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AdObserver Blocked by Facebook
- ceejayoz 5y agoSome really good journalism came out of this project. https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-system-lets-companies-talk-out-of-both-sides-of-their-mouths https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste... Not surprising Facebook wanted to kneecap them. Them claiming privacy concerns is just... peak hypocrisy.
- eganist 5y ago> Them claiming privacy concerns is just... peak hypocrisy. They're technically not wrong. They're just prioritizing client privacy, not product/cattle privacy.
- bob_theslob646 5y agoThe people who downloaded AdObserver agreed to share their data. What am I missing regarding the "client privacy?" Are you referring to clients as in advertisers? What's the harm in showing Congress concrete data on how political ads affect behavior?
- kmeisthax 5y agoIt's not transparency, it's "self-compromise" - some Facebook marketing engineer, probably
- anigbrowl 5y agoThat's an excellent summary of how selective ad targeting does its part to drive political polarization. Paradoxically, people being more informed about different messages can also drive polarization. To recycle the article's example of Exxon telling liberals 'we're becoming more green' and conservatives 'hands off our pipelines' (my paraphrases), if a liberal sees the conservative-targeted message they will likely think 'Exxon is greenwashing its dirty business' while in the reverse case a conservative may think 'woke virtue signalling at its worst.' Every ad campaign is like a bet on on attention that could pay off but could also backfire if it's too far adrift from the truth or public perceptions/attitudes about your firm/sector (eg if you're a serious company like an accountancy firm, don't try to do funny ads because finance people don't want to hire clowns). Running campaigns where the audience is systematically split and segmented mitigates those risks to some extent, but also runs the risk of eroding the public trust completely once there's a broad awareness that all corporate communications are targeted. To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised we haven't yet seen corporations put out different press releases to different parts of the media catering to different political orientations. You could probably send different press releases to, say, Newsmax and the Huffington Post and it would be a while before readers of one became aware of the different source material in the other.
- hardtke 5y agoI think it is more true that political polarization is used to make ad targeting more effective. Almost nobody uses Facebook to drive opinion or do "branding." Instead, they let Facebook target some campaign to the audience that maximizes ROI. All of the political Facebook ads you saw last year were fundraising ads, and the small net yield (revenue generated minus Facebook cut) was used on other platforms to pay for ads attempting to sway the few percentage of the electorate that was persuadable. Similarly, Exxon is paying for some sort of action on the part of the targeted consumer, not trying to change minds.
- 0x0000000 5y agoTitle seems incorrect here, it looks as though individual users had accounts banned, not the AdObserver extension itself.
- ndkwj 5y agoSeems reasonable that using a tool that massively gathers and exfiltrates data from a website gets you banned.
- knowtheory 5y agoYeah, that's falling directly into Facebook's talking points. It's a web extension, anybody can inspect the source. It doesn't do what Facebook is claiming. The NYU team bends over backwards to ensure that no personally identifying information about other users gets captured. The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform. https://twitter.com/issielapowsky/status/1422879438765797380 https://twitter.com/issielapowsky/status/1422879438765797380
- jensensbutton 5y agoSo Facebook, who just paid a 5 billion dollar fine to the FTC for allowing exactly what these researchers are doing, should adopt a policy of examining the source code of every update to any extension used for scraping data to determine whether it's allowed or not? Is that the other option?
- secondcoming 5y agoBut was that data still collected without consent?
- input_sh 5y agoI'd say installing an extension is a pretty big sign of consent. It's named clearly and clearly describes what it does in the first sentence of the description: > A browser extension to share data about your social feed with researchers and journalists to increase transparency. I'd call that type of data gathering quite consensual.
- marketingtech 5y agoYou're also granting the extension access to your friends' data, given that it can see everything that you can. Your friends consented to show that data to you, but not to the extension developer. Your friends' consent is not transitive.
- marketingtech 5y agoUniversity researchers get Facebook users to install a plugin that exfiltrates their data and their friends' data from the platform. Besides leveraging a browser plugin for scraping rather than FB's official APIs, how is this different from Cambridge Analytica? And didn't most people want Facebook to fight back harder against that behavior?
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoThere is no difference. Just like when the Obama campaign got literally every FB users in the US's data, it was not materially different from Cambridge Analytica (the deception was lacking, but other than that it was the same data, except more of it).
