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And what's worse is that privacy controls explicitly don't control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status an

And what's worse is that privacy controls explicitly don't control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status and only ended the status a year later. Immediately after changing a status marked "only me" in privacy settings I got bombarded with dating ads. I complained that this was a huge privacy violation and they said "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status"

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works. Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something. With computers the situation is less obvious. If you make a copy of something (say a movie) A) you're not really taking one copy of a movie from them; instead you created a copy of a movie for yourself, B) it's not clear that you're damaging their revenues either, as not all people who make copies of movies would've bought the movies in the absense of the possibility of making copies. Probably a more acurate picture is something in the middle, but the point here was that anti-piracy lobbies knowingly conflated "making copies" with "stealing". We entered the computer era without a morally charged word to describe an activity that used to be impossible, and instead they used one that misrepresents the new situation of things. I think when it comes to privacy we're in a similar situation. Pre-computers, "privacy" meant that (phrase A) "people won't know attributes of you", and that is absolutely equivalent to (phrase B) "people (in this case advertisers) aren't able to take actions that depend on attributes of you". Post-computers the two phrases are not equivalent: Facebook didn't tell advertisers attributes of you, but it gave them the possibility to make decisions which depend on attributes of you. Conveniently, Facebook understands privacy to mean the former. I suspect the reason for why Facebook got away with it for so long is that we don't have two words that differenciate between the two phrases. We need to once and for all decide if we want the word "privacy" to mean phrase A, phrase B, or phrase A AND phrase B. To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying "advertisers can only target you, they aren't being given your data, and therefore all is good". The only thing I'm saying is that the word "privacy" is lacking in a post-computers world.
- perpetualpatzer 9y ago
  > "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something." I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright. A "copyright" is so named because it is precisely the right to prevent other people from making copies. When it originated (in the 1700s), its goal was to prevent the copying of books, even though copying--then and now--did not deprive the owner of their own access to the work. What has changed is not the invention of a new fundamental concept (making a thing like another thing), but the ease with which this can be done by the unscrupulous. If you really liked a poem in 1720, wanted to be able to read it, but didn't want to buy a copy, you could get it by copying it word-for-word from someone else's version. The effect on the author was no different from copying a friend's MP3 file. The only difference is it feels like "a smaller act," so it can't be "a big deal."
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    Ok, so it's not that we went from non-zero cost to zero cost, but instead that cost of copy is a continuum and the lower we went the more prevalent it became.
PeterisP 9y ago
Well, but ad targeting (if it's done in-house) can be done without violating privacy. I mean, if FB would sell a service "show an ad to 10000 people born on 13th April 1998", and then doing so is perfectly compatible with keeping birthdays private as long as they don't tell the advertiser which people got shown that ad. A setting marked "only me" can be reasonably used to affect content that's shown only to you, e.g. targeted ads - assuming that you know your birthdate and relationship status, nothing that's shown to you is a privacy issue as long as no information is given to others. Such ad-targeting may be unwanted and intrusive, but that's not disclosing any private information. The upcoming EU GDPR law would likely require your consent for such usage of private data, though.
- inlined 9y ago
  I understand the point that you and Facebook each made. That is a different point than the one I did. I felt violated. I don't care what tools Facebook used to make sure my PII wasn't given to a third party, that was personal data. It was data I explicitly marked as "nobody's business" but they used it invasively. Their long-form response was summarized "so what? We probably knew you broke up without telling us anyway"
  - dwild 9y ago
    Can we once and for all accept that what you give to a website can be used by that website? Don't give your relationship status to Facebook if you don't want them to have it. It's a simple solution isn't it? I think for so long people ignored the impact of what they did with their data. Facebook isn't your doctor or your lawyer. Facebook make cash out of targeted ads, it's their business models, they WILL use the data you gave them to target you with ads.
RhysU 9y ago
If it was only for you, why tell FB at all?

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works. Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something. With computers the situation is less obvious. If you make a copy of something (say a movie) A) you're not really taking one copy of a movie from them; instead you created a copy of a movie for yourself, B) it's not clear that you're damaging their revenues either, as not all people who make copies of movies would've bought the movies in the absense of the possibility of making copies. Probably a more acurate picture is something in the middle, but the point here was that anti-piracy lobbies knowingly conflated "making copies" with "stealing". We entered the computer era without a morally charged word to describe an activity that used to be impossible, and instead they used one that misrepresents the new situation of things. I think when it comes to privacy we're in a similar situation. Pre-computers, "privacy" meant that (phrase A) "people won't know attributes of you", and that is absolutely equivalent to (phrase B) "people (in this case advertisers) aren't able to take actions that depend on attributes of you". Post-computers the two phrases are not equivalent: Facebook didn't tell advertisers attributes of you, but it gave them the possibility to make decisions which depend on attributes of you. Conveniently, Facebook understands privacy to mean the former. I suspect the reason for why Facebook got away with it for so long is that we don't have two words that differenciate between the two phrases. We need to once and for all decide if we want the word "privacy" to mean phrase A, phrase B, or phrase A AND phrase B. To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying "advertisers can only target you, they aren't being given your data, and therefore all is good". The only thing I'm saying is that the word "privacy" is lacking in a post-computers world.

perpetualpatzer 9y ago
> "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something." I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright. A "copyright" is so named because it is precisely the right to prevent other people from making copies. When it originated (in the 1700s), its goal was to prevent the copying of books, even though copying--then and now--did not deprive the owner of their own access to the work. What has changed is not the invention of a new fundamental concept (making a thing like another thing), but the ease with which this can be done by the unscrupulous. If you really liked a poem in 1720, wanted to be able to read it, but didn't want to buy a copy, you could get it by copying it word-for-word from someone else's version. The effect on the author was no different from copying a friend's MP3 file. The only difference is it feels like "a smaller act," so it can't be "a big deal."
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Ok, so it's not that we went from non-zero cost to zero cost, but instead that cost of copy is a continuum and the lower we went the more prevalent it became.

PeterisP 9y ago

Well, but ad targeting (if it's done in-house) can be done without violating privacy. I mean, if FB would sell a service "show an ad to 10000 people born on 13th April 1998", and then doing so is perfectly compatible with keeping birthdays private as long as they don't tell the advertiser which people got shown that ad. A setting marked "only me" can be reasonably used to affect content that's shown only to you, e.g. targeted ads - assuming that you know your birthdate and relationship status, nothing that's shown to you is a privacy issue as long as no information is given to others. Such ad-targeting may be unwanted and intrusive, but that's not disclosing any private information. The upcoming EU GDPR law would likely require your consent for such usage of private data, though.

inlined 9y ago
I understand the point that you and Facebook each made. That is a different point than the one I did. I felt violated. I don't care what tools Facebook used to make sure my PII wasn't given to a third party, that was personal data. It was data I explicitly marked as "nobody's business" but they used it invasively. Their long-form response was summarized "so what? We probably knew you broke up without telling us anyway"
- dwild 9y ago
  Can we once and for all accept that what you give to a website can be used by that website? Don't give your relationship status to Facebook if you don't want them to have it. It's a simple solution isn't it? I think for so long people ignored the impact of what they did with their data. Facebook isn't your doctor or your lawyer. Facebook make cash out of targeted ads, it's their business models, they WILL use the data you gave them to target you with ads.

RhysU 9y ago

If it was only for you, why tell FB at all?