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They already have, the internet is a mess. Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data s

They already have, the internet is a mess. Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data sharing widespread.

api 5y ago
It's not just Facebook. Every sales, marketing, or product person in the world basically has an unlimited appetite for data and will push to suck up as much data as possible. There is a logical reason for this: one of the toughest things is knowing what your users actually want and what their actual pain points are. In advertising there's an analogous problem often summarized as: "I know I am wasting 80% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 80%." Every single incentive on the business side incentivizes data grabbing. This will never change unless users vote hard with their wallets or unless there is protective legislation.
- Ticklee 5y ago
  I wholeheartedly think http/s is irreparably damaged, for example it is impossible to find good information on search engines, even the free ones like Searx. If you are able to find a website you can bet it includes 10MiB of trackers and ads. Hopefully someone writes a better protocol with no third party cookies and heavily restricted javascript.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    Hate to nitpick but those things are not features of the HTTP protocol from the IETF but of HTML from the W3C
    - Ticklee 5y ago
      Nitpick away, when I am ignorant I'd rather be told than stay ignorant.
  - phailhaus 5y ago
    As the other poster pointed out, those are properties of HTML and not HTTP/S. But what I'd like to point out is that this: > heavily restricted javascript Is basically impossible. Any useful subset of javascript would be turing-complete, and therefore enough to do whatever's necessary to track the user. Literally all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request and bam, you can track.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      Turing-complete is (kind of) irrelevant, the question is what (equivalent of) system calls is has access to. Eg, javascript should not be able to set cookies or cause network traffic after page load by default. > all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request Precicely. Inability to do this is (part of) what > > heavily restricted javascript means.
      - phailhaus 5y ago
        Haha yeah, never going to happen. No network calls = no real-time dashboards, which is a no-go for basically any company. Not only that, it doesn't really solve the issue. You can just make the user click a button which triggers the network call anyways, and bam you can track again. Restricting javascript wouldn't work.
  - zo1 5y ago
    Blogs were a major death blow to the web. Before that web pages were more like books, references, unique compilations and compendiums of knowledge, random non-sense, and individual people's musings for no other reason than to put it out there. Now, 99% of all "blog" content is just there to somehow sucker a poor soul into typing an unfortunate series of terms into a search bar out of desperation for knowledge/info, such that the semi-random search results gets the person's eyeball to fall on said "blog" content so that an ad can be sold.
joe_the_user 5y ago
I would claim the opposite. Facebook normalized the belief that the information people put on their FB page was NOT being scraped by many people even though it was. The rise of Facebook accompanied a whole belief system about "things I share with my friends on the Internet". It seems like Facebook is now large enough that they're effectively owning up to the unavoidable truth - there's no way that information made available to all subscribers of some largish social network isn't going to be public to the world.
- uoaei 5y ago
  That's not an accurate framing of the situation. Sure, they relied on people's technological illiteracy to do things people didn't really think were possible for a while. But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s).
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    The Cambridge Analytica scandal was three years ago and this article is about PR moves Facebook is doing now. And sure, I don't give every gruesome detail in the rise but I'd still claim that the overall situation is that Facebook is large enough and it's model porous enough that a variety of actors have scraped it, are scraping it and will scrape it. And given this, Facebook has to start owning up to an inevitable situation. Keep in mind, The Cambridge Analytica scandal was predicated on Facebook's claimed data model (which I'd claim isn't just false but also "can't be true"). Sure, the easiest way to scrape it is having API access, which it's hard not to give to your advertisers. But if Facebook gave no one API access, various actors would be directly scraping. And overall, I'd say The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the thing that wasn't a good framing of the broad problems of Facebook and privacy. Edit: "But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s)." And I'd say, this is again actually the wrong frame. Facebook is at the center of the storm, no doubt. But there is no large social network possible that wouldn't be subject to the general privacy problems of Facebook. Facebook created the fantasy definition of privacy, Facebook violated that definition but no one could satisfy it.

