, Facebook is not the only company engaged in this sort of thing. It's all around us.

wmccullough 10y ago
I'm starting to wonder if we the people need to begin creating a sousveilance system to track public officials and corporate heads.
- caconym_ 10y ago
  I really think what we need is to be willing to pay for the things we use so that we aren't aggressively productized for the benefit of the entities who cover that cost "for us". I stopped using Facebook not because I was worried about privacy (although that did help) but because it was just a waste of time. It wasn't doing anything positive for me. All the features that I had once enjoyed had been removed or drowned under a torrent of advertising and aggressively "curated" (calculatedly manipulative) content. Like, how about this: I pay $1 per month and I get a product that's actually built with me in mind, for my benefit, that I enjoy using. I recently switched to Fastmail (while I don't hate Gmail, it's not been great recently) and guess what: Fastmail is better, clearly more interested in catering to me, and it's dirt cheap. A product built for me... imagine that! Crazy talk, really, in today's ad-subsidized world.
  - xg15 10y ago
    Except that the ISPs, automakers, IoT venders, etc are tracking you too if they can get away with it. It's perfectly possible today to pay for a service and be the product.

lalos 10y ago

Sort of related, have people noticed or have they officially announced that they are tagging photos on the alt html field with a description of the actual photo? It's pretty accurate with texts like "two people smiling, with baby".

petters 10y ago
https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the-hood-building-accessibility-tools-for-the-visually-impaired-on-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the-ho...

bogomipz 10y ago

>"For instance, opting out of Oracle’s Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires “sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification” in postal mail to Oracle’s chief privacy officer." This is outrageous. Why is the onus on a user who never gave permission to a data broker in the first place? They deal in digitial domain when it comes to selling your data when it comes to consumers rights and concerns they operate exclusively via snail mail? Don't expect this to change any time soon. These brokers have the US Electorate in their pocket. Bought and paid for.

ljk 10y ago
iirc it's the same for facebook: if they think you're using a fake name, you'll have to mail them your government-issued identification to get your account back.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  You just have to upload it, not mail it in.
- pzh 10y ago
  And you can send them any blatantly fake/photoshopped ID, supposedly issued by a random country's government, and ultimately they'll accept it. If it doesn't work at first, just keep reposting it, and it will.
  - pluma 10y ago
    However that's a criminal offence in some countries (because you're forging official documents or maybe even impersonating someone else).
nxc18 10y ago
It isn't your data. It is their data about you, which is a very important distinction. Facebook and Oracle aren't the bad actors here, if you think there is a bad actor. The baddies are the people giving Oracle (and others) that data about you. (And now I have to hang my head in shame for saying something that sounds like it is a defense of Oracle. They're baddies for many, many other reasons, just not this one)

throwaway4897 10y ago

I'm operating on the assumption that some day soon there will be a market for personal services. I know it sounds crazy now but people also thought no regular person would ever need a personal computer. IMO the next computing revolution is in personal appliances with OS (but black box, plug-n-play to regular foks) that serve up usable voice recognition and other SaaS stacks that replace the "free" data black holes currently in use.

alanh 10y ago

Ironically, I cannot read this article as I am immediately redirected to https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229862657130557&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2Fr%2FiPrOY23SGAp.js%3Fversion%3D42%23cb%3Df21dff110d4cfe%26domain%3Dwww.propublica.org%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.propublica.org%252Ff944895a89fb34%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=0&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Farticle%2Ffacebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them%2F%3Futm_campaign%3Dbt_facebook%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&type=box_count&utm_mangled=fuckyeah https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229... (likely due to a script having a bad reaction with one of the browser extensions granting me a small illusion of privacy)

PrimeDirective 10y ago

I'm sorry but NO DUH

pwnna 10y ago

Speaking of which, perhaps someone can shed some light on the suggested friends feature. Many people suspected it uses GPS/Wifi to perform location based friend suggestions, as well as contact book uploading. However, it doesn't really explain my own case: I recently encountered a friend suggestion for someone that I only know online (IRC and later, Google Hangout). I don't really know who they are other than a name (as exposed by GHangout). I've never met them as they are in a completely different country. I don't have the facebook app and the messenger app is forbidden to read my contacts as per CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard. I fail to understand how FB can suggest this? The only possible reason I can think of is when they searched my name on Facebook. How else can they do it?

