"Is it true facebook can track user browsers even after they are logged out of facebook?"
Zuck: "I need to get back to you on that"
Zuck: "I need to get back to you on that"
Zuck knows this is generally feasible - he's a talented software engineer. The question was ambiguously worded, and Zuck could have clarified or answered that it's generally feasible but that Facebook has tight controls around the usage of that information. It's the panel's responsibility to not let him get away with that type of maneuver, and they don't have the type of real-time support that, say, a news anchor has (with earpiece and live research staff) to handle interviewing domain experts in an optimal way.
I think you could say the same thing about IP addresses. A website might log the IP addresses of people who visit them, or they might not, but quite a lot of tracking is feasible. The problem with focusing on feasibility there, is that you end up with an answer like "yes, just like every other website in the world, Facebook can track you when you're logged out." Assuming Zuckerberg has been coached to High Heaven not to gives answers like that, it seems fair to respond to the question as though it was asking about the internal details of what Facebook does with cookies / IP addresses / browser fingerprints.
What's really sad is that nobody has been addressing just how creepy the internet is getting. Like the fact that with just 500 likes the social network can insinuate more of your personality than your lover. Or how Google can predict what you will likely like to eat for breakfast tomorrow based on the kind of stuff you are buying at the store whenever you use reward cards that is gets cross referenced to your browsing habits that insinuate moods.
We are really over engineering the internet to the point that we have a "don't touch that red button" being installed into our lives where nobody knows what it does until it gets pressed, we end up wrecking our cars and are left wondering why the car manufacturers thought it was smart to install NOS in our cars without our knowledge in order to remain on the cutting edge (and thus competitive).
...with just 500 likes the social network can
insinuate more of your personality than your
lover.
The fear is that big data tech will become radioactive.
Imagine a bus full of school kids crashes because the driver was a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon.
Some smart SV engineer realizes their tech spotted the driver visited AA groups regularly & his wife just left him. The algorithm knows this data makes him an excellent target audience for _new alco-energy drink!_.
It doesn't really matter if the technology is even capable of that yet, what matters is that this is the sort of outcome that adtech engineers are trying to create.
(Glancing over the footnotes it seems to be (b), some other algorithm)
The beauty of adtech: it's perfectly fine to be wrong as long as advertisers think you are right.
On meta level, this "better than your lover" meme/study is surprisingly enlightening.
He ends the talk with a warning that unless the tech sector is careful, they will have their own Three Mile Island, and will forever afterwards be regulated into the ground. Facebook and Google are almost begging for it. May we see them become a shadow of their powerful selves in not too distant a future.
I just realized we are not even talking about AI.
Cookies are almost certainly irrelevant to FB's ability to track people, and Zuck certainly knows it.
His response there was an unequivocal lie.
I am guessing because I used the app at some point on my phone it fingerprinted it, then Instagram goes and fingerprints it when you install and links your account even when you decline to do so.
3 years ago uber got popped for this:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/23/15399438/apple-uber-app-s...
I can tell you that fingerprinting is still possible today.
Think about the times your phone is near your friends phones, how your phone probably sits in the same space every night, the overlap between your IP location to whatever other devices connect behind your NAT which also send data to FB.
By definition, ad tracking (cookies etc...) is opaque to most people and explaining it publicly would make it seem like FB is doing something more nefarious than others.
It's an important discussion but his response would just make FB seem way worse on that specific issue than highlighting how the entire ad network ecosystem works.
Even those of us without FB accounts (with forgone networking opportunities) are at risk because we all have friends without the same cynicism.
Any legislation that comes out of this hearing wouldn't apply only to Facebook. Facebook admitting the extent of its tracking could help clean up the "entire ad network ecosystem."
The only ad network in front of Congress today, was Facebook. 'Everyone else is doing it' or 'this is the nature of the business' doesn't qualify as an excuse. Perhaps it could have been good for the large public to know what goes on with ad networks these days.
Edit: Found it, Question from Mr. Wicker ~1:36 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZiDRonYZI