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> To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back in to every website, and you m

> To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back in to every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won't be as good while it relearns your preferences. Sounds like they designed this feature explicitly to show people why they need to provide facebook data. Instead of designing facebook features so that they can enjoyed while preserving privacy, Facebook is making moves to explicitly show how on Facebook privacy is at odds with utilitarianism of their product.

loceng 9y ago
I wonder if and how this impacts their ad targeting abilities?
- chrischen 9y ago
  If people use it en-masse, probably negatively, but most likely they're betting few people will use it, just like how few people (almost no one I know) 100% go through with account deletion. The reality is there is no compromise for privacy. They build tools that help you either lose all value from facebook and retain your privacy, or relinquish your privacy to continue using facebook. It's not so much privacy forward tooling as it is a constant reminder they have a gun to your head.
  - loceng 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Instapainting looks like a great service btw.
  - BlackFly 9y ago
    Well, GDPR makes forces them to make the tracking features opt in, so they have to collectively convince EU users to turn on the tracking as opposed to hoping the people won't disable it. They do this through a few devious practices, such as the spin doctoring discussed here. One other thing that they do is instead of the option being a check box, it is a selection between two radio buttons and you explicitly have to choose one of them. I suppose this is actually a violation of the GDPR, since it should be disabled by default. You don't lose value from facebook at all by not opting in. "Show ads that are relevant to me," is an arrogant statement. The actual statement is "Track my browsing to show ads that Facebook believes are relevant to me." I don't use Facebook for the targeted ads, I use it to infrequently receive news about people I know spread out across the globe.
- rhizome 9y ago
  What difference does it make? They wouldn't lower their rates and a zillion people are still on FB so advertisers are going to buy the slots regardless. "Ad targeting" is not something that people outside of the niche of advertising economics care about.
  - loceng 9y ago
    Well, I understand that Facebook will try to extract as much value from advertisers as possible as well, testing the price they're willing to pay based on the conversions that advertiser hopefully are tracking accurately. I more was curious of whether the history cleared with Clear History are primary markers for ad targeting or if other data is used, and in reality if enough users don't clear their data but have similar data fingerprints (the non-Clear History data) then Facebook could still present assumptions to target by for those who do clear their history regularly, e.g. it will be a moot point up until say 40% of people regularly are clearing their history and therefore can no longer accurately enough make those assumptions.
- gaius 9y ago
  wonder if and how this impacts their ad targeting abilities? Not at all, the NN that does ad targeting has already been trained on the data. Deleting it will make no difference (assuming you believe they actually will delete it)
merinowool 9y ago
Wouldn't GDPR say that user experience shouldn't be dependent on the consent given by the user?
- sbarre 9y ago
  I don't know how this could be universally possible. If you don't consent to providing data that is key to enabling features of the experience, how could that experience be provided?
- andybak 9y ago
  Surely there are many areas of functionality that depend upon gaining GDPR consent? Trivial example: I can't email you if you withhold email consent.
  - blowski 9y ago
    Actually, I can. If you’ve given me your email for some business reason, and for me to conduct that business I need to email you, I can email you. Even if you didn’t explicitly give consent. What I can’t do is email you marketing newsletters the times a week for the next decade, or sell your email address to ‘specially selected trusted partners’.
    - karmelapple 9y ago
      Do you know which parts of GDPR specify the concrete limits on things like this? Or is it more a “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of fuzzy boundary for what’s allowed? Would be helpful to know!
      - rahoulb 9y ago
        "You must balance your interests against the individual’s. If they would not reasonably expect the processing, or if it would cause unjustified harm, their interests are likely to override your legitimate interests." https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/legitimate-interests/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
hjnilsson 9y ago
How do you judge how "good" Facebook is, in order to evaluate this? I'm having a hard time thinking people will notice either way. There probably will be a difference, but I think in actual use, for most people, it will be very small.
- artursapek 9y ago
  I don't know... personally my Facebook experience improved dramatically after I deleted my account in 2013 :)
- pandoma 9y ago
  I can see it having to do with the ordering of timeline events, the ads you see, and the news visible in the top right corner.
  - hjnilsson 9y ago
    Yes, it would make a difference there. My question is in regards to the top-level comment, will people notice the difference? For example: If my mother "cleared her history", I really doubt she would notice the worse quality of Facebook and regret deleting her data, as the top-level comment implied. So my point is it's not a move to show how effective the algorithms are, but a privacy-conscious one from Facebook.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
> Sounds like they designed this feature explicitly to show people why they need to provide facebook data. Facebook is making moves to explicitly show how on Facebook privacy is at odds with utilitarianism of their product. In all seriousness, how is that possible any other way? Take the example he gives about log in. If you want a website to automatically know who you are without logging in, please let me know how that is possible without automatically sending identifying information to the website.
- mynameisvlad 9y ago
  There's not logging in automatically, and then there's using other data they have about you (however limited) to still provide a good experience. The parent comment is clearly talking about the latter (creating experiences that are equally good for privacy minded and open book people) while you're focused on a small feature that isn't really relevant to the bigger picture.
- lurker456 9y ago
  Yes, to offer that functionality it would need a cookie. No, the website doesn't need to correlate that login and all activity related to it to everything else you ever did on the internet to build up a profile about you. It is technically feasible (even easier) to offer the first ("remember me on this one site") without doing the second ("track me across all sites").
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Well, technically it's all the same, it's a request to FB servers with an user id and token. Decoupling that relies entirely on Facebook's internal policy. Since they are a public company now, not using that dsta is leaving money on the table.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Technically, at least for EU users, whether they do this or not should now be a switch on the GDPR panel.
esbafb8 9y ago
Sounds a lot like "guys, you should NEVER delete cookies or the world would crumble."
- chrischen 9y ago
  It's exactly what Zuckerberg added as a disclaimer if you were to choose to use their new feature.
Can_Not 9y ago
> and you may have to reconfigure things Too bad Facebook couldn't figure out a way to remember I prefer a chronological news feed even with cookies.
Terr_ 9y ago
They'll do what Google does, and impose barely-justified punishments on any users who try to deviate from their preferred flow.
coatmatter 9y ago
> Your Facebook won't be as good while it relearns your preferences. This is an excellent feature. I replaced Facebook time with Twitter time a while back and found it even more addicting (because the talent pool is much better and more real-time, and there's an extra sunk-cost fallacy going on with the amount of work required to find good content). But even more recently, I've been purposefully logging out of Twitter a lot more (and have replaced that with YouTube). Logging back into Twitter now, I see that the "content" there feels less relevant and more boring. This is great for productivity. I just gotta curb the YouTube now - at least with that I can just shunt everything to "Watch Later". Alright, time to log out of hacker news too.