lathiat 10y ago
they could have uploaded their contacts with you in it (e.g. by e-mail address) it's also conceivable to me they could be doing it using cookie tracking somehow.
nl 10y ago
If the other person has your email address in their address book and FB has access to it then you will be suggested.
junto 10y ago
If they have your email address and they leaked it, then the same applies. You get reverse suggestions. The sad thing is that you can be completely privacy conscious, but if just one of your friends, family or acquaintances uploads their contacts, and you're part of that upload, they've screwed your privacy via the back door.

emptybits 10y ago

> "He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook." The link provided is: https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_permalink https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_perma.... LOL. The amount of personal information requested at those "opt-out" links is suspicious and/or ironic. Examples of information requested to "opt-out" of the USA partners' reach include: Social Security Number (!), date of birth, "all variations" of full name, all recent mailing addresses, ... (!!)

yalooze 10y ago
I thought that at first too. But they want to make sure they're removing the correct person. I don't know how else they could do it.
- ljk 10y ago
  they could make it opt-in from the beginning, but that'll never happen
- username223 10y ago
  They're surveillance companies, so they could probably figure that out based on device fingerprinting if they wanted to. Or they could just remove every record matching the request, since no sane person actually wants to be in their database. But of course neither of those things will ever happen, for obvious reasons.
xg15 10y ago
I like it when a company whose sole business model depends on pervasive surveillance states "we take privacy very seriously"...

owly 10y ago

1. Of course! 2. It's not too late to delete your account. Go for it! 3. Block it all! https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

politician 10y ago
Unfortunately, one should not believe that deleting your account removes the underlying data. The actual operation is probably more like, "set a bit that prevents anyone from logging in to this profile."
- dade_ 10y ago
  True, but I deleted my account 2 years ago, so at least they have a lot less info during that time. Also, I don't miss it at all, not even a little bit. I think it offers no value for my time, let alone data. I am not sure why I am still on Twitter, but Snapshot has been entertaining and LinkedIn invaluable.
  - lisper 10y ago
    > at least they have a lot less info during that time How do you know? If FB can't be trusted to actually delete your account (and they can't) how can they be trusted to stop collecting data on you?
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      Presumably if you've cleared your cookies and you use an adblocker, their ability to reliably track your activity goes way, WAY down. In addition to the standard protections of the adblocker and privacybadger, I also generally set a full block on all content from facebook[.com/.net] and any identifiable facebook subdomains. I really have no use for facebook, so it is zero imposition on me, and if I ever want to view something on facebook, I can open up a new private window in an alternate browser as a one-off (or, if I'm feeling paranoid, spin up a VM).

ForrestN 10y ago

There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at the moment. Now that it's fairly clear that the service doesn't serve any unique, unambiguously positive purpose, what world-changing mission can you possibly decide that Facebook is achieving these days?

ljk 10y ago
i'm guessing to work for facebook the employees probably know what they're signing up for so it might not feel like "the wrong side" for them
deepsun 10y ago
I have a friend at Facebook. Yes, they do understand that some data they collect is pretty ... private. But since it's good for Facebook -- it's good for them. In all personal discussions they defend the company to the point that I started feeling like there is some mind-washing going on. Of course it's just a feeling, but my point is -- they don't think it is bad.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  Same, I have a friend who works there, often tells me about how good his stock prices are etc, never ever heard him talk about ethics, it's just not even on his radar. The other day I installed messenger (in the hope I never have to login to FB web again) and received a message about 15 seconds later saying, "Good boy, that's good for my stock prices" ha. I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something?
  - hueving 10y ago
    >I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something? Pretty standard amongst companies to discourage employees from talking politics about the product.

mattbee 10y ago

Facebook have to respond to Data Subject Access Requests in the UK, which oblige them to send you every piece of personally-linked information - for a maximum £10 fee. I did this with my bank a few years back and got back a box file full of credit scores, lending decisions and other stuff they'd never normally expose. Facebook's data for a busy user is going to be enormous by comparison - has anyone done this lately (and published / summarised the results?)

