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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

I think the last paragraph is the most important one:

>"Facebook clarified that it will still work with companies like Experian and Acxiom in order to measure ad performance and provide metrics, although it will also be conducting a review of those ongoing relationships."

These FB announcements the last couple of days seem little more than grooming for possible upcoming appearances in front of legislators. They can point to this and the surface-level app redesign and say they've "already" taken efforts to shore up concerns.

I think most people have no idea that FB and Experian - a consumer credit reporting agency have been sharing data at all. Where was that explained in the app redesign that was trotted out yesterday?

It's worth reading how Acxion who facing similar pressures recently handled their own superficial offering of "transparency":

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/technology/acxiom-lets-co...

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> grooming for possible upcoming appearances in front of legislators

Facebook knows what pretty much everyone in the Valley knows; 90%+ of the politicians in this country (and likely most other countries) don't have the technical education to understand just how little Facebook is actually doing to fix the problem.

I would really like to know what data they are sharing with Experian.

If its just helping them target ads then they should explain why Experian is allowed to continue, but I am more concerned with Experian being "creative" with Facebook's tools and incorporating some of that into their credit scoring models.

I am guessing it is something even worse. Like, Experian uses Facebook data to adjust credit scores. And some time in the near future your credit score will suck if you don't have a social media footprint.

A social media footprint on Facebook in particular, conveniently enough.

Sure, but people already go to extreme lengths to groom their credit histories, at least this method doesn't require spending money. Just as an example, I have a friend who has an account that's older than her that her parents made for the sole purpose of bumping her score.

Pulling data from more sources doesn't change the underlying problem of faceless businesses assigning people scores based on vague unknown requirements.

> And some time in the near future your credit score will suck if you don't have a social media footprint.

People will just create fake accounts that "like" things like "saving money" and "paying off debt."

Sure but anyone judging your credit score isn't looking for that. "Paying off debt but not too quickly" or "Carrying enough debt to accrue interest without defaulting" are more likely what they would want to see.

>"I would really like to know what data they are sharing with Experian."

Sure, I think most people who use FB would. Zuckerberg has been talking a big game lately about regaining user's trust and how "we have a lot of work to do." If he were at all serious about those sentiments FB would begin providing meaningful disclosure about what data they were collecting and sharing with which third parties.

They would also update their privacy settings and give user's the ability grant or deny access to the sharing of that data with third parties. Similar to how users now have to grant apps permissions to access contacts, the camera etc.

FB's desire to continue operating in total secrecy and simultaneously court public trust seems to be the very height of cognitive dissonance.

> Zuckerberg has been talking a big game lately about regaining user's trust and how "we have a lot of work to do." If he were at all serious about those sentiments FB would begin...

> FB's desire to continue operating in total secrecy and simultaneously court public trust seems to be the very height of cognitive dissonance.

Is it cognitive dissonance if they're self-consciously lying?

My take is nothing's fundamentally changed for them, and "the work they have to do" is distracting people until the spotlight's off, making only marginal changes in the process.

Take this change, for instance, it may have nothing to do with user privacy and everything to do with pushing advertisers to FB's own targeting platform more heavily.

>"Is it cognitive dissonance if they're self-consciously lying?"

I don't think it would be no, at least not clinically. And that actually makes the rhetorics even more insidious.

As far as I'm aware, the data only flows one direction, from the 3rd party data partner into facebook, not the other way around.

What wait? Why would Experian send data to facebook? I thought facebook already knew enough. ALSO WTF Experian can sell my data about me to the highest bidder?

It is used for income targeting in ads. Sorry about the lousy/spammy reference, but it's the best explanation I could find.

From [1]:

"Partner categories are, importantly, only available in specific areas. Acxiom provides data from Australia, France, Germany, the US, the UK, and Japan. CCC Marketing provides data from Japan. Epsilon provides data from the US. Experian provides data from Australia, Brazil, the UK, and the US. Oracle provides data from the UK and the US, and Quantium provides data from Australia."

[1] https://boostlikes.com/blog/2017/08/target-facebook-users-in...

Ya, that's exactly what these data brokers do. Its anonymous(when in FB ecosystem) to the end advertisers but they sell your data to ad platforms or advertisers.

That's why I put the word creative in there. If you ran the segmentation one way and ran some ads and then uploaded some data into Facebook and ran the same ads, you could infer what effect your added data had when combined with Facebook's data, possibly to the individual level if the person interacted with the ads/converted to a paying customer.

I don't have a specific use case because its not my industry, but Facebook's approach seems to be to give people tools they know can be misused in creative ways but then frown sternly if they get misused, so it wouldn't be out of character.

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