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> Lujan: It may surprise you that we’ve not talked about this a lot today. You’ve said everyone controls their data, but you’re collecting data on people who ar

> Lujan: It may surprise you that we’ve not talked about this a lot today. You’ve said everyone controls their data, but you’re collecting data on people who are not even Facebook users who have never signed a consent, a privacy agreement. > And it may surprise you that on Facebook’s page when you go to “I don’t have a Facebook account and would like to request all my personal data stored by Facebook” it takes you to a form that says “go to your Facebook page and then on your account settings you can download your data.” This is typically something Facebook should be prepared for considering it's one of the use case of the GDPR. It's highly likely they are prepared for that but won't show it before the storm.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TAForObvReasons 9y ago
WOW they are discussing the FB trackers now. This may actually get real
- fastball 9y ago
  Yeah, Congresswoman Dingell is laying it down. She even specifically mentioned the Facebook "pixel" in a technically accurate way!
  - scoggs 9y ago
    I'm not sure if she's technically savvy enough to have known that or researched it on her own but if not I'm really glad her interns or subordinates were focused on important talking points that will really help define the problems at hand.
    - Waterluvian 9y ago
      Agreed. Its absolutely not her role to be a specialist. Her role is policy and lawmaking. A good Congressperson would be one who can wield the full force of their team's knowledge and research power.
      - noir_lord 9y ago
        > A good Congressperson would be one who can wield the full force of their team's knowledge and research power. In practice I fear it's more that a 'good' (electable) congressperson is the one who can wield the full force of their lobbiest's knowledge and power. I try hard not to be cynical but as a citizen of the UK the soft control the private sector has over our government is horribly worrying.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    However, she focused on statistics, not intent behind those things - what type of data FB collects and why. She was almost there but sort of wasted the opportunity.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jrs235 9y ago
  The carriers and providers, free to collect and sell your data now that the FCC changed regulations and replacement legislation hasn't been passed, don't like competition...
fenwick67 9y ago
This will get really tricky, because shadow profiles can probably be fuzzy, and how could Facebook guarantee there aren't two or more shadow profiles for the same individual (ex: peggy platter and margaret hill and Hank's wife) and make sure they always get them all? Especially tricky for people who change genders and/or first names.
- entropie 9y ago
  They have to anonymize it somehow, because otherwise it wouldnt be legal in germany. (If i understand everything correctly, which might not the case)
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  I don't see the problem. Individual tells facebook: "delete data you have about me, here's who I am." and that's it. It doesn't discriminate between different profiles or dataset. If the data can't linked to the individual then it's considered to be anonymized data.
  - gizmogwai 9y ago
    That's more subtle, as individual anonymized data point can not identify an individual, but a linked set of those can, with a very high percentage of confidence. Facebook can always play the card that each data point are anonymous, hence not part of your data, and keep everything.
    - stavrianos 9y ago
      Exactly this. Assuming that shadow-profiles are derived on-demand, the only way to "delete" one would be to delete the datapoints it's built from. We know that facebook can use contact info to identify clusters, right? Suppose that I don't have facebook, but a bunch of my friends do, and facebook has all their contacts' phone numbers. They can infer the circle of friends of "whoever owns phone number X" using just this info. This is probably not the extent of a shadow-profile, but I think it's a plausible stab at the underlying mechanics (repeat again with email, with browser fingerprint, etc). In order to "delete" my phone-shadow-profile, facebook needs to remove my phone number from their internal copies of my friend's contact lists. They also need to keep a copy of my number in a "do not shadow" list, or else they'll just add me back in next time they scrape my friends' contacts. Armed with a such a do-not-shadow list, there's no need to actually do the deletion, rather than simply marking the deletion. So, assuming my speculations of the nature of shadow-profiles are about right, the only way to really avoid facebook having one is to register your fingerprints with them, so they can tell which parts of their data are you, in order to know not to use that data to draw inferences about you. That, or give up on drawing inferences between disparate data-sources at all.
amelius 9y ago
Can I also request all data related to my browser fingerprint?
- bcheung 9y ago
  I tried out the download tool. It's basically things that the user posted directly. They did have FB messenger conversation logs in their too. It doesn't include any likes, comments, attention metrics, or clicks to external links. It doesn't seem like it includes everything they have.
  - toufka 9y ago
    After watching a few of these hearings, you start to realize that there are very careful interpretations of otherwise common language in use here to obfuscate and avoid. In this case, Facebook 'lets a user download all of [their data]'. Where [their data] is any input a user provided - text, photos, messages, etc. It seems that Facebook considers fingerprints, links, and any other meta-data a user creates or uploads, not the user's data, but FB's data. And that [what they call FB's data] is not available to the user.
tareqak 9y ago
Congressman Costello from Pennsylvania asked if AI will be used to recognize the faces of "non-FB users". Combined with the shadow profiles question by Congressman Lujan from New Mexico, some of these questions are getting closer to what people need to know and understand. Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of questioning seems like blind man's bluff / Marco Polo [0]. It'd be nice if Congress can be asked to host a debate between subject matter experts in the privacy domain (who are knowledgeable and can effectively communicate this knowledge and their concerns to lay people) and tech company C-level executives like Zuckerburg. 2:50 PM EDT: Congressman Duncan from North Carolina is going to give Zuckerburg a small copy of the US Constitution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_man%27s_buff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_man%27s_buff 2:59 PM EDT - Edited to add "to lay people". 3:02 PM EDT - Added "Marco Polo". Thanks to caabalis for the reminder.
- koolba 9y ago
  > It'd be nice if Congress can be asked to host a debate between subject matter experts in the privacy domain (who are knowledgeable and can effectively communicate this knowledge and their concerns) and tech company C-level executives like Zuckerburg. That'd be amazing. Effectively champion warfare[1] but for civil liberties. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_warfare
- cabaalis 9y ago
  I'm very glad to have read that wikipedia page, and feel smarter. But I think you'd have reached a broader audience and not required a link if you had just called it Marco Polo.
  - tareqak 9y ago
    Oh yeah. I forgot that that was the same thing. Thanks! I'll add it.
- heurist 9y ago
  > 2:50 PM EDT: Congressman Duncan from North Carolina is going to give Zuckerburg a small copy of the US Constitution. Showboating... Not to defend Facebook and I admittedly have not watched any testimony or questioning, but I'm sure these politicians made no mention of FOSTA, SOPA, the PATRIOT Act, net neutrality, NSA domestic surveillance... Zuckerberg could have turned this all around on them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TAForObvReasons 9y ago

