
Why Facebook still seems to spy on you - bryanrasmussen
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ads-will-follow-you-even-when-your-privacy-settings-are-dialed-up-11551362400
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malloreon
It still seems to spy on you because Facebook and its employees are in the
business of spying on you and everyone else.

If you still use fb, messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp, you accept that.

If you work there, you don’t believe privacy is more important than the money
you make. You could work elsewhere, but you choose to spy instead.

~~~
rabbadabba_89
The privacy clusterf*ck combined with politically-motivated censorship is
really starting to steer the conversation towards regulation.

Given how profoundly big tech has failed to act responsibly with the power it
has amassed, I think it's both inevitable and a good idea.

And I say that as a libertarian who works in software.

I'll take the US gov's track record wrt protecting speech vs what we're seeing
with the tech industry right now.

Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Google
is just as bad, if not worse, and they have control of both a widely deployed
browser and an operating system.

~~~
labster
Google tends to build tools that make you more productive on the open web,
while Facebook tends to build timesinks that make you less productive in a
walled garden. The value proposition is different between them, and so we give
Google more slack because it's more valuable to our lives.

And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share
freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. On that, they're
actually less scummy than my bank is with data sharing.

~~~
hanspeter
No doubt that social media is often a waste of time. However Facebook's
products are also great tools for communication. And Google's YouTube is
likely the largest time sink on the net.

But that doesn't really matter. Even if Google made only the most innocent
products known to exist, how can that justify that they abuse those products
and build huge databases of private data to be shared with their advertisers?

> And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share
> freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you have at least one example of Facebook
undoing a user's privacy settings?

~~~
labster
"Since 2009, Facebook has been under investigation by federal authorities and
American senators in the wake of a series of incidents involving the sudden
change of users' privacy settings, most notably Facebook Beacon, which shut
down that same year."

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-
changes-t...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-to-
facebook-privacy-settings-to-be-opt-in/)

~~~
hanspeter
Beacon was a clusterf*ck, no discussion. Even the commercial partners were
surprised by the lack of consent from the affected users.

However this was a feature that they launched 12 years ago. Since then
Facebook have added more and more granular privacy controls and they have made
their API and Ads product increasingly more data restricted in the past 5-6
years.

I don't believe there has ever been a case, where they have reset a privacy
setting that was specifically set by the user.

~~~
labster
So if a user changes all the settings to say "only ever share with my
friends", and then Facebook creates a new service and sets it to "share with
all companies", that's not a change of a privacy setting because the setting
didn't exist before? Seriously?

It's a pattern of behavior on the part of Facebook to not act in the public
interest until faced with overwhelming legal or public opinion issues. At
least Google is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. But sure,
continue to support a company that was complicit in the Rohingya genocide
though willful ignorance to problems in general. I'm not a Stallmanite but
there has to be a point where enough is enough.

This is not to take away from the good engineers who worked on React or HHVM.
Just consider working for a less morally bankrupt company, please.

------
mojuba
I think the primary suspect today is app analytics platforms, especially the
free ones like Facebook's and Google's. Just looking at how e.g. Intercom
pulls additional data about users that your app didn't provide (full name,
photo, Twitter or LinkedIn profiles etc), you realize that these 3rd party app
services know more about you than you'd like them to. In fact Intercom, unlike
others, inadvertently exposes this spooky fact that they are a part of the
giant spying octopus with N number of independent brains.

So the explanation of what happened with the pregnancy app in the article
might lie in 3rd party frameworks linked to the app. It might be that the app
uses Facebook for its analytics but it's not even necessary: it could be
Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, Fabric, Intercom, any or all of them. The spooky
part here is that the legal implications of what 3rd party app services can do
with data are not very clear (to me at least), and on top of that, tracing the
sources of information seems to be getting more and more difficult these days.
Facebook's answers to the author might be kind of honest: the people you talk
to may not know where the information is coming from.

N.B. use outline.com if you can't see the linked article.

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AndrewKemendo
The advertising and PR industry is driving this.

