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gwicks56

1000 word statement.

Number of times the word "advertising" was mentioned: 0

Facebook continues to pretend it's business model is unicorns and kittens, not selling user data for money.

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It was standard crisis management PR sermon.

"learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together".

You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

Exactly this; no one is sorry, they're sorry they got caught after the fact. This is simply an attempt at ass covering and shifting blame onto Cambridge Analytica so users / investors / governments don't sue Facebook.

You're absolutely right. This is a bullshit non-apology in which nobody is actually sorry for anything. It's crap and does nothing but try to shift blame.

Yet, maybe it serves a purpose? It doesn't matter how sorry they actually feel, nobody is going to feel better from a large, public, self-flagellating apology. Nobody is going to be happier or more mollified or satisfied. All it's going to accomplish is to provide grist for the lawsuit mill - after all, why apologize if you're not guilty?

Again, you're completely right. They're clearly not sorry.

Should Facebook be sued?

I want to say yes, but there is a problem with suing these sorts of monopolistic companies. If Facebook were to be sued, for lets say $100 million in a class action lawsuit, even if they end up paying, it ultimately won't change their behavior. They have enough money to pay that, take a small hit in their earnings for the short term, and then continue as if nothing happened.

I had a very hard time imagining Zuckerberg actually writing these words, it just felt too carefully crafted and full of standard PR tropes. The CNN interview should be interesting, then we can hear the actual words from his mouth.

The words he's been rehearsing in hours of mock interviews with the same PR hacks, for the last couple days.

I imagine he'll be answering questions provided to CNN by the Facebook PR team.

No need to create the paper trail, the "hard hitting"-looking questions any tv news outlet is going to ask are incredibly predictable.

I always see people say this after any PR crises... but how would you say it instead if not that? Is there a way to be truly creative and not shoot yourself in the foot at the same time?

He laid out what happened, and several concrete actions they're taking to prevent it from recurring. That's not boilerplate.

I think people are sort of doubtful they will really follow through whole-heartedly with what Zuck wrote, because that's sort of their MO.

Thoughts and prayers that our random business partners will behave.

...and go on to continue to beat their wife, do drugs...

Facebook doesn't sell user data for money. It sells targeted advertising for money. There is a huge difference.

Yea, actually selling their user data would put them out of business... Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

You meant: why sell the cow once, if you can continue to sell milk indefinitely :)

Sell the premuim quality cow to buy two crappy cows. Sell their crappy milk dirt cheap to undercut the premium quality milk market. Invest, repeat, and race to the bottom.

Because cows don't provide milk indefinitely?

Because you get more money for a cow than milk over a long time period and can use the cash to expand the cow-selling business?

I think this thread has jumped over the moon...

(And that original metaphor was a bit mismatched, actually.)

2018’s 3P data and tracking tech no longer needs to violate FB policy to do what was done in 2013.

FB provides a platform for ads, sure, but it can be used for way more than just ads.

3P tracking can infer who (even specifically) is viewing ads and it knows the social graph by other means. It can also do effective mass psychometric tests. A/B testing infrastructure can be used for more than just optimizing ads ... all of the psychometric dimensions tested by Kogan’s 2013 app can be expressed as embedded imagery and messaging in ads, and the same types of tests can operate at the same scale by integrating 3P data and tracking (some of which certainly originates from policy-compliant FB apps) which already knows the social graph beyond what FB will allow a single app or ad to draw.

All I want is Mark Zuckerberg to say is "this isn't a community, we're a multi billion dollar company. We have a pretty cool website where you can do a bunch of stuff, and we mine your personal data (and sell it) to pay for it. Sound like a good deal? We think so."

But no, we've got to pretend Facebook is a touchy-feely community. I get the feeling that Facebook is ashamed of the way they make their billions.

Why do you have such a hard time believing that he is well intended?

You seem lost in a false narrative that he is out to get you :(

I challenge you to rethink your position assuming he means well...just for the fun of it...and share with us what your conclusion would be

It's not really selling it's user data for money; it's selling access to it's users for money. Sure, user data allows some advanced targeting, but the reason they make the profit they do is that people are buying ads for people to see, not data about them. That's an important distinction.

Most people are buying ads for people to see. Some others, however, are using the platform as access to user’s extensive 3P data, once they click and are shuffled through multiple shady ad exchanges gathering and selling data, including the social graph.

Some others, like CA and ilk, also get easy access to user’s psychometric data, by embedding the psychometrics into A/B tested ad content.

The adage “you are the product” has only become more true as FB has advanced, whether by their intended or explicit policies or not.

Facebook has cut down more and more on that as they've decided to be an advertising company instead of a platform. The vast majority of their data issues come from pre-2015 when they were still experimenting with their business model.

Honestly, at the moment, Facebook has huge economic incentives to keep as much data to itself as possible. Facebook being the only place where you can microtarget to such an extent is a huge moat around their business.

Even with their data policies, FB (and any ad platform) enables massive data-mining by the third parties which host the ad exchanges and destinations.

And microtargeting can be abused (or just plain used, depending on your perspective) to infer only additional data by incorporating it into the 3P analysis once users click and start loading non-FB content. Microtargeting by its nature leaks information about the target segments ...

Figuring out the data FB uses to microtarget is simply a matter of buying enough ads, or getting in the middle of enough campaign-to-user relationships (as a central 3P ad exchange or tracking service).

I think there are some pretty large differences in scale between "buying ads to target people with specific attributes and saving the situations where they interact with your ad" and "enabling any application to view all of the information about any friend who has connected with the app user".

I wouldn't argue that micro-targeting can't end up with very specific privacy concerns, but I don't think it's nearly the same scale as "you should probably assume that if you signed up to enable the Graph API on Facebook all information about you prior to 2015 is available to people you probably don't trust".

It’s a different scale only in the timeframe of a single campaign. 3P trackers have an *ongoing central vantage over many campaigns, giving them data which they accumulate and sell to each other, causing leaked “private” data to accrete and spread in essentially a viral fashion.

The resulting dataset over even short periods (< 1 yr) time is comparable to a total datadump, including an accurate social graph. A “very specific pivacy concern” it is not.

They are selling market making for an ad market. Any market is a trade of both value and information.

I disagree, because Facebook's incentive is to keep all their information to themselves in an advertising business. If their the only ones who have it, then in order to get the same form of targeting you have to pay them.

It’s not possible for them to keep targeting data to themselves.

Targeted campaign products leak data about the user’s targeted attributes by their very nature.

If you want FB’s targeting data, simply buy targeted campaigns and associate the target attributes with the users who click once they are on your server. At scale, the targeting data is transparent.

Big ad analytics companies and ad exchanges can and do basically sit in the center of many campaigns and slurp up the targeting data which is naturally leaking from FB by virtue of their selling capaigns based on those targets.

Whether they want to or not, they are selling their data.

Edit: Care to reply instead of downvote? Is everything above not true?

Interesting, that is same as the number of times "sorry" and "apologize" was used apparently.

Who doesn't know Facebook sells targeted ads?

People outside of the tech world, in general, do not really know what the "targeted" in targeted ads means though. They think advertising, they think ads in the NYT or on TV. People do "know", but unless you really think about it, or understand how it works, its invasiveness can be easily overlooked.

Yeah, I just took this to mean they were mad they weren't, from their perspective, properly compensated for such valuable data.

I like the part where he says, "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you." Facebook doesn't "serve" consumers, it built an RPG that harvests user data and sells it to the highest bidder.

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