24 ms·

Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

276 points by URfejk 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago
Background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602
- jsnell 6y ago
  Yes, this has been covered extensively on HN. Here's a couple more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24922578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24922578
mikece 6y ago
Sounds like new-speak: censorship is privacy.
- andybak 6y ago
  If you're alluding to the "war is peace, freedom is slavery" forumulation then I don't think it quite fits. Censorship and privacy aren't opposites and I would probably argue they are largely independent or even orthogonal.
  - pydry 6y ago
    Facebook and privacy are opposites though.
    - hiccuphippo 6y ago
      Here Facebook seems to be protecting their own privacy though, so we don't learn who do they take money from.
      - KineticLensman 6y ago
        ... or what they are telling specific users.
  - mcny 6y ago
    I think you’re missing the context of this conversation. From a comment in a previous Han post about this > The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting.
    - KaiserPro 6y ago
      They also voluntarily shared it with the personality quiz, which were then obtained by CA. much as I dislike facebook on this one, I think they actually have a point.
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        No, Facebook shared uaers' profile data (which now is banned by GDPR) in exchange for letting users take the quiz. The quiz wasn't the data CA abused, it was just bait. This NYU project only collects data that the users want to share with NYU.
      - mattnewton 6y ago
        The users also voluntarily share all this data with Facebook. Why do we have to protect the users from NYU academics, but not from Facebook's business model?
      - rndgermandude 6y ago
        No. The NYU gives a clear statement on why they want this data (to track ads) and what data they collect, this is informed consent. CA on the other hand obfuscated the purpose and what they collect as much as possible, pretending it was a personality/IQ quiz (something fun and benign) when in fact they harvested the data in order to create models for targeted advertising which they then used in political campaigns. This isn't informed consent. That's a very different starting point already. Your argument seems to be "well, if that doctor with the curious name of 'NYU' and working for a reputable facility asks you for informed consent to do a surgery to remove a cancerous mole, this doctor can in theory just be lying and cut off your leg!!!1!". CA in this context would be the back alley quack who pretends to provide you with a free non-invasive exam for skin cancer, but then steals your kidneys and sells them on the black market. The NYU also tries to be as transparent as possible beyond the initial value proposition, including open sourcing the collection software (browser extension), again the opposite of what CA did. Is there still a possibility of abuse by NYU? Sure, and that's why it is entirely fine to keep an eye on them, and keep holding them accountable, but for things they actually do or don't do. However, I think trying to hold the NYU to an unachievable standard ("we need to audit everything they do independently") while at the same time not even remotely applying that same standard to FB, their FAANG buddies, and everybody else really, that's just... wat Tell me again how you think there may be a vague security and privacy concern with the NYU voluntary ad data collection for the willing participants when Target starts selling your daughter pregnancy products (because they knew before her herself that she is pregnant), facebook detecting your face in other people's image shares and adding public tags with your name automatically, google telling you "you have visited this place 2 times in the last 10 years", or famous twitter users (or rather the new owners of their accounts) pushing bitcoin scams because twitter had their systems compromised.
  - chongli 6y ago
    The third part of Orwell’s original formulation is “ignorance is strength” which is not a pair of opposites either. “Weakness is strength” or “ignorance is wisdom” would be more accurate pairings.
    - andybak 6y ago
      Ah yes. I forgot the 3rd part. That does rather change things. Also - what a great bit of writing - setting up a clear pattern and then breaking the pattern. Much more effective than it would have been otherwise.
ankit219 6y ago
For once, can we have articles (or even opinion pieces) which try to explain the context and position of both sides rather than pieces such as these. These kind of writings do nothing to change the mind of anyone. For someone who hates FB and its practices, they reinforce the already held belief. And for those, who are skeptical of such media articles, they would be put off by the language used. And make no mistake, its not about putting arguments from all sides, they picked a side and decided they are right, while the other side is wrong. > Ad Observer is a browser plug-in that Facebook users voluntarily install. The plug-in scrapes (makes a copy of) every ad that a user sees and sends it to Ad Observatory, a public database of Facebook ads that scholars and accountability journalists mine to analyze what's really happening on the platform. I agree with the sentiment, but this clearly mentions that the plugin scrapes data and sends to NYU servers. I may be wrong, but arent we taking NYU on their word that they are scraping only the ad data and nothing else? People agree to share their data voluntarily, but they are taking this add in at the face value. It may not be scraping, but can scrape. If Facebook allows third parties to scrape data (who can incentivize users any which way) where does it stop? The question I had was, both - the independent ad analysis and the user privacy - seem important. So, what is the way both can exist? Maybe FB sharing the data by themselves? But, isnt that close to how Cambridge Analytica happened? These are grey areas, we should be debating and discussing in detail about them, not writing snide pieces with one side as the aggressor and another as victim.
