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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 id

by 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.
      - rtikulit 8y ago
        Your conclusion is entirely consistent with the facts. There is little in this world that we can control. It's really important to stop the bad actors from taking the little away from us.
        chillacy 8y ago
        Curiously, what is that little we can control? One could come up with an argument about how we control exactly zero in life. However even if it's true in a way, it might not be so useful to believe that since having that belief will lead to worse decisions (and a lot of psychology research shows that a belief that you don't have control is highly correlated with depression).
  - renholder 8y ago
    >If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it. This answer is far too simplistic for the reality of the situation. For example, what of the people who never used it (or did stop using it) and their correlated shadow profiles?[0] What is the supposed answer, then: Don't give your contact information to your friends? Don't use the internet, at all, because of Facebook Pixel?[1] ...but the bulk-share of the problem, for me specifically, is that treasure-troves of information on people are the ripest targets for either exploit or out-right theft. See the OPM hack[2] for a principle example of such theft and then look at the Snowden leaks, where he shows that <insert three-lettered agency here> was in major tech companies' bases, killing their do0dz.[3] The potential problems (and their requisite solutions) aren't as simple as you're trying to paint them to be. To summarise this long diatribe: I don't pretend to have an answer, to be sure, but to say that stopping Facebook usage is sufficient is disingenuous to the realities of what the company does; especially, since data about you is still being collected anyway. [0] - https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/ https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor... [1] - https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach#Data_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... [3] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
- malvosenior 8y ago
  What are you claiming the downside to targeted advertising is? A change in self perception from a single (dubious) study doesn't suggest negative effects. Why do I say the study was dubious? They showed a small number of undergraduates a luxury watch ad and told them it was being shown to them based on their behavior. Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there? Most people using FB aren't thinking that though, they're just silently ignoring the ads on the side of the content they actually want.
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    >Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there? An altered self image as the result of merely staring at a luxury watch advertisement is more than a little conncering. If psychological self assessment changes even in the context of a small study, what do hours of this stuff per day do to the human brain? the precautionary principle implies that we don't run an unsupervised experiment on the psyche of two billion people on the planet which primarily serves the purpose of distributing money to facebook.
    - acchow 8y ago
      So basically you're saying advertising is bad for us. What now?
  - trophycase 8y ago
    I'm not sure you actually understand how advertising works.
schrodinger 8y ago
I think you’re mostly right, except there is a downside—it’s just too long term to be an effective feedback loop.
feanaro 8y ago
No obvious downside for now. Discussions about Facebook are usually too shortsighted and look at timescales that are too short. Large detrimental downstream effects and people's perceptions and trends all happen on timescales on the order of magnitude of a decade. Give it a few years.
shrimpx 8y ago
Facebook is creepy. They engage in deep cloaked surveillance, capturing as much as technologically possible of people's behavior in the world and mining it for profit. They don't want the people to know how and to what extent they're mining their personal lives, because they know people would be disgusted by it. IMO the core reason people keep using this shady service is that they've just never been exposed to the truth.
rtikulit 8y ago
This isn't about ideology, it is about pragmatics. The accumulation and analysis of vast bodies of behavioural data by bad actors will inevitably lead them to develop and deploy increasingly indirect and long-term methods of subverting individual agency, to their own benefit. How about subtle data-directed lobbying to cause subtle data-directed changes to the educational system to create subtle data-directed vulnerabilities to manipulation in adulthood? There are plenty of examples in the real world, throughout history. It is going to get a whole lot worse, and it has the potential to never get better.

by 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.
    - rtikulit 8y ago
      Your conclusion is entirely consistent with the facts. There is little in this world that we can control. It's really important to stop the bad actors from taking the little away from us.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        Curiously, what is that little we can control? One could come up with an argument about how we control exactly zero in life. However even if it's true in a way, it might not be so useful to believe that since having that belief will lead to worse decisions (and a lot of psychology research shows that a belief that you don't have control is highly correlated with depression).
- renholder 8y ago
  >If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it. This answer is far too simplistic for the reality of the situation. For example, what of the people who never used it (or did stop using it) and their correlated shadow profiles?[0] What is the supposed answer, then: Don't give your contact information to your friends? Don't use the internet, at all, because of Facebook Pixel?[1] ...but the bulk-share of the problem, for me specifically, is that treasure-troves of information on people are the ripest targets for either exploit or out-right theft. See the OPM hack[2] for a principle example of such theft and then look at the Snowden leaks, where he shows that <insert three-lettered agency here> was in major tech companies' bases, killing their do0dz.[3] The potential problems (and their requisite solutions) aren't as simple as you're trying to paint them to be. To summarise this long diatribe: I don't pretend to have an answer, to be sure, but to say that stopping Facebook usage is sufficient is disingenuous to the realities of what the company does; especially, since data about you is still being collected anyway. [0] - https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/ https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor... [1] - https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach#Data_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... [3] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
malvosenior 8y ago
What are you claiming the downside to targeted advertising is? A change in self perception from a single (dubious) study doesn't suggest negative effects. Why do I say the study was dubious? They showed a small number of undergraduates a luxury watch ad and told them it was being shown to them based on their behavior. Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there? Most people using FB aren't thinking that though, they're just silently ignoring the ads on the side of the content they actually want.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  >Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there? An altered self image as the result of merely staring at a luxury watch advertisement is more than a little conncering. If psychological self assessment changes even in the context of a small study, what do hours of this stuff per day do to the human brain? the precautionary principle implies that we don't run an unsupervised experiment on the psyche of two billion people on the planet which primarily serves the purpose of distributing money to facebook.
  - acchow 8y ago
    So basically you're saying advertising is bad for us. What now?
- trophycase 8y ago
  I'm not sure you actually understand how advertising works.

schrodinger 8y ago

I think you’re mostly right, except there is a downside—it’s just too long term to be an effective feedback loop.

feanaro 8y ago

No obvious downside for now. Discussions about Facebook are usually too shortsighted and look at timescales that are too short. Large detrimental downstream effects and people's perceptions and trends all happen on timescales on the order of magnitude of a decade. Give it a few years.

shrimpx 8y ago

Facebook is creepy. They engage in deep cloaked surveillance, capturing as much as technologically possible of people's behavior in the world and mining it for profit. They don't want the people to know how and to what extent they're mining their personal lives, because they know people would be disgusted by it. IMO the core reason people keep using this shady service is that they've just never been exposed to the truth.

rtikulit 8y ago

This isn't about ideology, it is about pragmatics. The accumulation and analysis of vast bodies of behavioural data by bad actors will inevitably lead them to develop and deploy increasingly indirect and long-term methods of subverting individual agency, to their own benefit. How about subtle data-directed lobbying to cause subtle data-directed changes to the educational system to create subtle data-directed vulnerabilities to manipulation in adulthood? There are plenty of examples in the real world, throughout history. It is going to get a whole lot worse, and it has the potential to never get better.