Are we talking about the Facebook Privacy thing yet?

The0retical said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Going completely off grid isn't really an option anymore if you want to live any semblance of a modern life. In addition to uninstalling the apps, which is probably the best thing you can do, you can install browser extensions such as Privacy Badger and No Script and run a Pi-Hole to get rid of the most intrusive tracking. Disable locational tracking on the phone, run a VPN, ditch the FitBit and that'll get most people 80% of the way there. All that is mostly low effort.

For the rest:

Sure I have a problem with them giving data they weren't intending to give to people who weren't supposed to receive it...But I don't understand why people are acting so surprised about their data collection and monetization practices either.  What they've been doing hasn't exactly been a secret. People are dumb, and they have been capitalizing on it for years. 

Plus, it's really Google who is the real keeper of all your dirty little secrets.  Facebook knows who you pretend to be, Google knows who you really are.

In reply to slefain :

RISC architecture will change everything.

slefain said:

 

I loved that show. This topic is ridiculous, we all know every thing we do online is mined for value and we just keep doing it. 

Is this why Google thinks my penis needs enlargement?

Driven5 said:

What they've been doing hasn't exactly been a secret. People are dumb, and they have been capitalizing on it for years.

"They 'trust me.' Dumb berkeleys." - Mark Zuckerberg on early Facebook users

GameboyRMH said:

Driven5 said:

What they've been doing hasn't exactly been a secret. People are dumb, and they have been capitalizing on it for years.

"They 'trust me.' Dumb berkeleys." - Mark Zuckerberg on early Facebook users

It's not as if that many people question how FB makes money.  And VERY much FB tries their best to avoid that subject.

Appleseed said:

Is this why Google thinks my penis needs enlargement?

Well have probably see all the pics of it you post.   

alfadriver said:

GameboyRMH said:

Driven5 said:

What they've been doing hasn't exactly been a secret. People are dumb, and they have been capitalizing on it for years.

"They 'trust me.' Dumb berkeleys." - Mark Zuckerberg on early Facebook users

It's not as if that many people question how FB makes money.  And VERY much FB tries their best to avoid that subject.

 

Does Facebook actually make money, or do people just keep driving the share prices up to make it look like they do?  I'm old, and don't really believe anybody would pay actual money for whatever Facebook can mine from me.

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

Facebook owns 19.6% of the digital ad market. Google 37.2%. So between the two they own 56.8% of the online ad market and roughly 25% of all advertising dollars flows through those two entities. So yea, they make money hand over fist.

For reference the article states Facebook alone is expecting 21 billion dollars in ad revenue this year.

There's a reason they're so dominant and it isn't because ads are displayed indiscriminately.

alfadriver said:

Jerry said:

...because I just requested my archive.  368mb of very well organized info like profile basics, history, photos, messages, videos, etc.

And every single thing I either told them when I signed up in 2009 or clicked on, joined, liked, whatever.  No secret stash of phone calls or regular texts.  Is this getting overblown?

The real question- are you ok with someone selling that data with the intention of making money off of you (by both FB and the buyer, whoever that is)?

If you are ok with that, then it's overblown. 

...

...- but the reality is that the directed advertising that you see is exactly that.  And I hate that.

I guess it's overblown then.

And if they discover that I'm interested in car stuff, Star Wars, pit bulls, and the pinup pages I follow show that I'm interested in red-heads, fishnets and high heels?  Then bring on the directed advertising and less random cooking ideas and CPAP machines.

NPR just did a story about the efficacy of the data they collected and how it likely didn't really affect the election.  At least not as much as the electoral college does 

The algorithms that Facebook uses are simpler than we think and easily fooled.  For instance, you might click on "like" for Bentley cars but that doesn't mean you're in the market for them.  For that reason, Bentley doesn't buy FB data because it is useless to them.  Just as I might click "like" on a cat video that a conservative friend posted, the algorithm associates me with that friend's conservative likes and follows, and puts another notch in the "conservative" checkbox, even though I'm far from conservative.  The "experts" on NPR pretty much all agreed that the information campaigns used likely had zero effect on the election.

They said you can basically completely befuddle the algorithm if you counter every liberal like you click with an equal amount of Bing searches for conservative things, for instance.  Or for every post you make about Fords, do an equal number of google searches for Lexus and Ferrari.

The crux of the non-FB part of the investigation (as I understand it) is that FB has your permission to collect data on you AND your interactions with friends for their algorithm.  That is legal because you agreed to it when you signed up, but the use of that data OUTSIDE of FB doesn't fall under FB's user terms and therefore they are saying that the data can only be sold from the individual user.  They're determining if the Analytica company violated the law with the sale of that data.