WOW they are discussing the FB trackers now. This may actually get real

fastball 9y ago
Yeah, Congresswoman Dingell is laying it down. She even specifically mentioned the Facebook "pixel" in a technically accurate way!
- scoggs 9y ago
  I'm not sure if she's technically savvy enough to have known that or researched it on her own but if not I'm really glad her interns or subordinates were focused on important talking points that will really help define the problems at hand.
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    Agreed. Its absolutely not her role to be a specialist. Her role is policy and lawmaking. A good Congressperson would be one who can wield the full force of their team's knowledge and research power.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      > A good Congressperson would be one who can wield the full force of their team's knowledge and research power. In practice I fear it's more that a 'good' (electable) congressperson is the one who can wield the full force of their lobbiest's knowledge and power. I try hard not to be cynical but as a citizen of the UK the soft control the private sector has over our government is horribly worrying.
- artursapek 9y ago
  However, she focused on statistics, not intent behind those things - what type of data FB collects and why. She was almost there but sort of wasted the opportunity.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jrs235 9y ago
The carriers and providers, free to collect and sell your data now that the FCC changed regulations and replacement legislation hasn't been passed, don't like competition...

fenwick67 9y ago

This will get really tricky, because shadow profiles can probably be fuzzy, and how could Facebook guarantee there aren't two or more shadow profiles for the same individual (ex: peggy platter and margaret hill and Hank's wife) and make sure they always get them all? Especially tricky for people who change genders and/or first names.

