8 ms·
Facebook has always sold data to advertisers, and it probably always will
- soft_dev_person 8y agoThis is so on point that even Congress should be able to understand it.
- JBiserkov 8y agoUpton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- ardy42 8y agoThat's a nice quote, but I don't think it applies here in that way. I don't think any Congressman's salary actually depends on not understanding Facebook's business model.
- v64 8y agoMaybe not their literal salary, but Congress is heavily lobbied and can be incentivized with other perks and benefits to look the other way.
- michaelmrose 8y agoFacebook doesn't individually contribute much but it did contribute a total of 7 million over 12 years. If they were smarter they would kick in more.
- delhanty 8y ago>Please disable your ad blocker > >Advertising helps fund Times journalism. No I don't think so - uBlock Origin all the way. Internet advertising fuels the Facebook problem. The smaller we can make internet advertising, the smaller the Facebook problem becomes.
- ForHackernews 8y agoPay for a subscription, then. Journalism isn't cheap.
- delhanty 8y agoI do pay for stuff on the internet. IMO the NY Times simply isn't good enough or original enough to be worth paying for though, so I choose not to subscribe to it. Also, I'm not very interested in being informed about the endless news cycle of daily events. It distracts focus and in the long run is mainly noise. Its main purpose seems to be to create jobs in the media for the oversupply of liberal arts graduates.
- setquk 8y agoOr just not bother reading the thousands of syndicated bits of crap and opinion pieces which is what "journalism" is mostly these days.
- yostrovs 8y agoThanks to the big tech companies and ad blockers.
- djohnston 8y agojournalism is actually extremely cheap, and is probably why the NYT finds itself in the unenviable position of playing second fiddle to new medias these days
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoCranking out clickbait is cheap. Journalism isn't.
- djohnston 8y agothat's definitely true, i just think that even the "reputable" newspapers have fallen in line and while they do still execute detailed investigate journalism, they are also pumping out clickbait. the recent WaPo article on the child who died in CBP custody was quite disappointing.
- underwater 8y agoI disagree with the premise. The accusation only holds if your definition of "selling data" includes any transaction where data is leaked as part of a transaction. Importantly, in the ad model the information leakage is an unintended (but unavoidable) side effect. If Facebook could sell ad slots without revealing information about you they would. In fact over the years they've tightened their constraints around targetting to ensure that individuals cannot be targetted and data about individuals can't be derived by targetting hacks. If you asked an average person what "selling data" means, they would describe a much more straightforward exchange: you pay me, and I tell you the names of woman interested in skiing. Consider a real world comparison. You run a ski class for woman. I pay you $100 to distribute vouchers for a range of ski equipment at my store. If a customer shows up with a voucher then I know that they're taking your lessons. I can infer their skill level and that they can afford to pay for private lessons. Was that an instance of you selling your customer's data?
- andybak 8y agoI am no Facebook fan but I have to agree. Can anyone clarify if there still exists a way for 3rd parties to get data out of Facebook for users that haven't clicked on the 3rd party ad?
- cerved 8y agoFacebook has a large network of adtech partners who integrate with Facebooks advertising APIs. This used to be FBX, then they replaced it custom audiences. I used to work at one of these firms and AFAIK, I worked in sales, Facebook didn't exchange any data with us. I believe with FBX was implemented using tokens but this changed with custom audiences. What we could do was match email addresses from our clients, think newsletter list, and get custom audience segment to advertise towards on Facebook. I seem to recall that we needed at least 1000 emails and we could see how many of them matched a Facebook user. A possible covert channel of confidentiality breach could be that you feed it 999 bogus emails and one target email to find out if a particular email matched a Facebook user. But then I don't think you would've been able to target ads to that small of an audience. If there is a possibility to get data, my guess is that it would be through inference using this kind of covert channel.
- yosito 8y agoAs a culture, we all signed up to participate in a business model funded by collecting our data and selling it. The natural outcome is that people with money would use that money to influence public opinion. We walked straight into this trap.
- cerved 8y agoYou probably could use this type of granular targeting described, and infer personal data from Facebook users using UTM codes on your campaigns. But it doesn't tell you who this information is about. You'd have to trick the user to reveal their identity on the attacker website. I guess this could happen if the victim had previously visited the attacker website and identified themselves using say their email. Store a cookie of this user. Then when the click the information leaking ad they identify themselves on the attacking website with this cookie. Now you can link the information leaking targeting with the user and potentially leak data. It's misleading to say that Facebook is selling data to advertisers. Rather they might leak personal data through covert channels.
- known 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising is included in https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update
- bertil 8y agoReal question: Should opinion editors be judged by the practice of the journal that publishes them? The NYTimes does admittedly worst than Facebook on that front (the key aspects for me: I can’t see the targeting for their ads before clicking on it, refuse some ads on their website, I can’t access, edit or delete what their partners know about me; I can do all that on Facebook). That makes the claims of that editor seem very disingenuous. Should we judge him based on that? Or is he a user of NYTimes and a victim of their disputable privacy practice, like he is a user of Facebook and an avowed victim of the Mark & Boz’s decisions?
