7 ms·

>Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. The real insanity is with the users. FB did the mos

by _red 8y ago

>Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user-base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys. It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?

pas 8y ago
You target audiences (segments), and FB gets ad revenue. The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.
asciimo 8y ago
Obvious to some. When consumers receive a valuable service or product for free, with no obvious strings attached, they consume it. I don't think most people would preoccupy themselves with the provider or manufacturer's business model. You are savvy, and that's good. But others deserve consideration and protection.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CaptainZapp 8y ago
  It's rather simple: If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.
untog 8y ago
> It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious. Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous. When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.
- vasilipupkin 8y ago
  Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and their dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC. Realistically, I think we have three choices: - We can't have nice things. - Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information. - Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies. But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).
    - jgon 8y ago
      I think another thing that bothers me about this mindset is that we have started viewing "consumer" action as the only valid response, which is really convenient for some people for the reasons you mention. But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials. This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.
    - vasilipupkin 8y ago
      I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.
cafard 8y ago
Quite a few people I know signed up with FB when they were in high school. Some may have thought through the business model, I suppose.
naravara 8y ago
>It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be. Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.) The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard." The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.
- fsck_tw 8y ago
  I for one should have realized what it was more or less immediately, but as a young kid in college, didn't. I don't claim that it was particularly hard to see at that point as it was well into the mid 2000s, but I wasn't particularly tech savvy or worldly yet. By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
- intended 8y ago
mkane848 8y ago
Oh no, the people at large don't understand the complicated interactions between law and technology, those fucking idiots, how dare they
bobdole1234 8y ago
Facebook doesn't sell data, they ads. Those ads are targetable by categories determined from private data, but Facebook doesn't give anyone else the data, that's literally why people would purchase ads through their exchange and not through another exchange. Google has the same model, they don't sell your data, they use your data to match you with advertisers through a fairly opaque interface that lets advertisers reach the categories of people they want to reach, without revealing the data to allowed them to put someone in that category. Kind of like how your Mom will set you up on a blind date based on what she knows about what both parties want, but doesn't disclose all your information because she doesn't want anyone to be upset with her.

by _red 8y ago

pas 8y ago

You target audiences (segments), and FB gets ad revenue. The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.

asciimo 8y ago

Obvious to some. When consumers receive a valuable service or product for free, with no obvious strings attached, they consume it. I don't think most people would preoccupy themselves with the provider or manufacturer's business model. You are savvy, and that's good. But others deserve consideration and protection.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CaptainZapp 8y ago
It's rather simple: If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.

untog 8y ago

> It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious. Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous. When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.

vasilipupkin 8y ago
Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and their dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC. Realistically, I think we have three choices: - We can't have nice things. - Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information. - Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies. But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).
  - jgon 8y ago
    I think another thing that bothers me about this mindset is that we have started viewing "consumer" action as the only valid response, which is really convenient for some people for the reasons you mention. But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials. This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.
  - vasilipupkin 8y ago
    I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

cafard 8y ago

Quite a few people I know signed up with FB when they were in high school. Some may have thought through the business model, I suppose.

naravara 8y ago

>It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be. Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.) The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard." The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.

fsck_tw 8y ago
I for one should have realized what it was more or less immediately, but as a young kid in college, didn't. I don't claim that it was particularly hard to see at that point as it was well into the mid 2000s, but I wasn't particularly tech savvy or worldly yet. By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
intended 8y ago

mkane848 8y ago

Oh no, the people at large don't understand the complicated interactions between law and technology, those fucking idiots, how dare they

bobdole1234 8y ago

Facebook doesn't sell data, they ads. Those ads are targetable by categories determined from private data, but Facebook doesn't give anyone else the data, that's literally why people would purchase ads through their exchange and not through another exchange. Google has the same model, they don't sell your data, they use your data to match you with advertisers through a fairly opaque interface that lets advertisers reach the categories of people they want to reach, without revealing the data to allowed them to put someone in that category. Kind of like how your Mom will set you up on a blind date based on what she knows about what both parties want, but doesn't disclose all your information because she doesn't want anyone to be upset with her.