loceng 9y ago

I wonder if and how this impacts their ad targeting abilities?

chrischen 9y ago
If people use it en-masse, probably negatively, but most likely they're betting few people will use it, just like how few people (almost no one I know) 100% go through with account deletion. The reality is there is no compromise for privacy. They build tools that help you either lose all value from facebook and retain your privacy, or relinquish your privacy to continue using facebook. It's not so much privacy forward tooling as it is a constant reminder they have a gun to your head.
- loceng 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply. Instapainting looks like a great service btw.
- BlackFly 9y ago
  Well, GDPR makes forces them to make the tracking features opt in, so they have to collectively convince EU users to turn on the tracking as opposed to hoping the people won't disable it. They do this through a few devious practices, such as the spin doctoring discussed here. One other thing that they do is instead of the option being a check box, it is a selection between two radio buttons and you explicitly have to choose one of them. I suppose this is actually a violation of the GDPR, since it should be disabled by default. You don't lose value from facebook at all by not opting in. "Show ads that are relevant to me," is an arrogant statement. The actual statement is "Track my browsing to show ads that Facebook believes are relevant to me." I don't use Facebook for the targeted ads, I use it to infrequently receive news about people I know spread out across the globe.
rhizome 9y ago
What difference does it make? They wouldn't lower their rates and a zillion people are still on FB so advertisers are going to buy the slots regardless. "Ad targeting" is not something that people outside of the niche of advertising economics care about.
- loceng 9y ago
  Well, I understand that Facebook will try to extract as much value from advertisers as possible as well, testing the price they're willing to pay based on the conversions that advertiser hopefully are tracking accurately. I more was curious of whether the history cleared with Clear History are primary markers for ad targeting or if other data is used, and in reality if enough users don't clear their data but have similar data fingerprints (the non-Clear History data) then Facebook could still present assumptions to target by for those who do clear their history regularly, e.g. it will be a moot point up until say 40% of people regularly are clearing their history and therefore can no longer accurately enough make those assumptions.
gaius 9y ago
wonder if and how this impacts their ad targeting abilities? Not at all, the NN that does ad targeting has already been trained on the data. Deleting it will make no difference (assuming you believe they actually will delete it)

merinowool 9y ago

Wouldn't GDPR say that user experience shouldn't be dependent on the consent given by the user?

