Mozilla Presses Pause on Facebook Advertising
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.
Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. Would be ironic if people shared this article on Facebook.
I'm sure that it wasn't intentional. Most CMSs have this functionality built in.
Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.
Do you think anyone will try? This is a PR storm, but it will be drowned out in a few weeks or less with whatever headlines get clicks for news sites at that point. Click-hungry web publishers are not going to remove these sharing tools, and many smaller sites depending on tools like Wordpress probably don't even know how even if they wanted to.
If Facebook lost half of its users tomorrow (which won't happen), there would still be over a billion people using it, not to mention its other tools like Instagram. Love them or hate them, Facebook isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Which is a big problem for German (and potentially European) publishers due to privacy laws. One major German IT publisher therefore developed an open source privacy preserving tool that strikes a balance: https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff
It shows a bunch of buttons but only loads the 3rdparty Javascript when you press them once (ie. show intent to use them) and asks you to press once again (then the native 3rdparty button).
You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-ha...
At the 50% confidence interval, it predicts that Facebook has between 5 and 42 years left in it. Maybe the Cambridge Analytica scandal is serious enough to be the death knell, and in five years it will be defunct. Five years is a long time on the web. I could easily see us looking back on this as the scandal that led to Facebook's complete downfall.
Another question I don't have the answer to is how dependent is Facebook on advertising. If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? Enough to build a completely new revenue model before going out of business?
Day to day big things are rare, but over longer time intervals large companies do die, and for more frivolous reasons than this.
There are plenty of companies that will still advertise there. As long as the users remain - and that appears to not be a question, at least right now - there will be advertisers chasing after them. I am in charge of a relatively large Facebook advertising budget, and I can tell you that I would love it if, for example, half of the advertisers left. Facebook ad pricing is largely based on an auction model, and that would mean less competition and lower priced clicks. But I'd be stunned if even 0.5% of the advertisers left over this.
Mozilla is in a unique situation, in that the political views of its workforce seem to dictate many of its business decisions. That is not the case at most companies.
"When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide." -- Dijkstra
What will Facebook's successor look like, and what makes you think it'll be any more human-friendly?
Honestly, I think it's going to be "mobile messaging and X" where X is different for every subset of people. The mobile messaging allows you to keep contact details for people and keep in touch in a non-1-to-1 way through group chats, while the choice of X allows people to make a statement about what sort of person they are.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/facebook-losing-users-prin...!
Though to the best of my understanding there is no way of commenting on RSS posts unless you host a site.
Seems like a good time to resurrect that idea.
I respect what they are doing, but the community is still nerdy and really small. It will feel good from a techie perspective, but it's not something that many users are going to get much value out of, you are kind of wasting their time.
Not sure, but pretty sure Mastodon is going to end up being as popular as Diaspora RStatus or app.net. It's not a mainstream solution. Federation for most people is a useful feature on top of an active popular social network, not the other way around.
> "They know everything we click and like on their site, and know who our closest friends and relationships are."
was actually a big understatement - due to the ubiquity of the share button, which (as many HN readers know, but many average internet users do not) tracks logged in (edit: and also logged out) users, they also know a decent approximation of everything, done by everyone across the entire internet.
Now, it may be ironic, but it might also be poetic justice if something being shared over Facebook ultimately weakened it. Imagine a virally-shared post encouraging people to take a deletion pledge in 5 days by sharing it. They could use the intervening 5 days to get contact information, and establish what kind of relationship they'd like to have with the people they actually care about on there.
It also tracks logged out users. Assuming you didn't log out of Facebook AND clear your cookies. Logging out of Facebook merely marks you as logged out. But the cookie remains and they use it to track all the sites you visit.
They actually said they're not going to "support the platform with our advertising dollars."
It's not really hypocritical at all...
Should probably be https:// though!
You can see an implementation of it on Schneier blog: https://www.schneier.com/
And before anyone says,
Yes, you can use developer version but that's a beta (yes, it is). Using a beta as your daily driver shouldn't be a thing.
