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Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary. It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstoo

Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary. It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a security is it’s most recent price: ad historical CTR and user historical CTR (called “clickiness” in the business) are basically the whole show when predicting user cross ad CTR. The big shops like to ham up their data advantage with one hand (to advertisers) while washing the other hand of it (to regulators). As with so many things Hanlon’s Razor cuts deeply here: if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work.

gfosco 7y ago
I think it's worth pointing out that the comment you replied to didn't mention money, advertising, or CTR. People are concerned about data collection for more reasons than that. You've seen these attempts and entire careers about it without "juicing" CTR, so perhaps that isn't the true intent.
- benreesman 7y ago
  I admit that I inferred the proposed intent for grabbing maximum personal data, but if you’re interested in anecdotes from the trenches: no one below senior director level gets a couple million in stock for any other reason than they pushed CTR by a few basis points. What I was trying to say is that seen through the lens of mechanism design no one is incentivized to query the like button table because there’s no upside in it.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    The fact that so much potentially sensitive data exists in a few repositories is in itself a bit foreboding. Who knows what companies will be able to glean from it one, five, or twenty years down the road? My behavior on the web being tracked by corporations with little incentive to do right by me is worrisome.
    - benreesman 7y ago
      I’m more concerned that they’re designing the next version of the Web right under our noses than that they know what kind of sneakers I’m 8% more likely to buy.
      - owldimoon 7y ago
        I'm not sure where to add this comment, but I just wanted to briefly say that I appreciate your contributions to this topic. Both in terms of content and tone/delivery. These seem like constructive and valuable comments to me, so thanks!
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        However, I’m concerned that the data also allows them to see that I am 93% more likely to vote for a certain political candidate, 22% more likely to contract a chronic disease in the next ten years, and 16% more likely that I will have a friend that homosexual.
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        I'm not thinking about ad delivery, I'm thinking about behavioral analysis. Knowing how a person thinks and acts can be a very useful weapon in the wrong hands, and FB and the like have done nothing to make me think their hands are the right ones (I don't think any are really.)
  - jakobegger 7y ago
    I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data? Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?
    - avarun 7y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.
    - benreesman 7y ago
      I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.
      - ViViDboarder 7y ago
        That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.
    - laughinghan 7y ago
      Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it. The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach." https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  What other reasons do you think the original post was implying for Google to collect all this data?
  - benreesman 7y ago
    I think the implication was that the leadership is hanging onto all that data because of an immediate fiduciary obligation. I suspect that it’s more in the nature of when you’re running a business in which a few hundred million QPS is slow that you archive in case it ever becomes useful.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Unless the point of your comment was to deny that Google is collecting this data at all (because, according to you, there's no financial incentive), I don't see the relevancy of your criticism. The complaint of the top level comment was that Google is collecting extremely personal data on us. Your response is that Google doesn't have an immediate financial incentive to do this. If you're not actually denying that Google collects this data, why does that matter? For most of us, the fact that our personal data has some financial value to a corporation is irrelevant to the fact that we don't want them to have it.
kjaftaedi 7y ago
Anectotally, I keep no browser history and do not feel my experience with captchas is different than a user who does.
- benreesman 7y ago
  I would contend that the reason for that is that none of the engineers involved get paid more if that experience is different.
jackpirate 7y ago
Can you provide any evidence that personal data doesn't improve CTR prediction for companies like Google/Facebook? You state yourself that Google/Facebook publicly claim to advertisers that personal data improves CTR prediction. So I have a hard time believing that personal data isn't useful.
- benreesman 7y ago
  I’m already on a shaky limb being so candid about how the business actually works. If you want the opinion (albeit a little dated but still relevant) of someone who doesn’t give a fuck about who the truth pisses off I recommend a book called “Chaos Monkeys” written by a former YC (exited) founder.
smsm42 7y ago
That's the annoying part of it. They try to collect everything about me, down to my favorite color and the brand of tea I am drinking, and they can't even deliver a semi-relevant ad. Best they can do is to bombard me with shoe and riding classes ads for 6 month after I search for "weight of a horseshoe" and stuff like that. They kill the privacy, they make 99% of the sites unusable without an ad blocker, and at the end it doesn't even amount to them making relevant ads...
- benreesman 7y ago
  If I were you I’d be more worried that Google de facto controls whatever we’re calling HTTP these days than that they have a BigTable entry that ties a browser you once used to a preference for Earl Grey.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    This is a false dichotomy: I don’t see why I can’t be worried about both.
  - smsm42 7y ago
    I am worried by both. In fact, I am worried by more than these two things about Google, but listing them all would probably take this discussion way off course.
