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The main problem with Facebook is "too much tailored advertisements". You can even use this advertisements to deanonymize data. And that's extremely-dangerous.

by kartan 9y ago

The main problem with Facebook is "too much tailored advertisements". You can even use this advertisements to deanonymize data. And that's extremely-dangerous. If you want a list of people from an ideology, or minority, or whatever. You can send an ad targeted to that people, in the city that you are interested in. But the ad is for getting some free, unrelated to your motives, sample product. People will send you their name and address without even knowing that they saw your ad only because they are part of that minority/ideology/... You can also, and it has already been done, target undecided people in an election. This is nothing new, but the precision and scope has increased drastically. And usually you only need a few percentage points in one state to swing an election. The money that could buy you half a percentage point, now is going to buy you a lot more. Facebook offers a great feature for ad companies to be able to specifically target people, but it is dangerous for society as a whole. I think that the GDPR (http://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html http://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html) is a good step in the right direction. But probably it is not enough. The article misses completely the point. Moving the subject from "privacy" to "antisemitism".

abnry 9y ago
In general, I don't see a problem with targeted ads. For consumers, I think it is a positive. I want to be made aware of products that I will actually like. Even for political issues, I want to be put in touch with the candidates and organizations and events I care about. The only real problem I can think of is when these targeted ads are used as a way to lie to one set of targeted people while saying something completely different to another set.
- ece 9y ago
  Just targeting you at that level by definition means invading your privacy to the extent you may not want, or want to control and can't. Just to name a few things: 3rd party cookies, whatever data is mine-able from your profiles, your interactions, your use of the social network platform itself, on mobile, your email, your searches, information from your interaction graph, not to mention everything you might do in real life that ends up online in some way.. All of this to serve better ads is at the cost of your privacy, everyone's privacy. You can actually find things you might be interested in just fine by searching for them instead of seeing some ad twice that you might be interested in. Serving better ads requires more data on consumers and once the treadmill starts, there is no getting off unless as a consumer you decide to take back control. This is why ad-blockers are as big as they are. This isn't some externality either, what happened in the election is the externality. To the extent that Facebook interactions fed and influenced the election, it was because better ad targeting; and more consumer time on the site, which helps better ad targeting is the business model. So, I agree with the article very much.

by kartan 9y ago

abnry 9y ago

In general, I don't see a problem with targeted ads. For consumers, I think it is a positive. I want to be made aware of products that I will actually like. Even for political issues, I want to be put in touch with the candidates and organizations and events I care about. The only real problem I can think of is when these targeted ads are used as a way to lie to one set of targeted people while saying something completely different to another set.

ece 9y ago
Just targeting you at that level by definition means invading your privacy to the extent you may not want, or want to control and can't. Just to name a few things: 3rd party cookies, whatever data is mine-able from your profiles, your interactions, your use of the social network platform itself, on mobile, your email, your searches, information from your interaction graph, not to mention everything you might do in real life that ends up online in some way.. All of this to serve better ads is at the cost of your privacy, everyone's privacy. You can actually find things you might be interested in just fine by searching for them instead of seeing some ad twice that you might be interested in. Serving better ads requires more data on consumers and once the treadmill starts, there is no getting off unless as a consumer you decide to take back control. This is why ad-blockers are as big as they are. This isn't some externality either, what happened in the election is the externality. To the extent that Facebook interactions fed and influenced the election, it was because better ad targeting; and more consumer time on the site, which helps better ad targeting is the business model. So, I agree with the article very much.