- input_sh 6y ago
  The plug-in is open sourced: https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-collector https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-... You can download a release straight from there and import it into your browser. Browsers also do some reviews of the plugins that are in their stores, so every update should be tested by both Google and Mozilla (even if only superficially). I'd say the odds of them managing to pull off scraping anything else without anyone noticing are rather slim.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    with respect, thats not the issue. With facebook they only collect "limited" information. Its what they do with it afterwards that matter. How is it stored, is it secure, how do they anonymise it, who has access to the raw data, what happens when there is a break, is there monitoring, etc etc etc. They are making a massive honey pot, and we just have to trust them that they are doing good job. (much like facebook....)
gabea 6y ago
It’s important to point out that Facebook has an Ads library that allows you to research currently running ads for a given Facebook page and for politics, social issue, or election ads there is an API. While these capabilities do not map 1:1 to how this plugin works it seems like a bit of a middle ground for the researchers to be able to research ads without risking privacy of people or violating terms of service. (Disclaimer - I work at FB) See: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/?source=archive-landing-page https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/?source=archive-lan...
- Maarten88 6y ago
  > research ads without risking privacy of people ...so you go along in the doublespeak. Please elaborate, because the article says it's without merit and also rather rich coming from Facebook. > violating terms of service prohibiting independent research to find if what they promise is actually true, after they have been proven untrustworthy many times?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Facebook has an Ads library that allows you to research currently running ads for a given Facebook page and for politics The library omits targeting information. The specific subject of this research. Also, Facebook has a culture and history of lying. There is public interest in auditing its disclosures.
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    Moreover there's value in seeing how that targeting applies to real people in practice. It's great to be able to see what ads campaigns are running, but if you're a real user, who's feed is full of ads from overtly partisan news sites, clothing companies selling aggressive political gear, AND all the campaigns and SuperPACs, what does your experience look like as a whole? Our information environment is festering. I can't speak to any given study or technique, but we need to understand this stuff.
- deleted 6y ago
Maarten88 6y ago
> This may be par for the course with Facebook, but it's not something we as a society can afford to tolerate any longer. Those are strong words, but I'm afraid the "we as a society" are not as much of a power as one would hope. Facebook as a company might turn out to be more powerful. Facebook can bring lawsuits, PR doublespeak and over time wear down adversaries threatening their business. I think the underlying problems need to be fixed before there can be hope of restricting what businesses like Facebook can do.
- URfejk 6y ago
  > Those are strong words, but I'm afraid the "we as a society" are not as much of a power as one would hope. If everyone would abandon FB, they would go out of bussiness. People have much more power that they think they do. They just do not know it.
  - C19is20 6y ago
    ....or care.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Frankly, I really don't care. I keep my account and treat it like what it is, utter garbage. Though, it keeps my contacts in cases where it's convenient to connect. If not FB, it would be something else. The problem is those people who derive their world-view from social media platforms and buy in to all the lies and manipulation from bullies. There's pressure for accountability, and that should be a good thing, although we need to keep watch. If they oust the bullies and fake lies, good riddance. I don't need someone telling me their "Final Solution", especially without anything backing their words.
- Someone 6y ago
  “We as a society” write the laws. They can be changed. The process, IMO, already has started, with the USA and the EU launching investigations against about all the big tech companies (I think Microsoft isn’t investigated yet, but in the context of privacy, they aren’t a truly big player yet. Any new laws will apply to them, regardless)
antris 6y ago
I have recently started supporting a ban on targeted advertising. Dividing people into cultural bubbles and being able to spend unlimited dollars on it is dangerous if we are to maintain cultural unity and be able to agree on facts. Also, when your advertising is not public and only visible to subsections of people, it is more difficult to investigate what is going on. Facebook can do it themselves, but do we want to rely on a single company to do it? But when the advertising is public, it is easier to have a public discussion and have a possible backlash to it.