xg15 10y ago
Max Schrems filed a request via the irish Data Protection Commission a few years ago and explains the returned data at [1]. Since then, however, the commission seems to have simply stopped processing requests, without any legal justification to do so [2]. [1] http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html [2] http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...

j2bax 10y ago

Is there anyone out there making a paid, zero advertising/data collecting social network? What if this service allowed you to buy access for 50 of your closest friends and family? I would think if it was executed properly and you provided a standard "I'm deleting Facebook and here is why, apply to join my paid for network group" post people would consider making the jump. I know there's a lot to Facebook and I wouldn't expect some new company to stack up feature for feature. Just give me chat, text/image posts and the wall and I will be happy that I can keep up with my close friends and family. I wouldn't be entirely surprised or disappointed if Apple attempted something like this on their Messages platform but I would just hope they'd make it accessible to all phone/computer/tablet users.

swiley 10y ago
There's still email and personal web pages.
- jpetso 10y ago
  Both of which are indexed by Google, unless you're hiding website content behind a login and avoid sending emails to Gmail users. Not much better?
maverick_iceman 10y ago
There's Ello[1] but it's not going anywhere. [1] https://ello.co/ https://ello.co/
frik 10y ago
Facebook will censor/shadow-ban such a "good bye" post. It won't show up at most of your friends news feed. You also cannot advertise a competiting social network. The same goes fr private messages to more than a few people. Even if you try to write a seperate message to everyone, if it contains the same link or a similar text body, most of your friends will never see te message you wrote. That's all automatic. And for photos, they have a semi-automatic review process in place, with an army of contracted FTEs working in low paid countries to scan photos (there was a news story about that recently). I wouldn't be surprised if their other properties like WhatsApp and Instagram are monitored and censored/shadow-ban in a similar fashion nowadays.

linkregister 10y ago

When I read this article, I was expecting to see a description of what they collect from users. But the real controversial and creepy part is what's available from the data brokers. The fact Facebook is aggregating all this to make for better advertising options is discomforting, to be sure. The most concerning aspect of the article is that these data brokers are able to correlate my purchases. It seems inevitable that insurance companies will take all of these individual data points into account: "We're sorry Mr. Register, because you buy McDonald's every week we'll have to raise your life insurance rates."

sixothree 10y ago
I'm curious if it could be possible to buy this data on one's self. Maybe someone could start a company that would allow you to find out this information.

fritzw 10y ago

This became painfully obvious when LinkedIn's algorithm started making extremely circuitous connections that freaked people out. People in a relative manner are painfully stupid, algorithms are ridiculously capable. The result is freak out. Facebook being psychologically aware, protected its users from the truth before it could be known. It was long ago that google's Eric Schmidt said "we are on the verge of predicting our users thoughts" google is just as slick as Facebook.

laxatives 10y ago
LinkedIn's incredible algorithm was reading your contact book without your permission before those kinds of permissions existed or had any sort of granularity between none and complete access.

bigmofo 10y ago

How do the data brokers know whether one shops at dollar stores? Who is leaking our inforamtion to the brokers? Is the store or the credit card company releasing information to a third party? Store gets the customer name from the credit card. Credit card company knows that a transaction took place at the dollar store. Any other possibilities?

throwaway12145 10y ago
Visa requires at least some of their banking/prepaid partners to periodically upload customer data to an Acxiom FTP site. It's considered a "compliance" ask. Source: helped write a microservice for said FTP upload.

creepydata 10y ago

It's creepy how much companies know about you. When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They also marked me as "Active Duty Military or Dependant" (hubby is in the army so I became a "dependant" when we got married). So the only logical explanation is transunion can access DEERS, but I would hope the DoD doesn't allow random private companies access to DEERS... They DO have a website where you can lookup if someone is covered under the SCRA but dependants aren't covered under the SCRA and don't show up when queried (I tried). Again this is my credit report. I didn't report a change in my martial status to any of my financial institutions. Not banks, not credit cards, and we already had a joint account for two years before we were married.