- humbermetallic 8y agoI agree with this article, thanks for sharing. With the advent of big data and capabilities to draw conclusions from what seems like an anonymous information Mr. Zuck sill goes for the simplified explanation "but we're not giving it directly..." The violence case in Myanmar showed that Facebook has much broader consequences without directly doing anything. The same goes for third party involvement, they can deny it and it makes me question do they themselves understand the scope of the problem and manipulation.
- sbhn 8y agoIts not only advertisers buying your data. I had a boss who paid a subscription to a service that monitors as much of your internet activity as possible. He got alerts everytime i and other colleages did anything public. He bought it cause he was paranoid, or a voyer. Stuff that you do that is public, is more than just a facebook post, it is slso a google+, steam, wordpress, gravatar, linkedin, discuss, readdit, and loads more. The more you can link up a particular person, the more you can track across domains, the more its worth, even to the person being tracked. Think credit scoring companies who sell there tracking back to you and also to banks. Your governments pay billions to security contractors to collect your data. Newsagencies that suggest your data is only valuable to adveriserz are engaging in distraction.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoOne of the many benefits of a full-time job doing open source development: it has absolutely flooded out everything else about me on the Internet. My Dad used to have a service like this alerting him about anything I did. He turned it off because he got sick of all the notifications about my work. If you Google my name now, it takes until like page 10 before you find anything remotely personal.
- sbhn 8y agoYes, i had a similar perspective, ive also posted a lot of open source and i thought if you are still inclined to be following me with your draw dropped in awe, then youd need to be getting yourself a life. Surely im not that important. But actually, my data and activity genrates enough money amongst those who sell security to the government, that it would contribute a significant part to my weekly wage. If only we knew how much our data was really worth.
- harryh 8y agoThis essay is just wrong. Just because a person ends up on an advertiser's site after clicking on an add targeted to [whatever] doesn't mean the advertiser has the data. It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad.
- Quanttek 8y agoOf course it does. That is the whole point of the article. By clicking on a targeted ad, the info used to target you can be and also is very much transferred. Just imagine a string attached to the ad URL containing the characteristics of the targeted group: &woman=1&age=24&location=Seattle&sexor=bi&interested=[cars,skiing,succulents]&relstatus=single&...
- harryh 8y ago"It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad."
- nodamage 8y agoThey might not have your name and address (yet), but they've likely taken a browser fingerprint which can eventually be used to de-anonymize you.
- harryh 8y ago"Likely" is a strong word there. For most organizations, I'd go with "might have." But yes, that's true. Still, "Facebook tells you which ad someone clicked on, and that can give you some demographic information, and if you can at some later point determine that person's identity you can connect the two" is a very different thing from "Facebook sells your data."
- nodamage 8y agoIt might be different from a technical perspective, but from a privacy perspective information about the user has been transferred to the advertiser, who paid Facebook for the privilege. And "at some later point" may not be that far-fetched, if the adtech company operating the fingerprinting code happens to sell their data to other companies, etc.
- randaouser 8y agoHow is ad matching performed exactly? Is a users data profile basically matched against some set of ad network defined properties and then served to the end user?
- nitrogen 8y agoA lot of comments are missing the fact that there are data sources other than Facebook that can turn a click into an identity, or near enough. Facebook can't claim ignorance of all of those. See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ for one conceptual demo. As an innocuous example, have you ever noticed that Maps seems to show the right neighborhood when you connect a non-GPS laptop to a friend's wifi?
- nodja 8y ago> As an innocuous example, have you ever noticed that Maps seems to show the right neighborhood when you connect a non-GPS laptop to a friend's wifi? Isn't that just matching the IP to the correct town? Using a database like maxmind's.
- sjburt 8y agoGoogle also has a map of WiFi access points. By looking at which points are in range you can determine location.
- nitrogen 8y agoThere are databases with much higher accuracy. I once had a pizza delivery website I had never before used pre-populate the complete address for my location (on a desktop PC with no GPS). They don't do that anymore though, so I can't take a screenshot. Retailers buy and sell customer data as part of "data cleanup" efforts, that data can be correlated with geo-IP and third-party cookies, etc.
- taude 8y agoI don't know why we pick on FB for this practice, just because they're better at it than existing marketing data out there that's been accumulating for the past 40 years on people. Companies like Axciom, Experian, etc. have been doing this far longer than FB...
- jeromebaek 8y agoThis is tricky. I sort of agree with the author and sort of don't. It boils down to: if you own an algorithm f: H->R^n and show m number of (k, v) pairings such that f(k) = v, does it follow that you have revealed all or part of the algorithm? (Where user data is folded into f.) This would necessarily have to do with how big m is and whether it is enough to infer a f with reasonable accuracy. Not sure what are good metrics for "reasonable accuracy" though.