FB is in hot water because this also opened up a new can of worms.  A while ago, the law was changed to require FB to ensure that any data they released about you gets deleted if you delete your FB account or change your privacy settings.  For instance, if you go back to a post about your Miata and set it to private (only you can see), FB is required to notify Mazda that the data packet they purchased about you must be deleted (if they sold that data to Mazda)  FB hasn't been doing that, evidently, which is the basis of that investigation.

But I fully accept that big brother knows everything about me.  Its a known side effect of using FB and google.  I just bought a new google Pixel phone, and within 15 seconds of activating it, it knew everything about me just like my old phone did.  When I go to Canada and open the browser on my laptop, it immediately starts suggesting ads from Canadian websites because it knows my phone is in Canada.

Of course this existed long before FB and any other digital platform.  Back in the stone age of the late '80's, early '90's I worked for a company that always asked if you wanted to be on their mailing list.  Once you signed up, you were sold to anyone that wanted that data.  Since this was mostly upscale people given the nature of the business, they were in high demand.  The company made far more money off their mailing list than they ever did selling products.  One of the biggest buyers of the list were political parties and candidates.  

racerdave600 said:

Of course this existed long before FB and any other digital platform.  Back in the stone age of the late '80's, early '90's I worked for a company that always asked if you wanted to be on their mailing list.  Once you signed up, you were sold to anyone that wanted that data.  Since this was mostly upscale people given the nature of the business, they were in high demand.  The company made far more money off their mailing list than they ever did selling products.  One of the biggest buyers of the list were political parties and candidates.  

Whenever I gave my address out for something like a subscription or a request for a catalog, I would misspell my name by one letter.  That way if I started getting junkmail with that spelling, I knew who sold it.

In reply to The0retical :

Ok, but the only thing that digital advertising ever does for me is negative, or amusing in its obviousness.  I couldn't tell you what the banner ads are on GRM, and I likely want some of those products. If you have a pop-up that is particularly hard to get rid of, that product goes on my no fly list.

If they could figure out that I really like rib steaks, and tell me where good ones are on sale, they might get my attention.  So far, no rib steak ads.

I realize it's Bloomberg, but it is an interesting read on FB scammers anyway:

How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet “They go out and find the morons for me.”

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

The algorithm doesn't need to be super smart to pull people in. Typically ads on Facebook and Google are just designed to display what's relevant to the user at any given moment in hopes you'll click on it to investigate. They're really only good for items which you can afford to throw away 99% of the monetized clicks. Sidebar: A 1% conversion rate is considered pretty good.

Amazon's ad strategy of just display random crap you looked up is different. They get a cut or handlers fee for whatever you buy so they'll just keep throwing E36 M3 at the wall to see what sticks. Amazon can do this because they control the ad delivery vehicle, rather than Google or Facebook, so it costs next to nothing for them to deliver the ad from AWS. Obviously it isn't smart as items are often something you purchased or haven't looked at in weeks but it costs virtually nothing to take the chance.

Steaks on the other hand, Omaha and others know that you're just going to drive over to Ralphs and buy whatever is on sale there when you want it so there's no point in trying to follow you around to sell you a subscription based on a known interest in steak (eg. Searched for recipies.) They might, however, display an ad if you're searching "how to buy half a cow" on Google because there's a good probability you want recurring steak in your freezer.

You guys aren't thinking insidiously enough. The issue at hand wasn't that they were trying to sell shoes or steaks it's that they were trying reduce the unknown quantity of middle of the road voters by appealing to a single issue which would flip the switch for their candidate without being forthcoming about who was supporting the effort. CA was building highly scientific psychological profiles on individual users under the guise of a personality test to accomplish this. Since 68 percent of Americans get their news in some form from Facebook, especially those with less education, and Facebook is designed as an echo chamber, the personality test identified the blocks of voters as well as their first and second level connections which the resulting data suggested could be swayed with targeted messages.

That's why so many of the ads and fake groups were mostly tailored as: "She's coming for your guns" and "Hillary belongs in jail for Benghazi." Serious personal story here about how this works. I was was sitting in a remote FOB in Afghanistan when the Benghazi situation took place. There were definitely some thoughts of "Holy E36 M3 would the President and Secretary of State seriously also let us out to dry if it was politically expedient?" If I didn't go out of my way to read WaPo, CNN, Quartz, and NYT in addition to whatever appeared in the Google newsfeed (mainly because I was aware of Red Feed Blue Feed through the tech community and users here (Thanks ArsTechnica and AlfaDriver in particular)) I'd probably have fallen into that trap too reading only right leaning publications.

