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Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

Main takeaway from this: Facebook know much less about me than I thought. Maybe the whole online advertising industry is an emperor's-new-clothes situation.

My favourite bands appear to be Blaise Matuidi (who is a footballer - I don't even know who he plays for though), Kool & The Gang, Kool & The Gang, Kool & The Gang, and Kool & The Gang. My favourite sports entities are Team and Kool & The Gang. Under food & drink I have been correctly identified as a fan of water.

I'm a pretty active Facebook user too, so it's not like they have a death of data.

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If by "emperor's-new-clothes situation" you mean the paranoia about what these companies "know" about individuals, I agree. But since at least Google's revenue last year was $75 billion, it's clearly valuable to have statistically significant information about groups of people.

I think that people who are worried about data that others have on them would be better served by worrying about data brokers first, though: https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-... (though again, I think that the amount these people know and sell to others is less than a small town shopkeeper would know about their patrons 100 years ago).

I think by "emperor's-new-clothes situation" GP is referring to the possibility that companies are paying for advertising based on the notion that it will be targeted using sophisticated metadata on users, but that the metadata is in fact far less sophisticated than touted.

One would think that all significant ad spend by sane companies is made in the context of an empirical study demonstrating the uptick in the relevant metrics caused by (smaller) ad spend. But honestly, I share the suspicions of the GP, that western capitalism in certain areas (e.g. Bro-y advertising) is influenced more by group think and connections and unthinking continuation of established business practices, than by truly objective data-driven decision making.

>though again, I think that the amount these people know and sell to others is less than a small town shopkeeper would know about their patrons 100 years ago

but a shopkeeper 100 years ago would have longstanding relationships with those people, they would have to face significant consequences if they used this information to swindle people. They have as much stake in maintaining an honest relationship as the shopper, its a symbiotic relationship.

a distributed system of databases owned and traded by conglomerates has none of that

I am one of those weirdos who is not on Facebook, but I have come to a similar conclusion about Google. The ads that I am served are almost funny sometimes.

>I'm a pretty active Facebook user too, so it's not like they have a death of data.

dearth.

Just because they’re not showing you all the data and analysis capabilities they have doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Why would Facebook waste their effort making sure that all user data is exposed through their decrepit and intentionally hidden ads preferences section when they could spend that effort analyzing that data and making it available to their partners?

I've had the same conclusion for a while. I'm not a social media junkie, but I use Facebook often enough that they should know a lot about me but their ads and their algorithmic content show that they have a long way to go in getting a computer to actually understand my behavior and interests.

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