entropie 9y ago
They have to anonymize it somehow, because otherwise it wouldnt be legal in germany. (If i understand everything correctly, which might not the case)
johnchristopher 9y ago
I don't see the problem. Individual tells facebook: "delete data you have about me, here's who I am." and that's it. It doesn't discriminate between different profiles or dataset. If the data can't linked to the individual then it's considered to be anonymized data.
- gizmogwai 9y ago
  That's more subtle, as individual anonymized data point can not identify an individual, but a linked set of those can, with a very high percentage of confidence. Facebook can always play the card that each data point are anonymous, hence not part of your data, and keep everything.
  - stavrianos 9y ago
    Exactly this. Assuming that shadow-profiles are derived on-demand, the only way to "delete" one would be to delete the datapoints it's built from. We know that facebook can use contact info to identify clusters, right? Suppose that I don't have facebook, but a bunch of my friends do, and facebook has all their contacts' phone numbers. They can infer the circle of friends of "whoever owns phone number X" using just this info. This is probably not the extent of a shadow-profile, but I think it's a plausible stab at the underlying mechanics (repeat again with email, with browser fingerprint, etc). In order to "delete" my phone-shadow-profile, facebook needs to remove my phone number from their internal copies of my friend's contact lists. They also need to keep a copy of my number in a "do not shadow" list, or else they'll just add me back in next time they scrape my friends' contacts. Armed with a such a do-not-shadow list, there's no need to actually do the deletion, rather than simply marking the deletion. So, assuming my speculations of the nature of shadow-profiles are about right, the only way to really avoid facebook having one is to register your fingerprints with them, so they can tell which parts of their data are you, in order to know not to use that data to draw inferences about you. That, or give up on drawing inferences between disparate data-sources at all.

amelius 9y ago

Can I also request all data related to my browser fingerprint?

bcheung 9y ago
I tried out the download tool. It's basically things that the user posted directly. They did have FB messenger conversation logs in their too. It doesn't include any likes, comments, attention metrics, or clicks to external links. It doesn't seem like it includes everything they have.
- toufka 9y ago
  After watching a few of these hearings, you start to realize that there are very careful interpretations of otherwise common language in use here to obfuscate and avoid. In this case, Facebook 'lets a user download all of [their data]'. Where [their data] is any input a user provided - text, photos, messages, etc. It seems that Facebook considers fingerprints, links, and any other meta-data a user creates or uploads, not the user's data, but FB's data. And that [what they call FB's data] is not available to the user.

tareqak 9y ago

Congressman Costello from Pennsylvania asked if AI will be used to recognize the faces of "non-FB users". Combined with the shadow profiles question by Congressman Lujan from New Mexico, some of these questions are getting closer to what people need to know and understand. Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of questioning seems like blind man's bluff / Marco Polo [0]. It'd be nice if Congress can be asked to host a debate between subject matter experts in the privacy domain (who are knowledgeable and can effectively communicate this knowledge and their concerns to lay people) and tech company C-level executives like Zuckerburg. 2:50 PM EDT: Congressman Duncan from North Carolina is going to give Zuckerburg a small copy of the US Constitution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_man%27s_buff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_man%27s_buff 2:59 PM EDT - Edited to add "to lay people". 3:02 PM EDT - Added "Marco Polo". Thanks to caabalis for the reminder.

koolba 9y ago
> It'd be nice if Congress can be asked to host a debate between subject matter experts in the privacy domain (who are knowledgeable and can effectively communicate this knowledge and their concerns) and tech company C-level executives like Zuckerburg. That'd be amazing. Effectively champion warfare[1] but for civil liberties. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_warfare
cabaalis 9y ago
I'm very glad to have read that wikipedia page, and feel smarter. But I think you'd have reached a broader audience and not required a link if you had just called it Marco Polo.
- tareqak 9y ago
  Oh yeah. I forgot that that was the same thing. Thanks! I'll add it.
heurist 9y ago
> 2:50 PM EDT: Congressman Duncan from North Carolina is going to give Zuckerburg a small copy of the US Constitution. Showboating... Not to defend Facebook and I admittedly have not watched any testimony or questioning, but I'm sure these politicians made no mention of FOSTA, SOPA, the PATRIOT Act, net neutrality, NSA domestic surveillance... Zuckerberg could have turned this all around on them.