They already have, the internet is a mess. Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data sharing widespread.

api 5y ago

It's not just Facebook. Every sales, marketing, or product person in the world basically has an unlimited appetite for data and will push to suck up as much data as possible. There is a logical reason for this: one of the toughest things is knowing what your users actually want and what their actual pain points are. In advertising there's an analogous problem often summarized as: "I know I am wasting 80% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 80%." Every single incentive on the business side incentivizes data grabbing. This will never change unless users vote hard with their wallets or unless there is protective legislation.

Ticklee 5y ago
I wholeheartedly think http/s is irreparably damaged, for example it is impossible to find good information on search engines, even the free ones like Searx. If you are able to find a website you can bet it includes 10MiB of trackers and ads. Hopefully someone writes a better protocol with no third party cookies and heavily restricted javascript.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Hate to nitpick but those things are not features of the HTTP protocol from the IETF but of HTML from the W3C
  - Ticklee 5y ago
    Nitpick away, when I am ignorant I'd rather be told than stay ignorant.
- phailhaus 5y ago
  As the other poster pointed out, those are properties of HTML and not HTTP/S. But what I'd like to point out is that this: > heavily restricted javascript Is basically impossible. Any useful subset of javascript would be turing-complete, and therefore enough to do whatever's necessary to track the user. Literally all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request and bam, you can track.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    Turing-complete is (kind of) irrelevant, the question is what (equivalent of) system calls is has access to. Eg, javascript should not be able to set cookies or cause network traffic after page load by default. > all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request Precicely. Inability to do this is (part of) what > > heavily restricted javascript means.
    - phailhaus 5y ago
      Haha yeah, never going to happen. No network calls = no real-time dashboards, which is a no-go for basically any company. Not only that, it doesn't really solve the issue. You can just make the user click a button which triggers the network call anyways, and bam you can track again. Restricting javascript wouldn't work.
- zo1 5y ago
  Blogs were a major death blow to the web. Before that web pages were more like books, references, unique compilations and compendiums of knowledge, random non-sense, and individual people's musings for no other reason than to put it out there. Now, 99% of all "blog" content is just there to somehow sucker a poor soul into typing an unfortunate series of terms into a search bar out of desperation for knowledge/info, such that the semi-random search results gets the person's eyeball to fall on said "blog" content so that an ad can be sold.

joe_the_user 5y ago

I would claim the opposite. Facebook normalized the belief that the information people put on their FB page was NOT being scraped by many people even though it was. The rise of Facebook accompanied a whole belief system about "things I share with my friends on the Internet". It seems like Facebook is now large enough that they're effectively owning up to the unavoidable truth - there's no way that information made available to all subscribers of some largish social network isn't going to be public to the world.

uoaei 5y ago
That's not an accurate framing of the situation. Sure, they relied on people's technological illiteracy to do things people didn't really think were possible for a while. But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s).
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  The Cambridge Analytica scandal was three years ago and this article is about PR moves Facebook is doing now. And sure, I don't give every gruesome detail in the rise but I'd still claim that the overall situation is that Facebook is large enough and it's model porous enough that a variety of actors have scraped it, are scraping it and will scrape it. And given this, Facebook has to start owning up to an inevitable situation. Keep in mind, The Cambridge Analytica scandal was predicated on Facebook's claimed data model (which I'd claim isn't just false but also "can't be true"). Sure, the easiest way to scrape it is having API access, which it's hard not to give to your advertisers. But if Facebook gave no one API access, various actors would be directly scraping. And overall, I'd say The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the thing that wasn't a good framing of the broad problems of Facebook and privacy. Edit: "But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s)." And I'd say, this is again actually the wrong frame. Facebook is at the center of the storm, no doubt. But there is no large social network possible that wouldn't be subject to the general privacy problems of Facebook. Facebook created the fantasy definition of privacy, Facebook violated that definition but no one could satisfy it.