sbarre 9y ago
I don't know how this could be universally possible. If you don't consent to providing data that is key to enabling features of the experience, how could that experience be provided?
andybak 9y ago
Surely there are many areas of functionality that depend upon gaining GDPR consent? Trivial example: I can't email you if you withhold email consent.
- blowski 9y ago
  Actually, I can. If you’ve given me your email for some business reason, and for me to conduct that business I need to email you, I can email you. Even if you didn’t explicitly give consent. What I can’t do is email you marketing newsletters the times a week for the next decade, or sell your email address to ‘specially selected trusted partners’.
  - karmelapple 9y ago
    Do you know which parts of GDPR specify the concrete limits on things like this? Or is it more a “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of fuzzy boundary for what’s allowed? Would be helpful to know!
    - rahoulb 9y ago
      "You must balance your interests against the individual’s. If they would not reasonably expect the processing, or if it would cause unjustified harm, their interests are likely to override your legitimate interests." https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/legitimate-interests/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

hjnilsson 9y ago

How do you judge how "good" Facebook is, in order to evaluate this? I'm having a hard time thinking people will notice either way. There probably will be a difference, but I think in actual use, for most people, it will be very small.

artursapek 9y ago
I don't know... personally my Facebook experience improved dramatically after I deleted my account in 2013 :)
pandoma 9y ago
I can see it having to do with the ordering of timeline events, the ads you see, and the news visible in the top right corner.
- hjnilsson 9y ago
  Yes, it would make a difference there. My question is in regards to the top-level comment, will people notice the difference? For example: If my mother "cleared her history", I really doubt she would notice the worse quality of Facebook and regret deleting her data, as the top-level comment implied. So my point is it's not a move to show how effective the algorithms are, but a privacy-conscious one from Facebook.

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago

> Sounds like they designed this feature explicitly to show people why they need to provide facebook data. Facebook is making moves to explicitly show how on Facebook privacy is at odds with utilitarianism of their product. In all seriousness, how is that possible any other way? Take the example he gives about log in. If you want a website to automatically know who you are without logging in, please let me know how that is possible without automatically sending identifying information to the website.

mynameisvlad 9y ago
There's not logging in automatically, and then there's using other data they have about you (however limited) to still provide a good experience. The parent comment is clearly talking about the latter (creating experiences that are equally good for privacy minded and open book people) while you're focused on a small feature that isn't really relevant to the bigger picture.
lurker456 9y ago
Yes, to offer that functionality it would need a cookie. No, the website doesn't need to correlate that login and all activity related to it to everything else you ever did on the internet to build up a profile about you. It is technically feasible (even easier) to offer the first ("remember me on this one site") without doing the second ("track me across all sites").
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  Well, technically it's all the same, it's a request to FB servers with an user id and token. Decoupling that relies entirely on Facebook's internal policy. Since they are a public company now, not using that dsta is leaving money on the table.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Technically, at least for EU users, whether they do this or not should now be a switch on the GDPR panel.

esbafb8 9y ago

Sounds a lot like "guys, you should NEVER delete cookies or the world would crumble."

chrischen 9y ago
It's exactly what Zuckerberg added as a disclaimer if you were to choose to use their new feature.

Can_Not 9y ago

> and you may have to reconfigure things Too bad Facebook couldn't figure out a way to remember I prefer a chronological news feed even with cookies.

Terr_ 9y ago

They'll do what Google does, and impose barely-justified punishments on any users who try to deviate from their preferred flow.

coatmatter 9y ago

> Your Facebook won't be as good while it relearns your preferences. This is an excellent feature. I replaced Facebook time with Twitter time a while back and found it even more addicting (because the talent pool is much better and more real-time, and there's an extra sunk-cost fallacy going on with the amount of work required to find good content). But even more recently, I've been purposefully logging out of Twitter a lot more (and have replaced that with YouTube). Logging back into Twitter now, I see that the "content" there feels less relevant and more boring. This is great for productivity. I just gotta curb the YouTube now - at least with that I can just shunt everything to "Watch Later". Alright, time to log out of hacker news too.