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    do you deviate from social norms in any way more significant than tea preference? Have you ever? No extreme political opinions? No fetishes? There's really nothing in everything big tech companies have about you that would be worse for you to have leaked?
__jal 7y ago
> It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). That may be the case for some people, but that is not my complaint, nor that of many folks I know. I simply don't care how FB, Google and other surveillance outfits make money. I don't care about marketers' careers or their CTRs. I don't even care about putting a dollar value on my LTV to them. I care about denying them visibility into my datastream. It is zero-sum. They have no right to it, and I have every right to try to limit their visibility. Why? None of your business. Seriously - nobody is owed an explanation for not wanting robots watching. But I will answer anyway. It is because of future risks. These professional panty sniffers already have the raw material for many thousands of lawsuits, divorces and less legal outcomes in their databases. Who knows what particular bits of information will leak in 10 years, or when FB goes bankrupt? I have no desire to be part of what I suspect will become a massive clusterfuck within our lifetimes. If you're correct that this data has so little value, then it is more likely it will leak. FB and Google are the equivalent of Superfund sites waiting to happen, and storing that data should be considered criminal.
- benreesman 7y ago
  You could either stop using these services or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction in less time than it took to type that comment. I don’t want to single you out personally but there’s a broad trend on HN of bitter-sounding commentary on the surveillance powers of these companies by people who can easily defeat any tracking that it’s economical for them to even attempt let alone execute that reeks of sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes (as a rank and file employee) anywhere else. Again, you’re not likely part of that group, but seriously who hangs out on HN and can’t configure a VPN?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > reeks of sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes (as a rank and file employee) anywhere else This is not an argument and moreover not even true: there are companies that pay well and don’t collect reams of data on their users.
luckylion 7y ago
> If your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work. Isn't demographic targeting exactly that, based on your browsing history? Will showing an ad for a car wash have the same CTR for people that liked car products as for people that did not like car products? Or is your point that it still has to be a human that inputs "this is about car things, please show it to people that like car things" and it's not a magic AI that optimizes it automatically? And in that case: isn't that just a matter of time? Build the profile today, build the tech that uses it tomorrow?
dessant 7y ago
No offence, but your posts in this thread appear to be projections, and they derail the conversation. The main topic we discuss is corporate surveillance. We are concerned about all the personal data that leaves our control. We are worried that evading this type of surveillance becomes increasingly difficult. Some HN users may know how to mitigate these risks, but most people may not know how to defend themselves against corporate surveillance. This is why me must speak up now, and not just for ourselves.
anth_anm 7y ago
> source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years Why would anyone ever trust a goddamn thing you have to say about their data? Unless they pay your salary and are asking you to give your expertise on hoarding and abusing user data, obviously.
- benreesman 7y ago
  Me spilling tea about the business is far more in the spirit of a whistleblower than a shill. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by shedding light on one of the most powerful entities in existence. But TLDR it’s not as interesting as people like to think.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    You can gain internet points on a social website…
    - benreesman 7y ago
      Check my join date, I have less than 500 points. If I was just like “foo is evil” every time foo came up up I’d have like 10^3 more.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop. If we allow users to harass and attack people who have genuine expertise for posting here, does that make HN better or worse? Obviously worse. Mob behaviors like this are incompatible with curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
benreesman 7y ago
I am falling behind replying to all the comments that this has generated. For the record I am inked all over with anti-equation group stuff: I agree that these companies are too big and powerful (and I would know). I just don’t see a solution with the present judiciary. If anyone has a bright idea my email is in my profile. I will thank you all in advance for not shooting the messenger.
- laughinghan 7y ago
  Your HN profile appears to be blank. I think I found your email on GitHub though? For the record, many of your comments here have been thoughtful, and I've upvoted them. I've also downvoted many where instead of responding to other people's thoughtful comments, you just insult them instead. Those are also the ones that other people seem to be downvoting. I don't think anyone is shooting the messenger here.
  - benreesman 7y ago
    I am not experienced at replying to several comments a minute, I’m sure I made some errors in judgement during that process, but I think this thread is as active as it is because people want to know how this shit works, not because I’m the apex troll of pushing people’s buttons. FB and Google are in a dubious market position here but they take a lot of flack on HN for how highly they pay and how hard the interview used to be.
taneq 7y ago
> if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it That's great. So if my browsing history is useless then you won't mind not trying to snoop on it.
c0vfefe 7y ago
Part of the point of objecting to big data surveillance is that we ultimately don't know how it's being used, despite what companies claim about its use. Can I believe you? ...even if you're telling the truth, big corps can hide their most malicious practices from most of their own employees. To me, it doesn't matter how e.g. Facebook actually uses my data today, because even if they're telling the truth they could change their policies tomorrow, or get hacked, or some third party (incl. the gov't) could get hacked, etc. It's better as a user to try and prevent such data from ever existing in the first place.