The issue at hand is that various interested parties, both CA and Russia, were trying to gain more sway within the government by affecting the elections's outcome with a candidate partial to their interests. That's a lot different than "Look at these flashy shoes." The data mined from Facebook potentially allowed this to happen so, yes, I truly believe there needs to be an investigation and some fines for losing control of the data leveraged.

As to if CA had a real effect on the election, I'm not the data scientist analyzing the results, nor do I know if the data can be tickled enough to get some meaningful results on why people voted the way they did, but I'd bet there was at least some effect. I saw first hand how the rise of Breitbart articles through Facebook polarized my coworkers against Hillary Clinton but not necessarily for Trump, as well as saw what proper use of data analytics did for President Obama in 2012, so I'm certainly not discounting the probability.

edit: I'll look at this again in the morning I have a feeling I'm half coherently rambling because work and my kids wore me out.

In reply to The0retical :

I think to add, that it's not just ads and whatnot- there are systems out there that post "news" that sound reasonable, but are not.  If you get enough people to believe just enough of a lie, then you get to sway them into your camp of whatever.  Which is the core issue with whole russia investigation.  And to note how important this is to all sides- the system is adding fuel to the fire on BOTH sides of any argument at the same time.  Every time.

It may seem that you are avoiding the ads and whatnot, but if you see a post that is marginally not true, but believe it- you are part of this whole deception stuff.

In reply to alfadriver :

Thanks for that. That was my greater point but my sleep addled brain was having trouble putting it together.

Advertising is only one of the engagement mechanisms on Facebook. The others, as Alfadriver stated, are the newsfeed (confirmation bias) and the Like system (validation.) You appeal to users instincts to side with those like them and their need to feel good validated by using both news and "news" sources as well as "likes" for posting a comment.

The point of the game, from Facebook's standpoint, is to psychopathically make money through the ad vehicle. The engagement mechanisms serve to keep eyeballs on the site for the express purpose of serving more ads. The longer you keep users there the better the metrics are to garner more money for advertisers and more chances you have to catch the eye of the user.

The issue with less than complete, or outright fake, news making it's way into feeds is the unintended side effects of the process. Those very real side effects have very real consequences in the form of a less informed or heavily biased electorate and contributes heavily to the political polarization we're seeing right now.

The assentation is that CA and Russia took advantage of that side effect and manipulated the election. That's a serious problem given the outsized influence that social media has on the news that it's users see.

Streetwiseguy said:

In reply to The0retical :

Ok, but the only thing that digital advertising ever does for me is negative, or amusing in its obviousness.  I couldn't tell you what the banner ads are on GRM, and I likely want some of those products. If you have a pop-up that is particularly hard to get rid of, that product goes on my no fly list.

If they could figure out that I really like rib steaks, and tell me where good ones are on sale, they might get my attention.  So far, no rib steak ads.

You're me, right down the the rib steak part. I also find their (and to a slightly lesser extent Google's) advertising to be laughably bad, but we're not their target. I know 3 people who've fallen for one of those scam ads, each paying a few hundred bucks for practically nothing - and most people wil never admit to being suckered by that kind of thing so there are probably more in my little circle. I have  friends that advertised their businesses on FB a few years back. Like you I never saw the value in it and called it a sham, but they defended it and said it was great. They don't use it anymore because neither of them believed what FB was telling them in the reports and couldn't justify paying what they wee charging them.

The way (legit) American companies abandon and disassociate themselves from anything that appears to have committed any impropriety these days, I'm surprised that any of them advertise there anymore. On the other hand, maybe they don't and I'm so unaffected by that kind of thing I never noticed. But if they do, I think it's just a house of cards and only a matter of time.

Dr. Hess said:

I realize it's Bloomberg, but it is an interesting read on FB scammers anyway:

How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet “They go out and find the morons for me.”

After reading that article, I was disappointed that the Stack That Money convention didn't also have a booth for Nigerian princes and a Miriam Achaba lookalike contest.

whenever an ad shows up on my FB feed, I click "i don't want to see this" and then identify it as either offensive, illegal, immoral, or whatever their strongest-sounding reason is.   i'll go ad-free for a good 2-3 months, then i have to do this again for a couple days.

I’m kinda curious why Facebook thinks I’d be interested in an industrial strength toenail puller or muskrat trap.

I'm sure you could find a FaceBalls group of people who are into exactly that.

Is that a Photoshop of a gear puller ad, or are we just looking at what happens when an AI attempts to take Wally's sense of humor seriously?