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It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Ma

by adpirz 8y ago

It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows them down? Negative press seems to be nothing but pebbles thrown at steamroller...

echevil 8y ago
Well, though privacy is kind of imprtant to most people, what alternatives do people have (other than stop using all social media?) I don't think the problem of Facebook is unique to them at all - data leak, fake news, whatever - they are instrinsically hard problem to solve, and frankly I don't think there would be lot of companies doing much better.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 8y ago
I don't think that's true. People clearly care about privacy otherwise we wouldn't have curtains and account access controls etc. They just aren't worried enough about Facebook violating their privacy enough to stop using it. Frankly for most people that is the right decision. Facebook has done much less immoral stuff than the media would have you believe. Even the Cambridge Analytica type stuff (i.e. the obvious potential for abuse of the Friends API) was totally public at the time but nobody cared.
cm2012 8y ago
Since there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1] So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good. There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well. So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here. [1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely-to-buy-they-can-change-how-you-think-about-yourself https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...
  - mevile 8y ago
    Fair enough, but it's up to each individual to learn about these details and then make a decision if they still want to use Facebook. The media is doing their job reporting on this, and everyone else can learn from this and decide that hey, maybe using Facebook products are not worth the harm. Or maybe they are fine with it and like the relevant ads and continue to use Facebook. If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.
    - felix_nagaand 8y ago
      Just like how it's up to each individual to decide whether they want to be a heroin a addict.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        If you attribute so little agency to people that becoming a heroin addict becomes someone else's responsibility (barring physical addiction in the womb or being shot up at gunpoint repeatedly) then there's little in this world that we can control anyways.
int_19h 8y ago
Alternatively, people do care about privacy, but they care more about the value that FB provides to them. And part of that value can be due to customer lock-in (customers want social networks where the people they interact with are).
zepearl 8y ago
I share your fears, but I do have some doubts about their metrics (see the link to a chart in another thread). But maybe (just dumping some thoughts), after the scandals, DAU and MAU might not be anymore as relevant as in the past for Facebook's data collection if users, who are now (supposed to be) more aware of their data being shared and used actively for not only good stuff, just keep using it for only e.g. trivial posts (e.g. "I bought a bike today" instead of "I support/hate the president blahblah") or maybe make it more challenging for AI/aggregation using "irony" (algorithm would understand it as it's written, but the human interpretation would actually be the opposite), etc... . But maybe I'm just a desperate deluded optimist :)
wilkskyes 8y ago
It is good that people don't care about privacy. It means they are no longer afraid of being seen, that they have nothing to hide from the world, and in a way they are moving toward a more liberating existence. Keeping so many aspects of your life private comes with a price. There is inconvenience, there is overhead, and there is always fear that one day your private assets will be compromised and laid bare. The less private you are, the more you have to share, and the more you have to share, the richer and more meaningful your experiences will be: with other people, and even with other businesses. But if you are very private, you have little to share. You miss out on the social conversation of humanity, and businesses will treat you as another generic faceless entity, throwing whatever crap they can at you hoping it sticks. Why would anyone want that?
- malvosenior 8y ago
  I would put a slightly different spin on this thought. Most people's problem is that no one is paying attention to them. We struggle to get people to notice us and listen to us. Even if it's only an algorithm, I think most people would think being looked at and considered is a feature not a bug.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- feanaro 8y ago
  > But if you are very private, you have little to share. You miss out on the social conversation of humanity, and businesses will treat you as another generic faceless entity, throwing whatever crap they can at you hoping it sticks. And mass surveillance and data collection combined with blackbox machine learning techniques are somehow producing a different outcome? I think it is very misguided to conclude that people don't need privacy from all of this. Most of what people use Facebook and friends for is private, they just haven't been seriously and obviously burned enough from the fact that a large number of corporate entities are siphoning it up. Maybe they'll never get burned enough. Maybe it all turns out well. But concluding that no people do not need privacy as a basic psychological need is wrong. I know I do and I don't have a bad social life because of it.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Its not that they dont care about privacy a number of people do as others have said their bedroom windows likely have curtains. They likely close their bathroom / bedroom doors for privacy. The issue is they either dont truly understand the technical implications or they have already been so invested into Facebook personally and with no alternative to migrate to in sight (they bought Intagram which could of been one) they have no recourse currently. I hear it all the time here about events being vital or just connecting with family.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  Starting from a point of view that people are dumb never lead to great results! But it’s of course a easy way to defend ones point of view :)
