7 ms·

Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching

226 points by turadg 8y ago

BaldricksGhost 8y ago
You're not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about how this was "not that easy" the real reason probably lies in this bit near the end: "Why can’t Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely? Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook’s business depends on collecting this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream." As long as Facebook's business model involves monetizing your data, they are going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.
- fumar 8y ago
  Advertisers wouldn't want to hear that part of their campaign attribution (on-site conversions) were null because users have the option to remove browsing behavior. Facebook's people-based marketing is why advertisers use them.
  - fumar 8y ago
    I should add context: Facebook has ~20% of the digital advertising marketshare in the US (2018). They are #2 to Google. What both of these two titans give marketers (individual teams within a larger org) is something to brag about. How? Run a campaign for display or video ads in FB or Google and make sure you can tie it to a site action (ideally a conversion of some type). Let that run for a month and then give yourself a big pat on the back. You just drove some cost per action (conversion) number that with some tweaks can improve month over month. Your marketing org is now optimizing! yes! Drive those sales or site visits. It is a great approach for marketing teams. They grow, look good, claim to drive revenue, try to impact consumer behavior, but it all is dependent on Facebook's (insert any ad platform partner) attribution. So yeah, Facebook will not mess with its attribution. It would make a big mess for both its business and it's client's business. Marketers's should measure the incremental impact of their marketing buys (get their data science team to manage the study). They will be surprised to see how much display banners or video ads are impacting consumer behavior. Stay away from modeled approaches, try to grade the reporting yourself.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  The Upton Sinclair quote has never been more relevant: > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- Zarath 8y ago
  Funny thing is, clearing browsing history is a signal in itself. It can specify a certain type of person and/or a specific life event that triggered this.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  And if/when the feature launches I would not at all be surprised to seeing this headline down the road: "Facebook Clear History doesn't fully erase user data, information later sold to a group of Zombie Nazis bent on world domination."
  - denzil_correa 8y ago
    And it is mentioned as such in the article too that "Clear History =/= Delete History" > There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.
    - distant_hat 8y ago
      At Facebook's granularity of data collection it would be almost trivial to identify a user even if that user's name is not connected with the data.
amaccuish 8y ago
> "Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user it belongs to" I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.
- code_duck 8y ago
  ‘Stored by’ is a bit of a trick or a joke as far as a databases. What would that even mean, to a technical person? The primary key? One could say it is ‘stored by’ any field that you could query for. Obviously they have the records associated with individuals, considering that’s the focus of their business.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    It’s probably not a database if I had to guess, given the volume of event stream data. At my current company we store event streams as time organized flat files in HDFS for analytics. Our site isn’t as big as facebooks but it measures into the low petabytes across all time. So how you store the data is important in a post-sql world.
    - code_duck 8y ago
      I’m sure they’re not but using a standard relational database too. They obviously extract the information and work with it, so whether it’s ‘a database’ is basically an implementation detail. For the purposes of this discussion, a flat file is essentially a database. A CSV has fields and is easily made searchable. The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
      - code_duck 8y ago
        (Minus the extraneous ‘but’ in the first sentence)
        chillacy 8y ago
SkeptinenSpede5 8y ago
I wonder why I can't delete my account after 4 years ? Cannot login or delete.. when advertiser's start asking them about zombie accounts that fix they marketing analytics ?
aimdroid 8y ago
'Clear History' goes against Facebook's business model. They will never release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be something false only to serve PR.
jliptzin 8y ago
Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don’t see what’s so hard. I’d imagine most people don’t care that much and the ones that do have an option now.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Someone on HN explained the problem to me like so: Assume Facebook brings in $10/user/month in ad revenue. But the distribution is uneven; $50/user/month for rich westerners, $6/user/month for poor people in poor countries who outnumber westerners 10:1. If you offer everyone the chance to go ad-free for $10/month, your income from rich westerners drops from $50 to $10 and your total revenue drops to $6.36/user/month.
  - thepangolino 8y ago
    They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  That would not work, because of the following (quite neat) problem: The users that are most valuable to advertisers are those with a lot of disposable income. If you offer an ad-free experience for the value of the average user, far more of these high-income, high-value users would subscribe, both because they have the money and because they tend to be more privacy-conscious. Imagine (simplified) losing ad income from the top 50% of your users for the price of your average user, while being left with only the bottom 50% to show ads to.
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Put the opt-out price on a sliding scale that's adjusted quarterly per actual loss in revenue from users who drop out of the pool.
denzil_correa 8y ago
> There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it. I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.
- hadrien01 8y ago
  Is that GDPR compliant?
- nawgszy 8y ago
  Surely we can't be expected to believe they don't have techniques to re-identify that data. I suppose that's the subtext of what you wrote, though.
uptown 8y ago
I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples: 1. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device's clipboard and transmit this information to your servers? 2. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device, even if the user hasn't explicitly selected the image for upload? I'm sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent these in ways I'm not familiar with but it'd amaze me if companies weren't grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.
- rhegart 8y ago
  I’m pretty sure they did multiple times. Even recently in the past year. They just lie and there seems to be no consequences for it. At least after 2012 when they lied the government can go after them but they’re still looking into it.
tareqak 8y ago
Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-attorney-general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica-scandal https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-atto... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180
javaIsGreat 8y ago
facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)