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  Since I turned off targeted advertising, youtube delights in showing me very graphic videos of earwax extraction. It feels like deliberate punishment and a not-so-gentle nudge to opt for more personalised ads.
- Jgrubb 6y ago
  Since that'll never happen without toppling the money printing machines of several of the world's most powerful companies, I'd like to repeat an idea that I once heard - A publicly available clearinghouse of all targeted ads published via a service so that researchers can find out - Every ad published - What targeting parameters were used, other basic data about the ad - How many impressions the ad received - How many clickthroughs, etc It would not include any PII of those who saw the ads, only on the ads themselves. Bonus points if we can also have some kind of GUID "advertiser_id" that would allow researchers to tie the ads back to some kind of probably-anonymized-but-maybe-not entity that published the ad. The API would be defined in the regulation so that vendors can't pull any obfuscatory fuckery. Sunlight is the first step in stopping this.
  - prox 6y ago
    agreed to an extend, I simply feel that any idealistic / political advertiser needs to be in some sort of public ledger. The real blocker is transparency.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    None of that will work. Sure, have some basic regulatory model for your political campaigns to avoid unduly intervention by foreign actors and similar shady stuff,but that is an small deterrent. You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted. Even if you get rid of advertisement period, you will have to deal with stuff like famous academic Op-Eds, celebrities recommending who to vote for, media bias, etc. So you can control the blatant intervention but at the end you have to trust all voting citizens are discerning adults, savvy consumers of information in a complex world, although you know that is not true.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Facebook (and other too big to fail companies) should be split. Facebook Ad company should be independent from Facebook and should have access to the platform on the same terms any other ad company could have access with all respect to privacy. Currently Facebook has a conflict of interest between the social media platform and ad business. We never have seen this before and this needs to be urgently regulated. The same with Google - their ad business has to be decoupled from search and ad company shouldn't have any access to personal data. Google search and Facebook should be forbidden by law to store personal data in a manner that does meet interest of advertising or other types of surveillance.
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  > Facebook Ad company should be independent from Facebook Be under no illusions... Facebook IS an ad company! Their product is the people that use the platform. There is no separation. The Facebook data feed that users interact with is the bait to harvest the data for ads... it's nothing more than that.
OliverJones 6y ago
I wonder if NYU business school prof Scott Galloway @profgalloway is going to weigh in on this issue. NYU is by no means powerless. We can guess that FB employs a full-time proactive crisis management public relations team. Why? To help guess what they can get away with. But they may have underestimated NYU as an opponent.
commentrix 6y ago
The Third Reich is going after its critics in the name of liberating humanity.
PicassoCTs 6y ago
They do not even take up the main problem between academia and FB. Science goes were the data is- and data is at G,F,A . Meaning any science regarding people e.g. social sciences, psychology, behavioural studies - are effectively privatized. Meaning, the paper of psychology grad-student who did a experiment and asked 200 people on campus is less valuable, as the internal report of some fb-data scientists, who wrote a query and a filter and send the very same question into the production database. So if a whole branch of the sciences is effectively privatized, why do we even pretend the outside branches are anything then a publicly subsidized hobby? Why is there no real discussion about the moral problem of privatized sciences, selling the knowledge and advantage gained as manipulation lever to politicians?
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  Very good points
mattnewton 6y ago
The key question to me is why users privacy needs to be protected from opting in to the NYU study, but not from opting in to using the Facebook platform.
jkaplowitz 6y ago
I'm not expecting this to happen for many financial and sociopolitical reasons, but I wish NYU would sue Facebook before November 30 seeking a declaratory judgment that their extension complies with all applicable laws and also with FB's terms of service (leaving aside the obvious catch-all of "we can cut you off for no reason in our sole discretion"). Too many threats like this from FB and other powerful entities yield unwarranted capitulation. If those powerful entities had to fear a real risk of losing a lawsuit on the topic of their baseless threat, they'd at least think before threatening and would sometimes refrain. Alas.
matchbok 6y ago
Remember, if you work for FB, you are part of the problem.
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
Is there any difference between selected private ads, secret society and religion? It's quite similar. Subgroup of crowd, believing something may not be scientific, xenophobia, delivering some "special idea" to their members, etc. If there is no illegal stuff, why should we criticize on this? Just because they are not mature or long enough as religion?

276 points by URfejk 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

Background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602

jsnell 6y ago
Yes, this has been covered extensively on HN. Here's a couple more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24922578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24922578

mikece 6y ago

Sounds like new-speak: censorship is privacy.

andybak 6y ago
If you're alluding to the "war is peace, freedom is slavery" forumulation then I don't think it quite fits. Censorship and privacy aren't opposites and I would probably argue they are largely independent or even orthogonal.
- pydry 6y ago
  Facebook and privacy are opposites though.
  - hiccuphippo 6y ago
    Here Facebook seems to be protecting their own privacy though, so we don't learn who do they take money from.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      ... or what they are telling specific users.
- mcny 6y ago
  I think you’re missing the context of this conversation. From a comment in a previous Han post about this > The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    They also voluntarily shared it with the personality quiz, which were then obtained by CA. much as I dislike facebook on this one, I think they actually have a point.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      No, Facebook shared uaers' profile data (which now is banned by GDPR) in exchange for letting users take the quiz. The quiz wasn't the data CA abused, it was just bait. This NYU project only collects data that the users want to share with NYU.
    - mattnewton 6y ago
      The users also voluntarily share all this data with Facebook. Why do we have to protect the users from NYU academics, but not from Facebook's business model?
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      No. The NYU gives a clear statement on why they want this data (to track ads) and what data they collect, this is informed consent. CA on the other hand obfuscated the purpose and what they collect as much as possible, pretending it was a personality/IQ quiz (something fun and benign) when in fact they harvested the data in order to create models for targeted advertising which they then used in political campaigns. This isn't informed consent. That's a very different starting point already. Your argument seems to be "well, if that doctor with the curious name of 'NYU' and working for a reputable facility asks you for informed consent to do a surgery to remove a cancerous mole, this doctor can in theory just be lying and cut off your leg!!!1!". CA in this context would be the back alley quack who pretends to provide you with a free non-invasive exam for skin cancer, but then steals your kidneys and sells them on the black market. The NYU also tries to be as transparent as possible beyond the initial value proposition, including open sourcing the collection software (browser extension), again the opposite of what CA did. Is there still a possibility of abuse by NYU? Sure, and that's why it is entirely fine to keep an eye on them, and keep holding them accountable, but for things they actually do or don't do. However, I think trying to hold the NYU to an unachievable standard ("we need to audit everything they do independently") while at the same time not even remotely applying that same standard to FB, their FAANG buddies, and everybody else really, that's just... wat Tell me again how you think there may be a vague security and privacy concern with the NYU voluntary ad data collection for the willing participants when Target starts selling your daughter pregnancy products (because they knew before her herself that she is pregnant), facebook detecting your face in other people's image shares and adding public tags with your name automatically, google telling you "you have visited this place 2 times in the last 10 years", or famous twitter users (or rather the new owners of their accounts) pushing bitcoin scams because twitter had their systems compromised.
- chongli 6y ago
  The third part of Orwell’s original formulation is “ignorance is strength” which is not a pair of opposites either. “Weakness is strength” or “ignorance is wisdom” would be more accurate pairings.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Ah yes. I forgot the 3rd part. That does rather change things. Also - what a great bit of writing - setting up a clear pattern and then breaking the pattern. Much more effective than it would have been otherwise.

ankit219 6y ago

For once, can we have articles (or even opinion pieces) which try to explain the context and position of both sides rather than pieces such as these. These kind of writings do nothing to change the mind of anyone. For someone who hates FB and its practices, they reinforce the already held belief. And for those, who are skeptical of such media articles, they would be put off by the language used. And make no mistake, its not about putting arguments from all sides, they picked a side and decided they are right, while the other side is wrong. > Ad Observer is a browser plug-in that Facebook users voluntarily install. The plug-in scrapes (makes a copy of) every ad that a user sees and sends it to Ad Observatory, a public database of Facebook ads that scholars and accountability journalists mine to analyze what's really happening on the platform. I agree with the sentiment, but this clearly mentions that the plugin scrapes data and sends to NYU servers. I may be wrong, but arent we taking NYU on their word that they are scraping only the ad data and nothing else? People agree to share their data voluntarily, but they are taking this add in at the face value. It may not be scraping, but can scrape. If Facebook allows third parties to scrape data (who can incentivize users any which way) where does it stop? The question I had was, both - the independent ad analysis and the user privacy - seem important. So, what is the way both can exist? Maybe FB sharing the data by themselves? But, isnt that close to how Cambridge Analytica happened? These are grey areas, we should be debating and discussing in detail about them, not writing snide pieces with one side as the aggressor and another as victim.