  - techslave 8y ago
    have you talked to an average person on the street? high schoolers aside (who don’t use fb?) yeah people are dumb
  - feanaro 8y ago
    Well, you're the one pulling the word out of the hat. "Not truly understanding the technical implications" does not equal dumb. As an anecdote, my father is a non-dumb person who at some point started using Facebook out of a combination of curiosity and a feeling of missing out. He can use a computer proficiently for the things he needs and is quite adept at learning to use it for new use cases on his own. Yet he is far from a technological expert with as good as overview of the whole picture. Once I explained it to him over a course of several conversations, he was concerned and stopped using it.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Well, it was literally the start of Facebook! Citing Zuckerberg: The "trust me". Dumb fucks.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  The privacy people care about and the privacy Facebook violates are two mostly distinct things. The average person does not care that Facebook tracked them to espn.com or wherever else they went on the web, but they would be outraged if Facebook installed cameras in their bathroom. I suspect that if it came out that Facebook knew what porn sites you were visiting, outrage over Facebook's privacy practices would become much more real. Currently, the Facebook outrage is mostly just manufactured by the media.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
Who is "we"? You and I? Or "most people", the "average person", some abstract thing that doesn't even exist, determined by numbers? To shorten it extremely: Nobody has the right to piss away the future of humanity. If they do, they simply cease to be relevant to me, by definition. I will gladly fight them, but not ever ask for their permission or advice. Resistance to systematic mass surveillance and what hangs off that is not just a mere "social norm" like whether short or long skirts are acceptable. This is way more complex and important than all of the light-weights that don't consider it combined. Just being alive and wanting to be left alone with whatever apathy one ended up with isn't anything in the intellectual or moral arena.
fma 8y ago
In the beginning, FB was college students only, then high school... Then everyone. There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas. Some friends and I created an alternative social network at our university to capitalize. In my opinion it looked better and had more features (before they opened up their API). We were college students only, and had SSL (can you imagine back then sites without SSL?!). We were at the first techcrunch 50. We were located in "the pit". We didn't gain much coversge we didn't get traction at our university and well, we flopped. Pricacy doesn't matter to the average user.
- renholder 8y ago
  >There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas. Eternal September[0] exists everywhere. =] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
kortilla 8y ago
Same conclusion could be made that people don’t care about cancer because tobacco companies print money.
floatingatoll 8y ago
I talked to someone this morning who knew that people were vaguely worried about Facebook but was utterly horrified when I took the time to explain facebook/google and android/ios from a “privacy viewpoints” perspective. This is something the press doesn’t much do. It’s effective. Too bad :(
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hesarenu 8y ago
Its not that they don't care about privacy, its that they don't care for tracking the pages and showing ads. And if you do want to stop it you go into private mode.
gammateam 8y ago
Facebooks earnings are because advertisers spend more Every court case, summons and data breach are instructions manuals and tools for advertisers. These are public and much more useful than an outdated Udemy course selling shovels. Advertisers will continue spending more after each scandal, and they will be better targeted ads, making Facebook have more utility to users at the same time. Any proposed legislation ought to make advertisers spend more before the gravy train is over. Facebooks share price increase cant be seen as validation from its profile creators which are the product. These numbers didnt jump they offset and stay the same.
tj-teej 8y ago
I don't think the conclusion that "most people really don't care about privacy" is proved by people still using Facebook. Just because my friend buys a pack of cigarettes a day doesn't mean he doesn't care about cancer. My view: Loss of privacy is a negative externality of using Facebook. And we know companies can use shiny stuff (compelling-engaging products, PR, advertising, etc.) to overcome these kinds of negative externalities and keep customers coming back. I do think that your point about serious legislation is correct. Cigarette smoking in countries with serious legislation IS down, the question is if the political will is there and if Facebook's power can or can't outweigh that political will.