gfosco 7y ago

I think it's worth pointing out that the comment you replied to didn't mention money, advertising, or CTR. People are concerned about data collection for more reasons than that. You've seen these attempts and entire careers about it without "juicing" CTR, so perhaps that isn't the true intent.

benreesman 7y ago
I admit that I inferred the proposed intent for grabbing maximum personal data, but if you’re interested in anecdotes from the trenches: no one below senior director level gets a couple million in stock for any other reason than they pushed CTR by a few basis points. What I was trying to say is that seen through the lens of mechanism design no one is incentivized to query the like button table because there’s no upside in it.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  The fact that so much potentially sensitive data exists in a few repositories is in itself a bit foreboding. Who knows what companies will be able to glean from it one, five, or twenty years down the road? My behavior on the web being tracked by corporations with little incentive to do right by me is worrisome.
  - benreesman 7y ago
    I’m more concerned that they’re designing the next version of the Web right under our noses than that they know what kind of sneakers I’m 8% more likely to buy.
    - owldimoon 7y ago
      I'm not sure where to add this comment, but I just wanted to briefly say that I appreciate your contributions to this topic. Both in terms of content and tone/delivery. These seem like constructive and valuable comments to me, so thanks!
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      However, I’m concerned that the data also allows them to see that I am 93% more likely to vote for a certain political candidate, 22% more likely to contract a chronic disease in the next ten years, and 16% more likely that I will have a friend that homosexual.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      I'm not thinking about ad delivery, I'm thinking about behavioral analysis. Knowing how a person thinks and acts can be a very useful weapon in the wrong hands, and FB and the like have done nothing to make me think their hands are the right ones (I don't think any are really.)
- jakobegger 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data? Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?
  - avarun 7y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.
  - benreesman 7y ago
    I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.
    - ViViDboarder 7y ago
      That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.
  - laughinghan 7y ago
    Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it. The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach." https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.
ehsankia 7y ago
What other reasons do you think the original post was implying for Google to collect all this data?
- benreesman 7y ago
  I think the implication was that the leadership is hanging onto all that data because of an immediate fiduciary obligation. I suspect that it’s more in the nature of when you’re running a business in which a few hundred million QPS is slow that you archive in case it ever becomes useful.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Unless the point of your comment was to deny that Google is collecting this data at all (because, according to you, there's no financial incentive), I don't see the relevancy of your criticism. The complaint of the top level comment was that Google is collecting extremely personal data on us. Your response is that Google doesn't have an immediate financial incentive to do this. If you're not actually denying that Google collects this data, why does that matter? For most of us, the fact that our personal data has some financial value to a corporation is irrelevant to the fact that we don't want them to have it.

kjaftaedi 7y ago

Anectotally, I keep no browser history and do not feel my experience with captchas is different than a user who does.

benreesman 7y ago
I would contend that the reason for that is that none of the engineers involved get paid more if that experience is different.

jackpirate 7y ago

Can you provide any evidence that personal data doesn't improve CTR prediction for companies like Google/Facebook? You state yourself that Google/Facebook publicly claim to advertisers that personal data improves CTR prediction. So I have a hard time believing that personal data isn't useful.

benreesman 7y ago
I’m already on a shaky limb being so candid about how the business actually works. If you want the opinion (albeit a little dated but still relevant) of someone who doesn’t give a fuck about who the truth pisses off I recommend a book called “Chaos Monkeys” written by a former YC (exited) founder.

smsm42 7y ago

That's the annoying part of it. They try to collect everything about me, down to my favorite color and the brand of tea I am drinking, and they can't even deliver a semi-relevant ad. Best they can do is to bombard me with shoe and riding classes ads for 6 month after I search for "weight of a horseshoe" and stuff like that. They kill the privacy, they make 99% of the sites unusable without an ad blocker, and at the end it doesn't even amount to them making relevant ads...

benreesman 7y ago
If I were you I’d be more worried that Google de facto controls whatever we’re calling HTTP these days than that they have a BigTable entry that ties a browser you once used to a preference for Earl Grey.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  This is a false dichotomy: I don’t see why I can’t be worried about both.
- smsm42 7y ago
  I am worried by both. In fact, I am worried by more than these two things about Google, but listing them all would probably take this discussion way off course.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  do you deviate from social norms in any way more significant than tea preference? Have you ever? No extreme political opinions? No fetishes? There's really nothing in everything big tech companies have about you that would be worse for you to have leaked?