bumblebeard 10y ago
>Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They are constantly checking public records like this and that's how they would have found out. Still a little creepy though.
- creepydata 10y ago
  There are records, of course, but it doesn't seem like marriage records are public records in my state. The state says nothing on their website about obtaining these records other than going to city Hall in person with your ID and that's only to obtain your own marriage certificate. I think they also said something about responding to requests about genealogy requests but only for very old marriage records. There's not an online database of marriages like there is with everything else public in my state. Nothing publicly available for public consumption that I could see. I can't see if my friends are legally married but I can easily see what they paid for their house. Divorces are public though and very easy to find on the court's website.
aub3bhat 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

quadrangle 10y ago

I know this is too late to get noticed much, but here's the truth: This is a race-to-the-bottom. Everyone in this whole area has to compete with whoever is the scummiest exploiter unless they really go out of their way to sell their service with privacy and ethics as the top feature. So, some ethical niche services can exist, but meanwhile, everyone else is screwed, and network effects make any niche thing stay pretty irrelevant. The only way to avoid races-to-the-bottom in a competitive market is with real enforceable regulation that outlaws the worst shit and requires truly effective disclosures otherwise. That's not easy, sometimes it's impossible, and it often has major negative side-effects and problems, but whether or not we determine that regulation is worth it or not, we know that races-to-the-bottom are a real thing, so we can give some leeway that each company isn't actively trying to be malicious — they are just competing in a race-to-the-bottom situation (and we can reject the dogmatic free-market people who deny that this and all sorts of other natural market-failures exist).

Taek 10y ago
I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more. And if you do win the regulation battle, you only win it for the current generation of tech. There will be more, and every decade the power of information collection will get stronger. I believe that we need to embrace the loss of privacy and ask ourselves how to transition to a world where one's personal history and daily life is freely available to the general public. I give it 30 years until we get there. The tech is certainly not going away.
- nojvek 10y ago
  The way I see it is until someone truly hacks Facebook and the data is used for really malicious purposes. Killing actual humans/ destroying bank accounts there is not enough of an incentive. If US didn't bomb Japan, the general public would not have the same fear of nuclear weapons that we have today.
- 10y ago

MarkMc 10y ago

> Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver's license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers. So what exactly was the problem? She doesn't have a driver's licence?

malz 10y ago
Maybe she didn't want to share a lot of personal documents with companies that profit by selling her personal information. Obviously there's no reason for them to require a driver's license except to make it so inconvenient to opt-out that nobody does it.

throw2016 10y ago

I think this forum has to recognize a lot of work being done in the valley especially Google and Facebook is ethically questionable and seeking to brush it under the carpet or 'normalize' it perpetuates a dissonance. For starters the whole mythology of liberal freedom loving nerds sits in stark contrast to the reality of actively developing and enabling authoritarian technologies. The curious consequence of the willful ignorance on one's own actions is the continued posturing and stark dissonance in expecting ethical behavior from other segments of society. If you can't behave ethically you can't expect it from others. That level of dissonance is untenable and ultimately every intelligent person has to realize not recognizing and confronting unethical behavior is a race to the bottom and will reflect in every aspect of life around you.

antoniobg 10y ago

Who thought they did?

chriswwweb 10y ago

It's funny that a newspaper criticizes Facebook's data mining practices ... but when I opened the article on their website, my privacy badger addon told me that 16 scripts had been blocked (facebook!, twitter, google analytics, chartbeat, outbrain, pardot, ...). Then I read through the article and half way down they throw me a huge banner in the way telling me to like their page on Facebook :/ So basically they preach something and do something else, they are really a bunch of hypocrites!

username223 10y ago
This could also be seen as a newspaper operating as it should: one group is paid to report news, another is paid to sell ads, and they don't talk to each other. Things are more complicated in real life, more so now that the news people are under pressure to "generate viral content," but having creepy trackers next to an article about creepy trackers isn't necessarily hypocrisy.

discordianfish 10y ago

I understand the general privacy concern but what exactly is the critic here? That facebook aquires data from external source? Aren't those external source the real problem?

