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Google sells advertising. They don't sell your private data to 3rd parties. Same with Facebook. It's not in the interests of these companies to sell their propr
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Google sells advertising. They don't sell your private data to 3rd parties. Same with Facebook. It's not in the interests of these companies to sell their proprietary user targeting data to other companies. They need to keep it closely guarded if they want to retain any edge in the marketplace.
Two very different things, but they've been (intentionally) conflated in a lot of the public debates to make it sound more evil.
- tchalla 5y agoAnd, why does Google and Facebook not sell data? It’s not out some altruistic concern. They want to play kingmaker. Tomorrow, if there’s an option to sell data versus stay in business let’s see what they’d do.
- judge2020 5y agoWe're not saying they wouldn't sell data if it meant 10x revenue, but it'd have to be 10x revenue sustained for eternity. As of now, all of that data staying safe in their solos means (A) they don't lose customers who are fine with advertising but not that data going to some DB that anyone could then inspect (since you know some company would buy it then charge others $x thousands of dollars to dig into users' lives), and (B) they're the only ones with that data, and thus their advertising business can use it to possibly show more relevant ads. If the competing ad company can just buy Google's user data, they could sell just as well-targeted ads as Google but undercut them by x% margin, thus always winning the ad space on a website.
- newfonewhodis 5y ago> The idea that Google or Facebook "sell your data" is a myth. Do you have hard evidence for this claim?
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoIt doesn't even make logical sense. Why would the company give up their edge in the market? Where does one go to buy this Facebook or Google data? Who's buying it? Surely these things would have come up in all of the Congressional hearings, right?
- bastardoperator 5y agoCambridge Analytica harvested Facebook user data with help from Facebook... You go straight to Facebook or Google and become a "partner".
- celestialcheese 5y agoThis was a long time ago CA did this with the personality quiz apps (2013 IIRC). It's incredibly onerous and in some cases impossible to get this data legally from Facebook anymore.
- bastardoperator 5y agoFacebook was fined in 2019 by the FTC for 5 billion dollars due to privacy violations. Despite the fact that data was trading hands up until 2016, I don't think it was that long ago...
- pb7 5y agoExactly, it was a scandal because data left Facebook's silos because in normal operations it does not.
- rgavuliak 5y agoYeah and then they gave access to chat data for companies like Spotify https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-shared-user-data-private-messages-netflix-spotify-amazon-microsoft-sony https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-...
- newfonewhodis 5y agoData flows from and in and out of data warehouses is very commonly known now [1]. It would be very surprising to me that FB, Google and Amazon aren't participating in that marketplace. [0] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-..., https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibilli..., https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/03/25/i-tried-to-use-the-ad-tech-industrys-tool-to-opt-out-of-personalized-ads-did-it-work https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/03/25/i-tried-to-use-the-... (more investigations have been done by WIRED as well).
- jonathankoren 5y agoDo you have any evidence that they're selling PII?