
Facebook’s Ad Scandal Isn’t a Fail, It’s a Feature - stablemap
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/facebook-ad-scandal.html
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bittermang
I find it all to be the same. Email spam. Robocalls. Phone scammers. The
entire online advertising industry. It's all a vile poison that wastes time,
effort, and money.

But worst of all, there's no incentive to fix it.

Most cases of bad actors on platforms are already a violation of the terms of
service. But until it starts to affect the platform provider financially,
everyone will keep funneling money in to the problem. The bad actors pay for
the ads, they pay for the phone numbers, they pay for Internet access, and
thus it's too easy to look the other way.

Then the providers come to us, the victims of the crimes whose time is wasted,
whose lives are scammed. They say it's too big a problem, and gosh darn it
they just can't do anything. They have their pockets turned inside out and
shrug at us like we're supposed to believe them. But it doesn't affect them,
it affects us, and they've never cared about us, just our money.

~~~
lostlogin
There are incentives to fix it. Some of us pay for things rather than have ad
supported content, and as a result see far fewer adverts than ever before.
Music, TV and news are now paid for and no adverts are seen (with an ad
blocker sorting the rest rather than paying the content providers directly
sadly).

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kartan
The main problem with Facebook is "too much tailored advertisements".

You can even use this advertisements to deanonymize data. And that's
extremely-dangerous. If you want a list of people from an ideology, or
minority, or whatever. You can send an ad targeted to that people, in the city
that you are interested in. But the ad is for getting some free, unrelated to
your motives, sample product. People will send you their name and address
without even knowing that they saw your ad only because they are part of that
minority/ideology/...

You can also, and it has already been done, target undecided people in an
election. This is nothing new, but the precision and scope has increased
drastically. And usually you only need a few percentage points in one state to
swing an election. The money that could buy you half a percentage point, now
is going to buy you a lot more.

Facebook offers a great feature for ad companies to be able to specifically
target people, but it is dangerous for society as a whole. I think that the
GDPR ([http://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html](http://www.eugdpr.org/key-
changes.html)) is a good step in the right direction. But probably it is not
enough.

The article misses completely the point. Moving the subject from "privacy" to
"antisemitism".

~~~
abnry
In general, I don't see a problem with targeted ads. For consumers, I think it
is a positive. I want to be made aware of products that I will actually like.
Even for political issues, I want to be put in touch with the candidates and
organizations and events I care about.

The only real problem I can think of is when these targeted ads are used as a
way to lie to one set of targeted people while saying something completely
different to another set.

~~~
ece
Just targeting you at that level by definition means invading your privacy to
the extent you may not want, or want to control and can't. Just to name a few
things: 3rd party cookies, whatever data is mine-able from your profiles, your
interactions, your use of the social network platform itself, on mobile, your
email, your searches, information from your interaction graph, not to mention
everything you might do in real life that ends up online in some way..

All of this to serve better ads is at the cost of your privacy, everyone's
privacy. You can actually find things you might be interested in just fine by
searching for them instead of seeing some ad twice that you might be
interested in. Serving better ads requires more data on consumers and once the
treadmill starts, there is no getting off unless as a consumer you decide to
take back control. This is why ad-blockers are as big as they are.

This isn't some externality either, what happened in the election is the
externality. To the extent that Facebook interactions fed and influenced the
election, it was because better ad targeting; and more consumer time on the
site, which helps better ad targeting is the business model. So, I agree with
the article very much.

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blackoil
The bias in reporting, HN and comments in general make it difficult to
identify extent of problem. We see tonnes of articles and comments supporting
them, that FB advt. is waste of money with mostly bots and spams. But we also
see articles and comments about dangers of precision ads on FB. Which side is
exaggerating, and what's the truth?

~~~
nerdponx
Both can be true simultaneously. Precision ads can be immoral and creepy and
still not actually work.

However I don't believe the "precision ads don't work" hype. I've noticed a
dramatic increase in the quality and relevance of ads in the last few years,
even as I mostly stopped using Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Google. Amid
all these bot scandals, I would still be shocked to dind that hyper-precision
targeting is ineffective without adblockers and such.

Crying out "ads don't even work!" is just a desperate attempt by anti-ad
people (like me) to find some indication tha the ad emperor has no clothes.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Both can be true simultaneously. Precision ads can be immoral and creepy
> and still not actually work._

And both _are_ true in the cases people most often complain about. I buy a
camera and then get to see ads for cameras everywhere. That's both precise and
_completely ineffective_. Basically, the smarts are is in the targeting side,
the dumbness is in choosing what ad to show...

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a_imho
_Facebook directly employs only about 20,658 people — roughly one employee per
100,000 users._

Slightly OT, where does the 2b monthly active user statistics come from and
how was it measured? I could only find Facebook self reported stats and it is
not clear what do they mean by users, and most articles seem to use
user/account/person interchangeably.

~~~
nl
FB measure's "Active Users" is someone who logs in and uses Facebook in that
time period. That seems a relatively honest metric and I haven't seen any
substantial criticism of it (unlike FB's video metrics).

OTOH Twitter's definition of an "Active User" is laughable: _an account must
simply follow 30 other Twitter accounts and must also be followed by one-third
of the accounts it follows to qualify as an active user._

[1] [https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-
use...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-users-maus-
how-do-facebook-twitter.aspx)

