
Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching - turadg
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection
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BaldricksGhost
You're not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about
how this was "not that easy" the real reason probably lies in this bit near
the end:

 _" Why can’t Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely?
Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook’s business depends on collecting
this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream."_

As long as Facebook's business model involves monetizing your data, they are
going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.

~~~
fumar
Advertisers wouldn't want to hear that part of their campaign attribution (on-
site conversions) were null because users have the option to remove browsing
behavior. Facebook's people-based marketing is why advertisers use them.

~~~
fumar
I should add context: Facebook has ~20% of the digital advertising marketshare
in the US (2018). They are #2 to Google. What both of these two titans give
marketers (individual teams within a larger org) is something to brag about.
How? Run a campaign for display or video ads in FB or Google and make sure you
can tie it to a site action (ideally a conversion of some type). Let that run
for a month and then give yourself a big pat on the back. You just drove some
cost per action (conversion) number that with some tweaks can improve month
over month. Your marketing org is now optimizing! yes! Drive those sales or
site visits.

It is a great approach for marketing teams. They grow, look good, claim to
drive revenue, try to impact consumer behavior, but it all is dependent on
Facebook's (insert any ad platform partner) attribution. So yeah, Facebook
will not mess with its attribution. It would make a big mess for both its
business and it's client's business.

Marketers's should measure the incremental impact of their marketing buys (get
their data science team to manage the study). They will be surprised to see
how much display banners or video ads are impacting consumer behavior. Stay
away from modeled approaches, try to grade the reporting yourself.

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amaccuish
> "Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user
> it belongs to"

I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing
history and not associating it with users.

~~~
aiiane
Reading between the lines, what this statement actually means is likely "we
have a lot of this user data in flat logs, which makes it hard to delete a
single individual's data out of the logs, so we need to move from flat user-
agnostic logs to per-user structured data".

~~~
jandrese
Given their business model of sifting through and selling your data this
doesn't seem all that likely that they've left it in gigantic combined
flatfiles.

It seems more likely to me that yes, they could do a DELETE FROM
BROWSING_HISTORY WHERE USER = "%S", but that's not their business model.
Instead they have to add a column to the database that flags data that will be
shown to the user or not, and then go through every part of the site where the
data might be visible and add a check for that flag. It's a lot more work, and
worse they have to get it right the first time because people will be angry if
there is a leak somewhere and their supposedly deleted data is visible.

~~~
tylerhou
Or, maybe, making a product which has to deal with legacy code for billions of
users is actually difficult?

Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be _that_ evil, right?

~~~
jandrese
> Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?

People keep saying this and they keep being surprised.

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denzil_correa
> There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the
> feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your
> specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely,
> Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by
> Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.

I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist
but not tied to a particular user.

~~~
nawgszy
Surely we can't be expected to believe they don't have techniques to re-
identify that data.

I suppose that's the subtext of what you wrote, though.

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aimdroid
'Clear History' goes against Facebook's business model. They will never
release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be
something false only to serve PR.

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uptown
I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what
type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples:

1\. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device's clipboard and transmit
this information to your servers?

2\. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device,
even if the user hasn't explicitly selected the image for upload?

I'm sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent
these in ways I'm not familiar with but it'd amaze me if companies weren't
grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.

~~~
rhegart
I’m pretty sure they did multiple times. Even recently in the past year. They
just lie and there seems to be no consequences for it. At least after 2012
when they lied the government can go after them but they’re still looking into
it.

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tareqak
Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy
violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1].

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-
atto...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-attorney-
general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica-
scandal)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180)

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jliptzin
Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the
option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don’t see what’s
so hard. I’d imagine most people don’t care that much and the ones that do
have an option now.

~~~
michaelt
Someone on HN explained the problem to me like so:

Assume Facebook brings in $10/user/month in ad revenue.

But the distribution is uneven; $50/user/month for rich westerners,
$6/user/month for poor people in poor countries who outnumber westerners 10:1.

If you offer everyone the chance to go ad-free for $10/month, your income from
rich westerners drops from $50 to $10 and your total revenue drops to
$6.36/user/month.

~~~
thepangolino
They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.

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javaIsGreat
facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a
bunch of ny old wierd messages)