Whether it's Facebook or another company, it doesn't matter. You can kill
Facebook, or Twitter or whatever, it won't matter because the ad market is
paying to get into your head and they will always figure out how to get there.

Regulate the ad industry, not tech companies.

~~~
zepto
Facebook and Google _are_ the ad industry.

Their entire business is based on gathering personal information and using it
to sell ads. That’s why they must be regulated.

Nobody is talking about regulating ‘tech’ companies for any other reason.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
They have certainly absorbed and consolidated a significant portion of the ad
market, however they aren't the ad industry.

The "ad industry" exists no matter who is running the ads and has persistent
aims and goals that are independent of whatever the vogue ad platform of the
day is. Newspapers were the beginning of "influence at scale" for advertisers,
then TV completely obliterated that, when internet based attention eclipsed
TV, the internet became the "new" platform.

The platform will change again, and the advertising industry will absorb
whatever is next and turn it into a cesspool.

~~~
zepto
This is faulty reasoning. Google and Facebook weren’t absorbed by the Ad
industry. They absorbed large parts of the ad industry. They are the ones who
did all of the innovation in microtargeting and harvesting of personal
information. Not some amorphous external ‘ad industry’.

Advertising is their primary business, and neither of them have any other
significant business. Almost everything they do is designed to drive
advertising. They are advertising companies plain and simple.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
The Ad industry turned Google and Facebook into ad companies, they didn't
start with any intention of becoming ad companies. The Ad industry just
shifted where it points it's dollars; those dollars weren't taken out of the
ad industry.

Google and Facebook wouldn't exist without the ad industry but the ad industry
would exist just fine without them. That's how you know if you're sucked into
it or not.

Think about it this way, corporations, governments, non-profits etc... all use
the ad industry. They hire people who have studied social manipulation to
create "content" with the singular purpose of inducing you to take an action
you would not have otherwise taken. They have to put that content in front of
people somehow, so they go where the people are and then get in front of them
there.

If it so happens that a company can attract a lot of people, then that company
becomes a target of all the groups who want to get their manipulators in front
of those people. Once there is a big enough demand ($$) for that, then the
company starts to build processes and systems to make that easy - like
adwords. If that's the easiest way to make money, then the company will
optimize around that process, and all other things fall to the wayside.

So the causal path is actually perfectly sound reasoning. Market demand in the
form of the ad industry, turned the technology companies into ad companies.
Pretty simple really.

There are tons of tech companies that don't do this because it's not the right
business model, Twilio is one of the best examples. So they never turn into ad
companies.

~~~
zepto
The Ad industry did no such thing. Nobody forced google to create AdWords.
That was all them. They designed the advertising product themselves. They
chose to become an advertising business.

You provide the point yourself by saying that google and Facebook wouldn’t
exist without the ad industry. I.e. they exist because they are advertising
companies.

There is no reason a search engine cannot exist without being part of an
advertising company. The same is true for a social network.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
We're talking past each other so I'm going to abandon this thread, sorry.

~~~
zepto
You just dishonestly edited your previous responses up the thread before
declaring this, to make me look like I was missing your point.

Thae second half of you previous reply would have helped to clarify what you
meant. _Had it been there when I replied_. But it wasn’t. You added three
paragraphs _after_ seeing my response.

I still wouldn’t have agreed, but we could have left it there as two different
viewpoints.

As it was, you edited your previous reply to _make it look as though_ we were
taking past each other.

I question your integrity and I’m glad I don’t have anything to do with your
company.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I don't recall editing anything.

I'm not trying to make anyone look poorly, I'm simply stating that I'm not
being clear with my point and I didn't have the time or interest in trying to
clarify it. No malice.

All the best.

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ec109685
Last paragraph explained what happened:

“And Facebook, upon looking into the ad, said I was targeted because I was
part of a look-alike audience that resembles customers, uploaded by the
advertiser, who apparently are in need of maternity-wear”

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isatty
Facebook still seems to spy on you because they do.

Why was this article necessary?

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raddledsplash
Wait, when does facebook stopped spying on users?

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tiuPapa
Seems to is not the right choice of words, I feel

