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The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Ever

The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile. Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like button, then they can track everything everyone does on the web. That's why the stickiness thing is important, not just because active users are less likely to quit. This is how you monetize a free social service.

esmevane 15y ago
I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?
- pork 15y ago
  Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
  - glimcat 15y ago
    Now if only it was easier for said PhDs to get access to said data. Actually, on second thought, that's a bit horrifying.
    - freshhawk 15y ago
      Ad networks, research companies and domain parking companies will kill to get PhD's on staff to do those kind of optimization problems. They pay well but the good ones never stay long as the job is pretty boring for someone with those skills, it's really just a few problems that need to be solved over and over to the 10th decimal place because slight improvements in results mean lot's of real dollars.
      - glimcat 15y ago
        Optimization, bleh. Mining the tar out of Facebook's rather Orwellian data set? FUN!
- cpeterso 15y ago
  Facebook can create a demographic profile of its users by observing (spying) on users' browsing behavior. Advertisers will pay more for targeted demographics, e.g. women over 40 who read Martha Stewart and travel often.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Look at the fundamentals: Facebook has a shit-ton of information about you already. It knows your social graph, it knows what you "like", it knows your name, it knows your relationship and job status, it knows your religion, it knows your age, it knows your education, it knows your phone number and address. These are things you may have explicitly told it. It now also knows a significant fraction of your browsing history. Web-savvy folks with a solid business sense know how that sort of information can be easily monetized. Consider what Facebook can easily determine from the information it explicitly knows: your income, debt level, and credit rating; your family size (and stage); your job satisfaction; your relationship satisfaction; your hobbies; your fetishes; every single one of your buying patterns. Facebook can not only determine a better set of ads to present to you on facebook.com it can resell information elsewhere to others so they can present better and more effective ads/deals on potentially every site you visit and offers you receive in the mail and through other mechanisms as well. A hypothetical example: facebook is able to determine that you are a gainfully employed person with a much higher than average income and no children, they can also tell that you "like" a lot of things about motorcycles, you visit motorcycle news sites and web forums several times a week, you visit motorcycle manufacturer pages often. How valuable is that information to a local motorcycle dealership?
  - weaksauce 15y ago
    For those that are worried about it(which should be pretty much anyone) this is an extension that claims to block all other sites from gleaning your fb credentials. Probably a good idea to do. The code is on github if you want to extend it. http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/ http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/
- freshhawk 15y ago
  For those with their own ad network the obvious benefit is in better targeting of customer's ads to users. The more clicks they get the happier the customers are and the more money they make from their cut of the ad spend. They also provide a lot of tools to view and examine the data to the advertisers so they can tailor their ads in some way. Most of the times you click one of these ads your user_id or email is sent to the advertisers and they can make pretty good use of that data as well. That's the obvious one but they also sell the data to market research companies who analyse it and package it up for resale as "customer engagement profiles" or some other euphemism for poorly anonymized user tracking data. I have no experience with Facebook here but with Google and Yahoo there is an understanding between big advertisers and their account reps about API abuse. Someone's personal credit card rents a few VPS's and some perl scripts start pulling in everything they can and even if they go over the API limits by a few orders of magnitude they never get blocked. For any ad network or other service provider who has a resource like an ad unit or a like or +1 button everywhere on the web and can track people, the user tracking data is a major revenue stream, both for internal use and external.
itswindy 15y ago
Google has G Analytic and now G+. Logged in or not they have the IP. But the chart is about time spent online
cpeterso 15y ago
Does Facebook's privacy statement state that they don't track "logged out" users? Logging out of Facebook does not delete all facebook.com cookies (let alone any web beacons from covert domains Facebook might use), so they could technically still track users. I just deleted my facebook.com cookies. Visiting facebook.com login page issued me 5 cookies. Logging in issued 31 (!) additional cookies. Logging out and restarting my browsing (to clear session cookies) left me with 3 cookies. And those 3 cookies have suspicious names like "datr" and "lu" (Log User?) with obfuscated hash values.
- aristus 15y ago
  :( This meme has been refuted so many times I don't know what else to do. We do not track logged-out behavior. The datr cookie is for phishing and spam protection. http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084 http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tracking-allegations/4044 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tr... I like how it's "denies allegations". Stay classy, zdnet.
  - wnight 15y ago
    How would anyone know that? If any personally identifying cookies remain you could. And personally, from my corporate experience there's a good chance that you're simply lying to us here and a better chance that you're telling us what you think the truth is but have been lied to yourself. For instance, the FAQ directly contradicts the Wall Street Journal. You and the FAQ say no logged out info is collected, the article says exactly otherwise. > WSJ: Facebook acknowledges that it gets that data [from logged out users] but says it deletes it right away. Oh, I see. You do track them. But, you don't inhale... Even if we believed you, by collecting that data you change the game entirely. Now you can be legally required to log data from a specific user which you couldn't if the system wasn't in place. Stay shifty, Facebook.
    - aristus 15y ago
      If you cannot entertain the possibility that employees of the company who work with the code in question are telling the truth, and put more faith in a paraphrase by a journalist, then we don't have much common ground to have an intelligent and respectful discussion. Many large web services, for instance Google's Plus button, appear to work in exactly the same way with logged-out cookies. This is something you can easily test yourself. When asked, these companies make exactly the same statements about how this data is and is not used. All of the speculations in your last paragraph would seem to apply equally, though I personally don't put much credence in them. So the question is unfortunately not one of facts, but of trust and feelings. Beyond telling the truth as far as I know it there's not much else I can do. FWIW we don't make evil plans down in the old volcano lair.
vixen99 15y ago
Strange - you insert an apostrophe and thus write "it is user profile" but leave it out of "facebook's perspective" where is needed. I can't work out why apostrophic abuse is so popular.
- freshhawk 15y ago
  For me, it's that muscle memory will take over while I'm typing fast and thinking about something else. It's a really annoying habit I've developed. I normally catch them when I read back the comment and think "glad I caught that, I would have looked stupid" ... not this time apparently.