226 points by turadg 8y ago

You're not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about how this was "not that easy" the real reason probably lies in this bit near the end: "Why can’t Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely? Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook’s business depends on collecting this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream." As long as Facebook's business model involves monetizing your data, they are going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.

fumar 8y ago
Advertisers wouldn't want to hear that part of their campaign attribution (on-site conversions) were null because users have the option to remove browsing behavior. Facebook's people-based marketing is why advertisers use them.
- fumar 8y ago
  I should add context: Facebook has ~20% of the digital advertising marketshare in the US (2018). They are #2 to Google. What both of these two titans give marketers (individual teams within a larger org) is something to brag about. How? Run a campaign for display or video ads in FB or Google and make sure you can tie it to a site action (ideally a conversion of some type). Let that run for a month and then give yourself a big pat on the back. You just drove some cost per action (conversion) number that with some tweaks can improve month over month. Your marketing org is now optimizing! yes! Drive those sales or site visits. It is a great approach for marketing teams. They grow, look good, claim to drive revenue, try to impact consumer behavior, but it all is dependent on Facebook's (insert any ad platform partner) attribution. So yeah, Facebook will not mess with its attribution. It would make a big mess for both its business and it's client's business. Marketers's should measure the incremental impact of their marketing buys (get their data science team to manage the study). They will be surprised to see how much display banners or video ads are impacting consumer behavior. Stay away from modeled approaches, try to grade the reporting yourself.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
The Upton Sinclair quote has never been more relevant: > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Zarath 8y ago
Funny thing is, clearing browsing history is a signal in itself. It can specify a certain type of person and/or a specific life event that triggered this.
EpicEng 8y ago
And if/when the feature launches I would not at all be surprised to seeing this headline down the road: "Facebook Clear History doesn't fully erase user data, information later sold to a group of Zombie Nazis bent on world domination."
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  And it is mentioned as such in the article too that "Clear History =/= Delete History" > There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.
  - distant_hat 8y ago
    At Facebook's granularity of data collection it would be almost trivial to identify a user even if that user's name is not connected with the data.

amaccuish 8y ago

> "Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user it belongs to" I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.

code_duck 8y ago
‘Stored by’ is a bit of a trick or a joke as far as a databases. What would that even mean, to a technical person? The primary key? One could say it is ‘stored by’ any field that you could query for. Obviously they have the records associated with individuals, considering that’s the focus of their business.
- chillacy 8y ago
  It’s probably not a database if I had to guess, given the volume of event stream data. At my current company we store event streams as time organized flat files in HDFS for analytics. Our site isn’t as big as facebooks but it measures into the low petabytes across all time. So how you store the data is important in a post-sql world.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    I’m sure they’re not but using a standard relational database too. They obviously extract the information and work with it, so whether it’s ‘a database’ is basically an implementation detail. For the purposes of this discussion, a flat file is essentially a database. A CSV has fields and is easily made searchable. The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
    - code_duck 8y ago
      (Minus the extraneous ‘but’ in the first sentence)
      - chillacy 8y ago

SkeptinenSpede5 8y ago

I wonder why I can't delete my account after 4 years ? Cannot login or delete.. when advertiser's start asking them about zombie accounts that fix they marketing analytics ?

aimdroid 8y ago

'Clear History' goes against Facebook's business model. They will never release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be something false only to serve PR.

jliptzin 8y ago

Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don’t see what’s so hard. I’d imagine most people don’t care that much and the ones that do have an option now.

michaelt 8y ago
Someone on HN explained the problem to me like so: Assume Facebook brings in $10/user/month in ad revenue. But the distribution is uneven; $50/user/month for rich westerners, $6/user/month for poor people in poor countries who outnumber westerners 10:1. If you offer everyone the chance to go ad-free for $10/month, your income from rich westerners drops from $50 to $10 and your total revenue drops to $6.36/user/month.
- thepangolino 8y ago
  They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.
IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
That would not work, because of the following (quite neat) problem: The users that are most valuable to advertisers are those with a lot of disposable income. If you offer an ad-free experience for the value of the average user, far more of these high-income, high-value users would subscribe, both because they have the money and because they tend to be more privacy-conscious. Imagine (simplified) losing ad income from the top 50% of your users for the price of your average user, while being left with only the bottom 50% to show ads to.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Put the opt-out price on a sliding scale that's adjusted quarterly per actual loss in revenue from users who drop out of the pool.

denzil_correa 8y ago

> There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it. I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.

hadrien01 8y ago
Is that GDPR compliant?
nawgszy 8y ago
Surely we can't be expected to believe they don't have techniques to re-identify that data. I suppose that's the subtext of what you wrote, though.

uptown 8y ago

I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples: 1. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device's clipboard and transmit this information to your servers? 2. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device, even if the user hasn't explicitly selected the image for upload? I'm sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent these in ways I'm not familiar with but it'd amaze me if companies weren't grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.

rhegart 8y ago
I’m pretty sure they did multiple times. Even recently in the past year. They just lie and there seems to be no consequences for it. At least after 2012 when they lied the government can go after them but they’re still looking into it.

tareqak 8y ago

Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-attorney-general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica-scandal https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-atto... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180

javaIsGreat 8y ago

facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)