- meowface 5y ago"The deception was lacking" is not only a material difference, but a key difference, assuming this Chicago Tribune article is accurate: >"However, as former Obama advisers point out, there are significant differences between the way Obama’s campaign mined data from Facebook, and the activities of which Cambridge is accused: The Obama campaign collected data with its own campaign app, complied with Facebook’s terms of service and, most important in my view, received permission from users before using the data." https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-perspec-page-facebook-zuckerberg-obama-20180323-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-pers... Cambridge Analytica made a personality quiz app and in the terms stated the data would be used only for academic purposes. The creator, the app, the theme of the app, the name of the app, and the purported use of the data wouldn't have indicated any kind of political purpose to any users, while the Obama campaign app was clearly attributed to the Obama campaign and the purpose was evident. There was some potentially questionable behavior due to the app's ability to scrape info about all of the app users' friends, but the app did request permission to see users' friends lists beforehand. I don't know the exact details of the nature of that scraping or how it was presented to users, but even if ones assumes they also did something shady, Cambridge Analytica was definitely sneakier and behaving more like a private intelligence agency than a campaign contractor/advisor. edit: I don't know enough about the facts of the use of users' friends' data to judge how ethical or consensual it was. I just think that either way, the Cambridge Analytica one is definitely less defensible.
- literallyaduck 5y ago"Their platform their choice", right? Maybe the researchers can make their own platform. Remember when everyone said that about people they didn't like?
- ceejayoz 5y agoDon't mistake "it's legal" for "it can't be criticized". "Their platform, their choice" tends to refer to the legal situation (especially when folks make wild claims about Facebook being subject to the First Amendment), not the moral one. Their choices can be bad, and we can be critical of them.
- luckylion 5y agoTo be fair, in 90% of the responses the GP is referencing, it totally also means the moral one. "Just build your own platform" is a common response.
- drdeca 5y agoI don’t know about quite 90% (though maybe that was meant as hyperbole), but yes, it does seem a common occurrence to defend bannings and such on similar grounds, often by conflating “legally permissible” with “appropriate”. That being said, while I certainly agree that decisions about how to run a platform can be such that they should be legal, but also shouldn’t be done, I also feel that the range of what can be appropriate for a platform to require/do can be fairly large, so long as they produce the appropriate expectations among users and others who interact with the platform (and not just by drastically expectations as immediate preparations for changing policies in big ways either) So, my view on the “ ‘just make your own platform’ “ complaint, is a bit mixed? Obviously the neutrality of the base-layers is highly important.. but if they weren’t, would the solution be to make a replacement that was, or to somehow get those in control of the base layers to behave neutrally? Well, the degree of lock-in at base layers would presumably be basically just as high as it is now (though, I would expect a typical world with less neutral base layers would also have more centralization of the base layers? Not sure how that would influence this.) Well, at least if the base layers were govt controlled, then I guess there would probably be an obligation for it to be neutral, not just something desirable. Perhaps if it were privately owned by a single org, due to being so critical, it would be justified for govt to (with appropriate compensation) , Ok nvm idk what I’m talking about
- xkcd-sucks 5y agoBigger question is how they found the accounts to ban - did they just get the social graph of this outspoken researcher or is the extension itself distinguishable based on its activity?
- tablespoon 5y ago> Bigger question is how they found the accounts to ban - did they just get the social graph of this outspoken researcher or is the extension itself distinguishable based on its activity? It sounds like they may have just banned the researchers associated with the, but not the app itself. She's still asking people to install it: https://twitter.com/LauraEdelson2/status/1422742671957843971 https://twitter.com/LauraEdelson2/status/1422742671957843971.
- timdorr 5y agoHere's Facebook's blog post about this situation: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/research-cannot-be-the-justification-for-compromising-peoples-privacy/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/research-cannot-be-the-jus...
- AlexandrB 5y ago> Research Cannot Be the Justification for Compromising People’s Privacy Right. Ad revenue is the only acceptable justification for compromising people's privacy. Edit: Although research is a valid justification for compromising people's wellbeing[1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
- nonfamous 5y agoHope none of those journalists had family photos or other memories in their now-banned personal Facebook accounts. And if they had an Oculus, that's basically useless now as well.
- anigbrowl 5y agoI suspect we'll see an increase in adversarial scraping in the coming years, since it's (relatively) easy and legal. Probably more interesting research or at least datasets will come from researchers outside academia, since companies like Facebook will use their financial muscle to dissuade institutions from operating research projects like this by offering or withholding donations. More likely datasets will come from where they come from, and if their reliability can be validated or seems sufficiently credible analysts will follow. I don't see adversarial research as necessarily unethical, any more than it's an unethical attack on industry to study pollution patterns.