__jal 7y ago

> It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). That may be the case for some people, but that is not my complaint, nor that of many folks I know. I simply don't care how FB, Google and other surveillance outfits make money. I don't care about marketers' careers or their CTRs. I don't even care about putting a dollar value on my LTV to them. I care about denying them visibility into my datastream. It is zero-sum. They have no right to it, and I have every right to try to limit their visibility. Why? None of your business. Seriously - nobody is owed an explanation for not wanting robots watching. But I will answer anyway. It is because of future risks. These professional panty sniffers already have the raw material for many thousands of lawsuits, divorces and less legal outcomes in their databases. Who knows what particular bits of information will leak in 10 years, or when FB goes bankrupt? I have no desire to be part of what I suspect will become a massive clusterfuck within our lifetimes. If you're correct that this data has so little value, then it is more likely it will leak. FB and Google are the equivalent of Superfund sites waiting to happen, and storing that data should be considered criminal.

benreesman 7y ago
You could either stop using these services or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction in less time than it took to type that comment. I don’t want to single you out personally but there’s a broad trend on HN of bitter-sounding commentary on the surveillance powers of these companies by people who can easily defeat any tracking that it’s economical for them to even attempt let alone execute that reeks of sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes (as a rank and file employee) anywhere else. Again, you’re not likely part of that group, but seriously who hangs out on HN and can’t configure a VPN?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > reeks of sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes (as a rank and file employee) anywhere else This is not an argument and moreover not even true: there are companies that pay well and don’t collect reams of data on their users.

luckylion 7y ago

> If your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work. Isn't demographic targeting exactly that, based on your browsing history? Will showing an ad for a car wash have the same CTR for people that liked car products as for people that did not like car products? Or is your point that it still has to be a human that inputs "this is about car things, please show it to people that like car things" and it's not a magic AI that optimizes it automatically? And in that case: isn't that just a matter of time? Build the profile today, build the tech that uses it tomorrow?

dessant 7y ago

No offence, but your posts in this thread appear to be projections, and they derail the conversation. The main topic we discuss is corporate surveillance. We are concerned about all the personal data that leaves our control. We are worried that evading this type of surveillance becomes increasingly difficult. Some HN users may know how to mitigate these risks, but most people may not know how to defend themselves against corporate surveillance. This is why me must speak up now, and not just for ourselves.

anth_anm 7y ago

> source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years Why would anyone ever trust a goddamn thing you have to say about their data? Unless they pay your salary and are asking you to give your expertise on hoarding and abusing user data, obviously.

benreesman 7y ago
Me spilling tea about the business is far more in the spirit of a whistleblower than a shill. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by shedding light on one of the most powerful entities in existence. But TLDR it’s not as interesting as people like to think.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  You can gain internet points on a social website…
  - benreesman 7y ago
    Check my join date, I have less than 500 points. If I was just like “foo is evil” every time foo came up up I’d have like 10^3 more.
dang 7y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop. If we allow users to harass and attack people who have genuine expertise for posting here, does that make HN better or worse? Obviously worse. Mob behaviors like this are incompatible with curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

benreesman 7y ago

I am falling behind replying to all the comments that this has generated. For the record I am inked all over with anti-equation group stuff: I agree that these companies are too big and powerful (and I would know). I just don’t see a solution with the present judiciary. If anyone has a bright idea my email is in my profile. I will thank you all in advance for not shooting the messenger.

laughinghan 7y ago
Your HN profile appears to be blank. I think I found your email on GitHub though? For the record, many of your comments here have been thoughtful, and I've upvoted them. I've also downvoted many where instead of responding to other people's thoughtful comments, you just insult them instead. Those are also the ones that other people seem to be downvoting. I don't think anyone is shooting the messenger here.
- benreesman 7y ago
  I am not experienced at replying to several comments a minute, I’m sure I made some errors in judgement during that process, but I think this thread is as active as it is because people want to know how this shit works, not because I’m the apex troll of pushing people’s buttons. FB and Google are in a dubious market position here but they take a lot of flack on HN for how highly they pay and how hard the interview used to be.

taneq 7y ago

> if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it That's great. So if my browsing history is useless then you won't mind not trying to snoop on it.

c0vfefe 7y ago

Part of the point of objecting to big data surveillance is that we ultimately don't know how it's being used, despite what companies claim about its use. Can I believe you? ...even if you're telling the truth, big corps can hide their most malicious practices from most of their own employees. To me, it doesn't matter how e.g. Facebook actually uses my data today, because even if they're telling the truth they could change their policies tomorrow, or get hacked, or some third party (incl. the gov't) could get hacked, etc. It's better as a user to try and prevent such data from ever existing in the first place.