input_sh 6y ago
The plug-in is open sourced: https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-collector https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-... You can download a release straight from there and import it into your browser. Browsers also do some reviews of the plugins that are in their stores, so every update should be tested by both Google and Mozilla (even if only superficially). I'd say the odds of them managing to pull off scraping anything else without anyone noticing are rather slim.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  with respect, thats not the issue. With facebook they only collect "limited" information. Its what they do with it afterwards that matter. How is it stored, is it secure, how do they anonymise it, who has access to the raw data, what happens when there is a break, is there monitoring, etc etc etc. They are making a massive honey pot, and we just have to trust them that they are doing good job. (much like facebook....)

gabea 6y ago

It’s important to point out that Facebook has an Ads library that allows you to research currently running ads for a given Facebook page and for politics, social issue, or election ads there is an API. While these capabilities do not map 1:1 to how this plugin works it seems like a bit of a middle ground for the researchers to be able to research ads without risking privacy of people or violating terms of service. (Disclaimer - I work at FB) See: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/?source=archive-landing-page https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/?source=archive-lan...

Maarten88 6y ago
> research ads without risking privacy of people ...so you go along in the doublespeak. Please elaborate, because the article says it's without merit and also rather rich coming from Facebook. > violating terms of service prohibiting independent research to find if what they promise is actually true, after they have been proven untrustworthy many times?
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Facebook has an Ads library that allows you to research currently running ads for a given Facebook page and for politics The library omits targeting information. The specific subject of this research. Also, Facebook has a culture and history of lying. There is public interest in auditing its disclosures.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Moreover there's value in seeing how that targeting applies to real people in practice. It's great to be able to see what ads campaigns are running, but if you're a real user, who's feed is full of ads from overtly partisan news sites, clothing companies selling aggressive political gear, AND all the campaigns and SuperPACs, what does your experience look like as a whole? Our information environment is festering. I can't speak to any given study or technique, but we need to understand this stuff.
deleted 6y ago

Maarten88 6y ago

> This may be par for the course with Facebook, but it's not something we as a society can afford to tolerate any longer. Those are strong words, but I'm afraid the "we as a society" are not as much of a power as one would hope. Facebook as a company might turn out to be more powerful. Facebook can bring lawsuits, PR doublespeak and over time wear down adversaries threatening their business. I think the underlying problems need to be fixed before there can be hope of restricting what businesses like Facebook can do.

URfejk 6y ago
> Those are strong words, but I'm afraid the "we as a society" are not as much of a power as one would hope. If everyone would abandon FB, they would go out of bussiness. People have much more power that they think they do. They just do not know it.
- C19is20 6y ago
  ....or care.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Frankly, I really don't care. I keep my account and treat it like what it is, utter garbage. Though, it keeps my contacts in cases where it's convenient to connect. If not FB, it would be something else. The problem is those people who derive their world-view from social media platforms and buy in to all the lies and manipulation from bullies. There's pressure for accountability, and that should be a good thing, although we need to keep watch. If they oust the bullies and fake lies, good riddance. I don't need someone telling me their "Final Solution", especially without anything backing their words.
Someone 6y ago
“We as a society” write the laws. They can be changed. The process, IMO, already has started, with the USA and the EU launching investigations against about all the big tech companies (I think Microsoft isn’t investigated yet, but in the context of privacy, they aren’t a truly big player yet. Any new laws will apply to them, regardless)

antris 6y ago

I have recently started supporting a ban on targeted advertising. Dividing people into cultural bubbles and being able to spend unlimited dollars on it is dangerous if we are to maintain cultural unity and be able to agree on facts. Also, when your advertising is not public and only visible to subsections of people, it is more difficult to investigate what is going on. Facebook can do it themselves, but do we want to rely on a single company to do it? But when the advertising is public, it is easier to have a public discussion and have a possible backlash to it.

jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Since I turned off targeted advertising, youtube delights in showing me very graphic videos of earwax extraction. It feels like deliberate punishment and a not-so-gentle nudge to opt for more personalised ads.
Jgrubb 6y ago
Since that'll never happen without toppling the money printing machines of several of the world's most powerful companies, I'd like to repeat an idea that I once heard - A publicly available clearinghouse of all targeted ads published via a service so that researchers can find out - Every ad published - What targeting parameters were used, other basic data about the ad - How many impressions the ad received - How many clickthroughs, etc It would not include any PII of those who saw the ads, only on the ads themselves. Bonus points if we can also have some kind of GUID "advertiser_id" that would allow researchers to tie the ads back to some kind of probably-anonymized-but-maybe-not entity that published the ad. The API would be defined in the regulation so that vendors can't pull any obfuscatory fuckery. Sunlight is the first step in stopping this.
- prox 6y ago
  agreed to an extend, I simply feel that any idealistic / political advertiser needs to be in some sort of public ledger. The real blocker is transparency.
- cambalache 6y ago
  None of that will work. Sure, have some basic regulatory model for your political campaigns to avoid unduly intervention by foreign actors and similar shady stuff,but that is an small deterrent. You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted. Even if you get rid of advertisement period, you will have to deal with stuff like famous academic Op-Eds, celebrities recommending who to vote for, media bias, etc. So you can control the blatant intervention but at the end you have to trust all voting citizens are discerning adults, savvy consumers of information in a complex world, although you know that is not true.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Facebook (and other too big to fail companies) should be split. Facebook Ad company should be independent from Facebook and should have access to the platform on the same terms any other ad company could have access with all respect to privacy. Currently Facebook has a conflict of interest between the social media platform and ad business. We never have seen this before and this needs to be urgently regulated. The same with Google - their ad business has to be decoupled from search and ad company shouldn't have any access to personal data. Google search and Facebook should be forbidden by law to store personal data in a manner that does meet interest of advertising or other types of surveillance.

_Understated_ 6y ago
> Facebook Ad company should be independent from Facebook Be under no illusions... Facebook IS an ad company! Their product is the people that use the platform. There is no separation. The Facebook data feed that users interact with is the bait to harvest the data for ads... it's nothing more than that.

OliverJones 6y ago

I wonder if NYU business school prof Scott Galloway @profgalloway is going to weigh in on this issue. NYU is by no means powerless. We can guess that FB employs a full-time proactive crisis management public relations team. Why? To help guess what they can get away with. But they may have underestimated NYU as an opponent.

commentrix 6y ago

The Third Reich is going after its critics in the name of liberating humanity.

PicassoCTs 6y ago

They do not even take up the main problem between academia and FB. Science goes were the data is- and data is at G,F,A . Meaning any science regarding people e.g. social sciences, psychology, behavioural studies - are effectively privatized. Meaning, the paper of psychology grad-student who did a experiment and asked 200 people on campus is less valuable, as the internal report of some fb-data scientists, who wrote a query and a filter and send the very same question into the production database. So if a whole branch of the sciences is effectively privatized, why do we even pretend the outside branches are anything then a publicly subsidized hobby? Why is there no real discussion about the moral problem of privatized sciences, selling the knowledge and advantage gained as manipulation lever to politicians?

romanoderoma 6y ago
Very good points

mattnewton 6y ago

The key question to me is why users privacy needs to be protected from opting in to the NYU study, but not from opting in to using the Facebook platform.

jkaplowitz 6y ago

I'm not expecting this to happen for many financial and sociopolitical reasons, but I wish NYU would sue Facebook before November 30 seeking a declaratory judgment that their extension complies with all applicable laws and also with FB's terms of service (leaving aside the obvious catch-all of "we can cut you off for no reason in our sole discretion"). Too many threats like this from FB and other powerful entities yield unwarranted capitulation. If those powerful entities had to fear a real risk of losing a lawsuit on the topic of their baseless threat, they'd at least think before threatening and would sometimes refrain. Alas.

matchbok 6y ago

Remember, if you work for FB, you are part of the problem.

LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago

Is there any difference between selected private ads, secret society and religion? It's quite similar. Subgroup of crowd, believing something may not be scientific, xenophobia, delivering some "special idea" to their members, etc. If there is no illegal stuff, why should we criticize on this? Just because they are not mature or long enough as religion?