esmevane 15y ago

I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?

pork 15y ago
Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
- glimcat 15y ago
  Now if only it was easier for said PhDs to get access to said data. Actually, on second thought, that's a bit horrifying.
  - freshhawk 15y ago
    Ad networks, research companies and domain parking companies will kill to get PhD's on staff to do those kind of optimization problems. They pay well but the good ones never stay long as the job is pretty boring for someone with those skills, it's really just a few problems that need to be solved over and over to the 10th decimal place because slight improvements in results mean lot's of real dollars.
    - glimcat 15y ago
      Optimization, bleh. Mining the tar out of Facebook's rather Orwellian data set? FUN!
cpeterso 15y ago
Facebook can create a demographic profile of its users by observing (spying) on users' browsing behavior. Advertisers will pay more for targeted demographics, e.g. women over 40 who read Martha Stewart and travel often.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Look at the fundamentals: Facebook has a shit-ton of information about you already. It knows your social graph, it knows what you "like", it knows your name, it knows your relationship and job status, it knows your religion, it knows your age, it knows your education, it knows your phone number and address. These are things you may have explicitly told it. It now also knows a significant fraction of your browsing history. Web-savvy folks with a solid business sense know how that sort of information can be easily monetized. Consider what Facebook can easily determine from the information it explicitly knows: your income, debt level, and credit rating; your family size (and stage); your job satisfaction; your relationship satisfaction; your hobbies; your fetishes; every single one of your buying patterns. Facebook can not only determine a better set of ads to present to you on facebook.com it can resell information elsewhere to others so they can present better and more effective ads/deals on potentially every site you visit and offers you receive in the mail and through other mechanisms as well. A hypothetical example: facebook is able to determine that you are a gainfully employed person with a much higher than average income and no children, they can also tell that you "like" a lot of things about motorcycles, you visit motorcycle news sites and web forums several times a week, you visit motorcycle manufacturer pages often. How valuable is that information to a local motorcycle dealership?
- weaksauce 15y ago
  For those that are worried about it(which should be pretty much anyone) this is an extension that claims to block all other sites from gleaning your fb credentials. Probably a good idea to do. The code is on github if you want to extend it. http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/ http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/
freshhawk 15y ago
For those with their own ad network the obvious benefit is in better targeting of customer's ads to users. The more clicks they get the happier the customers are and the more money they make from their cut of the ad spend. They also provide a lot of tools to view and examine the data to the advertisers so they can tailor their ads in some way. Most of the times you click one of these ads your user_id or email is sent to the advertisers and they can make pretty good use of that data as well. That's the obvious one but they also sell the data to market research companies who analyse it and package it up for resale as "customer engagement profiles" or some other euphemism for poorly anonymized user tracking data. I have no experience with Facebook here but with Google and Yahoo there is an understanding between big advertisers and their account reps about API abuse. Someone's personal credit card rents a few VPS's and some perl scripts start pulling in everything they can and even if they go over the API limits by a few orders of magnitude they never get blocked. For any ad network or other service provider who has a resource like an ad unit or a like or +1 button everywhere on the web and can track people, the user tracking data is a major revenue stream, both for internal use and external.