by adpirz 8y ago

echevil 8y ago

Well, though privacy is kind of imprtant to most people, what alternatives do people have (other than stop using all social media?) I don't think the problem of Facebook is unique to them at all - data leak, fake news, whatever - they are instrinsically hard problem to solve, and frankly I don't think there would be lot of companies doing much better.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

IshKebab 8y ago

I don't think that's true. People clearly care about privacy otherwise we wouldn't have curtains and account access controls etc. They just aren't worried enough about Facebook violating their privacy enough to stop using it. Frankly for most people that is the right decision. Facebook has done much less immoral stuff than the media would have you believe. Even the Cambridge Analytica type stuff (i.e. the obvious potential for abuse of the Friends API) was totally public at the time but nobody cared.

cm2012 8y ago

Since there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.

Barrin92 8y ago
There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1] So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good. There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well. So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here. [1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely-to-buy-they-can-change-how-you-think-about-yourself https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...
- mevile 8y ago
  Fair enough, but it's up to each individual to learn about these details and then make a decision if they still want to use Facebook. The media is doing their job reporting on this, and everyone else can learn from this and decide that hey, maybe using Facebook products are not worth the harm. Or maybe they are fine with it and like the relevant ads and continue to use Facebook. If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.
  - felix_nagaand 8y ago
    Just like how it's up to each individual to decide whether they want to be a heroin a addict.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      If you attribute so little agency to people that becoming a heroin addict becomes someone else's responsibility (barring physical addiction in the womb or being shot up at gunpoint repeatedly) then there's little in this world that we can control anyways.

int_19h 8y ago

Alternatively, people do care about privacy, but they care more about the value that FB provides to them. And part of that value can be due to customer lock-in (customers want social networks where the people they interact with are).

zepearl 8y ago

I share your fears, but I do have some doubts about their metrics (see the link to a chart in another thread). But maybe (just dumping some thoughts), after the scandals, DAU and MAU might not be anymore as relevant as in the past for Facebook's data collection if users, who are now (supposed to be) more aware of their data being shared and used actively for not only good stuff, just keep using it for only e.g. trivial posts (e.g. "I bought a bike today" instead of "I support/hate the president blahblah") or maybe make it more challenging for AI/aggregation using "irony" (algorithm would understand it as it's written, but the human interpretation would actually be the opposite), etc... . But maybe I'm just a desperate deluded optimist :)

wilkskyes 8y ago

It is good that people don't care about privacy. It means they are no longer afraid of being seen, that they have nothing to hide from the world, and in a way they are moving toward a more liberating existence. Keeping so many aspects of your life private comes with a price. There is inconvenience, there is overhead, and there is always fear that one day your private assets will be compromised and laid bare. The less private you are, the more you have to share, and the more you have to share, the richer and more meaningful your experiences will be: with other people, and even with other businesses. But if you are very private, you have little to share. You miss out on the social conversation of humanity, and businesses will treat you as another generic faceless entity, throwing whatever crap they can at you hoping it sticks. Why would anyone want that?

malvosenior 8y ago
I would put a slightly different spin on this thought. Most people's problem is that no one is paying attention to them. We struggle to get people to notice us and listen to us. Even if it's only an algorithm, I think most people would think being looked at and considered is a feature not a bug.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
feanaro 8y ago
> But if you are very private, you have little to share. You miss out on the social conversation of humanity, and businesses will treat you as another generic faceless entity, throwing whatever crap they can at you hoping it sticks. And mass surveillance and data collection combined with blackbox machine learning techniques are somehow producing a different outcome? I think it is very misguided to conclude that people don't need privacy from all of this. Most of what people use Facebook and friends for is private, they just haven't been seriously and obviously burned enough from the fact that a large number of corporate entities are siphoning it up. Maybe they'll never get burned enough. Maybe it all turns out well. But concluding that no people do not need privacy as a basic psychological need is wrong. I know I do and I don't have a bad social life because of it.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Its not that they dont care about privacy a number of people do as others have said their bedroom windows likely have curtains. They likely close their bathroom / bedroom doors for privacy. The issue is they either dont truly understand the technical implications or they have already been so invested into Facebook personally and with no alternative to migrate to in sight (they bought Intagram which could of been one) they have no recourse currently. I hear it all the time here about events being vital or just connecting with family.