Yes, you can use the unbranded not-Firefox version. But now you have to install it manually (not in any distro's repository) and keep it up to date manually.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html
>When I found out about those, I overthrew them. The first time, I happened to know the password of one of the people who was included among the elite, so I was able to use that to turn everyone back on. The second time he had changed his password, he had now changed his sympathies, he was now part of the aristocratic party. So, I had to bring the machine down and use non-timeshared DDT to poke around. I poked around in the monitor for a while, and eventually figured out how to get it to load itself in and let me patch it, so that I could turn off password checking and then I turned back on a whole bunch of people's wheel bits and posted a system message. I have to explain that the name of this machine was OZ, so I posted a system message saying: “There was another attempt to seize power. So far the aristocratic forces have been defeated—Radio Free OZ”. Later I discovered that “Radio Free OZ” is one of the things used by Firesign Theater. I didn't know that at the time.
>But gradually things got worse and worse, it's just the nature of the way the system had been constructed forced people to demand more and more security. Until eventually I was forced to stop using the machine, because I refused to have a password that was secret. Ever since passwords first appeared at the MIT-AI lab I had come to the conclusion that to stand up for my belief, to follow my belief that there should be no passwords, I should always make sure to have a password that is as obvious as possible and I should tell everyone what it is. Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime. On the systems that permit it I use the “empty password”, and on systems where that isn't allowed, or where that means you can't log in at all from other places, things like that, I use my login name as my password. It's about as obvious as you can get. And when people point out that this way people might be able to log in as me, i say “yes that's the idea, somebody might have a need to get some data from this machine. I want to make sure that they aren't screwed by security”.
So it both provides a false sense of security and prevents users from being able to control the software they run on their own machines.
I've now sandboxed Facebook (and others) in container tabs in Firefox so no cookies go in or out, along with uBlock Origin to whitelist JS per site.
Seeing some relevant ads on the web is just scratching the surface isn't it? Isn't the true extent – and far more worrying – what we can't immediately see, or know it's because of tracking?
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-parad...
I only discovered her writing last night, but Shoshana Zuboff appears to think it is mass surveillance, that big data has bought in new classes of overloads, technology is an attack on democracy and some uses of it break the fundamentals of trust and contracts etc.
Then get Cookie AutoDelete, tick "Enable Support for Firefox's Container Tabs", and whitelist the cookies you need to sign into those sites.
Combined with uBlock Origin it's the best setup I've found so far, though Firefox Quantum destroys my MacBook's battery.
I used to have Safari and Safari Technology Preview to keep good battery life, with only one browser signed into Google, FB and others but I still noticed some searches into the non-signed in browser leaking to FB - I have a feeling the two browsers share some state.
If anybody knows an improvement for Firefox's battery usage on macOS I'd love to hear!
The CliqZ debacle was insanity, considering that Burda, the parent company of CliqZ, is mostly known for its ad and tracking networks, and its clickbait tabloids.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/retrospective-looking-glass...
(disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
> But it's surprisingly frustrating watching everyone slowly catch on to what I had already figured out 8 years ago about the nature of Facebook
Everybody knows. Not everybody cares. I would estimate about 99% of non-technical people don't.
> about all the people who'll just go right back when the outrage dies down.
Which is exactly what would happen.
Here's what is going to happen.
- Facebook's finances won't be meaningfully impacted at all. Advertisers are not going to abandon FB in any consequential numbers. They'll spit off ~$21 billion in net income in 2018 and end the year with around $50 billion in cash. One of the richest corporations in world history, at the age of 15. Comparable to the income production of Microsoft, a juggernaut that is 40 years old.
- Zuckerberg and Facebook will go to Washington, so to speak. They'll bow down as the powers want them to, pledge changes, blah blah blah. We're so very sorry we helped Donald Trump to get elected, we promise it won't happen again.
- Some new monster US Government bureaucracy will be crafted. It'll simultaneously be claimed to protect privacy while assisting the government in further abusing it. The Digital Protection Agency. It will also make compliance increasingly costly and difficult, benefiting the existing tech giants, entrenching their positions against start-up competition. This will increase stagnation. [1]
- A very tiny, entirely meaningless, portion of Facebook users will quit. It will be 1% or less. Most people don't care. Even the ones that do, will overwhelmingly continue using the platform to broadcast their opinions or photos or just to communicate with friends & family generally.
- Political speech and political advertising will be further restricted online. The big tech platforms will become regulated stand-in government & political party censorship systems, as with traditional broadcast media of past generations. This is aggressively being put into place now, across every major social network. They're all going to comply willingly.
- Political power, and the power of these tech giants, will be more entrenched than ever before. It will become even harder to unseat those already in power. The duopoly politcal party system in the US, will ensure its survival at the top of the food chain and will regulate the platforms to their benefit, as was the case with traditional media. Again, this is taking place right now. Nothing will prevent it.
As the tech giants increasingly pledge fealty - while on their knees begging forgiveness - to the existing political system in DC - the two parties - their survival will be guaranteed and protected through regulation and favors. This is tradition at this point, going back nearly a century. The powers that be in Washington don't care who wins in tech, or how much money the winners make, they care about obedience to their agenda of maintaing control & power.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/paul-ford...
1% is like 10 million. More like 0.001% or less. I know many non-tech people using FB. I don't know any of them who considered quitting FB because of such concerns and it's unlikely they would. I mean, they can feel concerned or even outraged about FB shenanigans - just like when they hear yet another politician has been caught stealing millions or harassing employees or selling his vote to the highest bidder - but they don't move to another country because of that.
Otherwise, your bleak picture seems to be entirely correct.
To cover this cost and profit off of you, they need advertising dollars. Those entities are the real customers and Facebook and Google must keep them on. And this relationship is one of the reasons I think Google and Facebook are overvalued because Wall Street doesn't see the parallel with other industries and how their brand has suffered from lack oversight.
When H&M was found to be using child labor in Pakistan we didn't allow them to get away with excuses about "oh, we produce so much clothes, we can't just switch" they had to promptly tell us what their exit strategy was from that textile provider. Imagine Wells Fargo is found to have bought adds from Google that was featured on an site for Holocaust denial or ISIS recruitment, really bad stuff. Imagine the reporter asking if Wells Fargo supports ISIS and they would answer "of course not, we have no idea where Google will feature our ads, we only know what target demographic we bought" to which the reporter could reply "so, will you make Google guarantee you won't be funding Islamic extremism? Or will you be moving off of Google soon and start buying ads from local newspapers where you know for a fact they won't publish ISIS recruitment or Holocaust denial pieces?".
When it starts sinking in for the Fortune 500s what they're really buying Google and Facebook will find that quality control is a lot more important and expensive than they previously thought.
That way you only have Google (and whatever apps you decide to give access to) tracking you and not your OEM.
Do you think other people will follow or is this a statement of position?
I'm afraid I can't go check what ads I saw, since I just jumped on the bandwagon and deactivated my account.
By forcing someone to see an ad without a prior approval of the viewer, it's also forcing someone to passively memorize some sort of information. And in some maybe not-too-distance-altered-carbon future, violate their right to forget the ad (as there is no such method you can pay for forget seeing an ad).
What if instead of having a button on an ad to say "Do not show me ad like this", instead having all ads start with a button/muted dialog such as "We like to show an ad of this sort, and it will likely create light memorization, strong persuasion with heavy text but little colorful graphics".
I'm really thinking the events going on right now can create some new opportunity to reimagine how the relationship between ads and viewers could work out.
Edit: Just checked, they had a deal with Google until 2014 when they signed with yahoo instead. As of 2017 they switched back to Google as the fault search engine but there's no info on Wikipedia at least about whether or not they get money this time around