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One of my all-time favorite rebuttals is from an FB employee. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401 It’s
by fingerlocks 5y ago
One of my all-time favorite rebuttals is from an FB employee.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401
It’s a fresh perspective on targeted advertising in what is normally a boring discussion with the same predictable comments. Whether you agree with the post or not doesn’t matter. It’s a candid insider’s view that drives curiosity and precisely the kind of content that keeps me returning to HN.
- mgraczyk 5y agoYeah that's a good comment, and you can see from the replies why somebody would want to post that anonymously (the replies are basically "you are lying"). I'm happy to endorse that comment using my real-world identity. Facebook does not do "hypertargeting". The marginal cost of running text processing on messages or image processing on photos for specific users exceeds the value of that information for targeting by many orders of magnitude. Facebook literally cannot afford to "listen to your conversations". The way I typically explain targeted advertising is something like this. You go to a website, you put something in your cart, but you don't buy. Facebook shows you an ad for that website the next day, you go back and buy the thing in your cart. That basic pattern probably accounts for 20-30% of ad revenue for Facebook, and the only "personal information" required is that you recently visited a particular website. The next 70-80% is similarly banal stuff, like "you're the sort of person who buys outdoor gear and you're likely to buy this quarter".