rock_hard 8y ago
Starting from a point of view that people are dumb never lead to great results! But it’s of course a easy way to defend ones point of view :)
- techslave 8y ago
  have you talked to an average person on the street? high schoolers aside (who don’t use fb?) yeah people are dumb
- feanaro 8y ago
  Well, you're the one pulling the word out of the hat. "Not truly understanding the technical implications" does not equal dumb. As an anecdote, my father is a non-dumb person who at some point started using Facebook out of a combination of curiosity and a feeling of missing out. He can use a computer proficiently for the things he needs and is quite adept at learning to use it for new use cases on his own. Yet he is far from a technological expert with as good as overview of the whole picture. Once I explained it to him over a course of several conversations, he was concerned and stopped using it.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Well, it was literally the start of Facebook! Citing Zuckerberg: The "trust me". Dumb fucks.
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
The privacy people care about and the privacy Facebook violates are two mostly distinct things. The average person does not care that Facebook tracked them to espn.com or wherever else they went on the web, but they would be outraged if Facebook installed cameras in their bathroom. I suspect that if it came out that Facebook knew what porn sites you were visiting, outrage over Facebook's privacy practices would become much more real. Currently, the Facebook outrage is mostly just manufactured by the media.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

Who is "we"? You and I? Or "most people", the "average person", some abstract thing that doesn't even exist, determined by numbers? To shorten it extremely: Nobody has the right to piss away the future of humanity. If they do, they simply cease to be relevant to me, by definition. I will gladly fight them, but not ever ask for their permission or advice. Resistance to systematic mass surveillance and what hangs off that is not just a mere "social norm" like whether short or long skirts are acceptable. This is way more complex and important than all of the light-weights that don't consider it combined. Just being alive and wanting to be left alone with whatever apathy one ended up with isn't anything in the intellectual or moral arena.

fma 8y ago

In the beginning, FB was college students only, then high school... Then everyone. There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas. Some friends and I created an alternative social network at our university to capitalize. In my opinion it looked better and had more features (before they opened up their API). We were college students only, and had SSL (can you imagine back then sites without SSL?!). We were at the first techcrunch 50. We were located in "the pit". We didn't gain much coversge we didn't get traction at our university and well, we flopped. Pricacy doesn't matter to the average user.

renholder 8y ago
>There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas. Eternal September[0] exists everywhere. =] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

kortilla 8y ago

Same conclusion could be made that people don’t care about cancer because tobacco companies print money.

floatingatoll 8y ago

I talked to someone this morning who knew that people were vaguely worried about Facebook but was utterly horrified when I took the time to explain facebook/google and android/ios from a “privacy viewpoints” perspective. This is something the press doesn’t much do. It’s effective. Too bad :(

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hesarenu 8y ago

Its not that they don't care about privacy, its that they don't care for tracking the pages and showing ads. And if you do want to stop it you go into private mode.

gammateam 8y ago

Facebooks earnings are because advertisers spend more Every court case, summons and data breach are instructions manuals and tools for advertisers. These are public and much more useful than an outdated Udemy course selling shovels. Advertisers will continue spending more after each scandal, and they will be better targeted ads, making Facebook have more utility to users at the same time. Any proposed legislation ought to make advertisers spend more before the gravy train is over. Facebooks share price increase cant be seen as validation from its profile creators which are the product. These numbers didnt jump they offset and stay the same.

tj-teej 8y ago

I don't think the conclusion that "most people really don't care about privacy" is proved by people still using Facebook. Just because my friend buys a pack of cigarettes a day doesn't mean he doesn't care about cancer. My view: Loss of privacy is a negative externality of using Facebook. And we know companies can use shiny stuff (compelling-engaging products, PR, advertising, etc.) to overcome these kinds of negative externalities and keep customers coming back. I do think that your point about serious legislation is correct. Cigarette smoking in countries with serious legislation IS down, the question is if the political will is there and if Facebook's power can or can't outweigh that political will.