NumberCruncher 10y ago

It is easy to forget that FB is a media company and as such it is not only making money by selling ads but also by manipulating the masses. They may focus today on serving ads making $3.6 billions annually. Tomorrow they may focus on something else for example on serving fake news for manipulatig elections and making 10x more. The data they collect is only a means to an end and I am afraid I won't like the end when it arrives.

dhruvghulati 10y ago
Good point. Their whole business model relies on addiction to the intoxication of getting likes, shares, approval. If fake news stories that achieve those better do the trick, it goes against their business model to prevent it.

paingoomandalay 10y ago

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mikebay 10y ago

Why would NSA / CIA share anything with you ?

deleted 10y ago

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optionalparens 10y ago

Some day I'll need to reclassify all my cyberpunk books as non-fiction it seems. We are nearly at the point of having real-life equivalents of things like information brokers and a Central Intelligence Corporation. The funny thing is the real companies I've seen are more creepy than the over-the-top portrayals of your typical dystopian corporate future. Worse yet, they do a better job of automating it all vs. the typical human intelligence or hacking missions in those types of books.

Karunamon 10y ago

Why is it obligated to? No, really. Why? Why on earth is it a problem what a company does internally with its own collected data? Why is this only being directed at Facebook?

mungoid 10y ago

I cant speak for other countries, but why do American people seem to trust companies more than they do the government? I mean, it is completely known that companies are here to make money, and publicly traded companies are here to please their investors so they will do whatever it takes to do that. They study us, classify us, categorize us, manipulate us. They spend billions in research so they can make that 'perfectly tailored' ad to get us to buy their product. They are constantly buying our data and selling our data, JUST to make their investors happy, and we seem to always just shrug it off. 'Meh.' I am honestly more ok with the government having this data to keep tabs on me than these hundreds of other companies treating my personal info like it's a trading card.

chrischen 10y ago
I think the reason is that government is vastly more powerful than any single company.
- mungoid 10y ago
  Yeah that's definitely true, and it is what makes me question a lot of why they do what they do and distrust it generally. But would it be better if a company was vastly more powerful than the government? Actually, I think some companies kind of are in some aspects. They may not have the military, but some definitely have a hand on the reigns.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
The relationship with the government and companies is different. I moved to Norway a few years back, and married a Norwegian man. He has trust in government that me, as an American, simply doesn't have. But to be fair, nearly every time I've contacted government - even being searched at customs and going through immigration - has been a decently pleasant experience. Things just get done. It isn't perfect or anything, but it seems to work. Whereas in the states, it seemed like every effort was made to screw me over - from the government. Companies, on the other hand, didn't want the bad publicity, so tended to treat folks slightly better. Another aspect to this is things like health care and infrastructure and things like that. Part of the company relationship - jobs, anyway - is healthcare and decent pay. There isn't much of a safety net, so folks rely on companies' and churches' charities to keep them afloat. Americans see companies bring them the things for life where here, a lot of that stuff is simply provided by the government.

pschastain 10y ago

I haven't had a Facebook account for years, and my phone number was never associated with it. Yesterday I visited the site on my laptop to look up the page for a tavern that's re-opening. 1/2 hr later I got a text from 32665 with a Facebook confirmation code. WTF; creeped the hell outa me. I replied with "stop" and received verification that "Texts from Facebook are now turned off." I visited their site again to request whatever data they have on me, but even though I checked the "I don't have a Facebook account" button for the request they insist that I log in to finish the process. Not sure where to go from here with it. [edit] grammar

intrasight 10y ago

If everyone (like me) installed an FB ad blocker, then they'd not get a return on their investment for buying that 3rd party data.

tripzilch 10y ago

> One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of their social security number to obtain their data. This is just one of the many WTFs that Facebook apparently actively supports. In what world, what possible explanation was this ever a good idea? Or a reasonable idea? Either the US SSN is like a password (it's not) then how did Acxiom get their hands on it, or it isn't (correct) and it doesn't serve the purpose for identification. Letting this sort of crap run wild also affects what is considered "normal" or common privacy in other parts of the world, like the EU, it slides the window. Continuously pushing the boundaries against people watching helplessly as layer upon layer of foundations of surveillance are built. Authorities don't do much until adoption is way beyond the curve of network effect, or they do it weirdly. And by then people think it's normal or acceptable. Already now, on countless popular sites, advertising transgresses heavily on not only guidelines but also law. Medical claims, product placement, child advertising, you name it. What can we do to not make the lowest common denominator decide what's normal?