itswindy 15y ago

Google has G Analytic and now G+. Logged in or not they have the IP. But the chart is about time spent online

cpeterso 15y ago

Does Facebook's privacy statement state that they don't track "logged out" users? Logging out of Facebook does not delete all facebook.com cookies (let alone any web beacons from covert domains Facebook might use), so they could technically still track users. I just deleted my facebook.com cookies. Visiting facebook.com login page issued me 5 cookies. Logging in issued 31 (!) additional cookies. Logging out and restarting my browsing (to clear session cookies) left me with 3 cookies. And those 3 cookies have suspicious names like "datr" and "lu" (Log User?) with obfuscated hash values.

aristus 15y ago
:( This meme has been refuted so many times I don't know what else to do. We do not track logged-out behavior. The datr cookie is for phishing and spam protection. http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084 http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tracking-allegations/4044 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tr... I like how it's "denies allegations". Stay classy, zdnet.
- wnight 15y ago
  How would anyone know that? If any personally identifying cookies remain you could. And personally, from my corporate experience there's a good chance that you're simply lying to us here and a better chance that you're telling us what you think the truth is but have been lied to yourself. For instance, the FAQ directly contradicts the Wall Street Journal. You and the FAQ say no logged out info is collected, the article says exactly otherwise. > WSJ: Facebook acknowledges that it gets that data [from logged out users] but says it deletes it right away. Oh, I see. You do track them. But, you don't inhale... Even if we believed you, by collecting that data you change the game entirely. Now you can be legally required to log data from a specific user which you couldn't if the system wasn't in place. Stay shifty, Facebook.
  - aristus 15y ago
    If you cannot entertain the possibility that employees of the company who work with the code in question are telling the truth, and put more faith in a paraphrase by a journalist, then we don't have much common ground to have an intelligent and respectful discussion. Many large web services, for instance Google's Plus button, appear to work in exactly the same way with logged-out cookies. This is something you can easily test yourself. When asked, these companies make exactly the same statements about how this data is and is not used. All of the speculations in your last paragraph would seem to apply equally, though I personally don't put much credence in them. So the question is unfortunately not one of facts, but of trust and feelings. Beyond telling the truth as far as I know it there's not much else I can do. FWIW we don't make evil plans down in the old volcano lair.

vixen99 15y ago

Strange - you insert an apostrophe and thus write "it is user profile" but leave it out of "facebook's perspective" where is needed. I can't work out why apostrophic abuse is so popular.

freshhawk 15y ago
For me, it's that muscle memory will take over while I'm typing fast and thinking about something else. It's a really annoying habit I've developed. I normally catch them when I read back the comment and think "glad I caught that, I would have looked stupid" ... not this time apparently.