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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Facebook doesn't delete all cookies (for instance, there's an `sb` cookie still set) in their logout response. They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes. And even if they currently did delete all cookies, there's nothing from preventing them from introducing cookies that do remain.

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.

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This is all supposed to be politically scary and demonstrative of the fact that very few people actually knows what is going on. Which all the more scary to me because these are the people who are supposed to understand what's going on so they can have proper oversight. This entire issue reminds me of the time the supreme court tried to wrap their brains around the (finger quotes) "the cloud".

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).

I'm deriving a perverse kind of pleasure from all this. Maciej Ceglowski has a fantastic talk called Haunted By Data, where he compares data to radioactive waste: we collect a lot of it, and ultimately don't know how to handle it safely and responsibly.

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.

  ...with just 500 likes the social network can 
  insinuate more of your personality than your 
  lover.

...and get absolutely everything wrong with such assumptions in the process, including whether or not it's possible to lie when using the Like button.

For advertising purposes it really only depends as a whole how truthful a picture the likes tell. If the likes are on average 70% truthful it is still going to be more effective targeting than not using them at all.

Which is the point. People need to stop seeing "better than a coin flip" as "knowing you better than your lover".

It's a reference to a study where they had an algorithm fed with a certain number of facebook likes compete against personal acquaintances (including spouses) in predictig personality traits. The algorithm won:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

But what's the supposed ground truth that spouses and algorithms were tested against? Self reporting? Some other glorified coin flip algorithm that maybe just did the same mistakes as the "thumbs" algorithms? An export panel populated with people that, unlike the benchmarked spouses and acquaintances, used the same jargon as the algorithm authors?

(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.

The parent's argument assumes though that this kind of accuracy is achieved regularly and consistently today, which is way different than the report of one study.

It doesn't need to be consistent in order to be horrifying.

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.

>>> This is all supposed to be politically scary and demonstrative of the fact that very few people actually knows what is going on.

I just realized we are not even talking about AI.

> They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes.

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.

While a website may be able to track you via IP address within itself, it can't track you across websites like FB can since their code gets injected to a lot of websites (which they do use to track you when you're signed in - my guess would be the same holds for when you're logged out).

They need the website to add their code in order to track you. The website could just send the IPs as easily.

Just an IP is presumably not enough to fingerprint someone.

Still, the website could just share your user agent etc

Browser fingerprinting is already alright, even without world-class data centers with several server rooms the size of football fields, and world-class AI experts tuning those many rooms of servers to intelligently track and classify people online.

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 was thinking the same thing. Why are we at hacker news focusing on cookies when we know about all the other more devious ways of tracking?

Cookies? I would assume Facebook is using the latest tracking techniques like canvas fingerprinting and other ways to identify users uniquely on the web.

I though canvas fingerprinting can't track individual users, but only segments based on the underlying graphics substrate?

Even if they can't track single users solely based on canvas fingerprinting, it gives them a big additional piece of information, to narrow down specific users.

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