Facebook buys offline data gathered by marketers or gathered from other sources

apnews.com

56 points·paulashbourne··9 comments

Dear general public, welcome to the advertising industry. This is standard practice that's been going on for decades.

Doesn't mean we can't change how things are done. It'll be an interesting public discourse now that some light is being shined on these practices.

Some societies have changed "standard practices" which went on for centuries. It is possible.

Google does the same. They claimed last year to have 75% of all credit and debit card transaction data in the US, so they could match ad displays with successful conversions.

It's really hard to find large companies that you can continue to like. I'm always floored by how companies like Google start out as the underdog with everybody rooting for them and then as soon as the big bucks come in they start behaving just as bad or even worse than whatever they replaced. There's something fundamentally wrong here, it shouldn't be the rule that companies become like that but the exception.

Any new organization (commercial, state, or religious) that achieves sufficient influence — will be targeted by humans from incumbent organizations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

> It's really hard to find large companies that you can continue to like

Why would you want to or need to? (I'm asking seriously.)

I assume "to like a company" here is a metaphor for a company actually employing ethical behavior.

This is the data I actually want to see when I “download a copy of my data”.

All companies do this!

Purchase data from multiple sources with the intention of connecting more dots. It helps them get around most of the data is anonymous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com