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I respectfully disagree. Very few people will ever clear their history.

Which is why I used the caveat “if a significant percentage of users” do this. If not then fine, but if they do, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we can all say goodbye to Facebook. That’s how big of a problem this would cause.

They apparently announced that they’re getting into online dating today. Maybe the plan is to knowingly decimate the ad platform and charge for dating at some point. They’ll have massive layoffs and have to sell datacenters, but could at least keep the lights on for a few remaining employees managing the dating service.

The paragraph literally starts with "if"...

And then the author goes on to say "I would short the stock now".

> If a significant percentage of users actually exercise this option, that will be the end of Facebook as a significant channel for ad spend. It will decimate revenue.

They'll make the "Clear History" feature a multi step process that's tucked away in a configurations pane, miles away from what the common user will seek out and use on a regular basis.

Also, for "technical reasons", using the feature will somehow result in FB Events no longer working properly.

And, like this article does, they'll randomly pop up Zuckerberg's face at you.

> If a significant percentage of users actually exercise this option, that will be the end of Facebook as a significant channel for ad spend. It will decimate revenue.

I don't think it would have a significant negative impact on Facebook at all. I see the value of ad networks as primarily resulting from two features: Having a large audience (network), and knowing the audience well (targeted ads).

Facebook will still have a large audience if people keep using it, even if they all delete their information, so a large audience is a given.

Knowing an audience has two large pieces, identity (i.e. you're user X) and derived identity data, i.e. people interested in HN are interested in tech. The biggest use of all this data is associating users together. If all my data across all the internet was deleted immediately, I bet Google et. al would be able to uniquely identify me within a few days, they wouldn't know I'm the same person whose data was just deleted, but they'd know a wealth of targeting information about me again, and within a few years I'd bet they'd know me just as well as they do now.

My web usage is pretty routine, and humans in general are pretty routine, so I would expect it to generally hold that, without explicit effort to the contrary, we'd all be pretty easily re-identified (at least as much as advertisers are concerned) after deleting our information, and sure, I won't be searching for that exact search query because now my git-fu has improved, but I'm still going to be doing things that identify me as someone interested in and/or using git.

Facebook is going to keep all the derived data from people, and that data is going to allow them to very easily re-target anyone once they have a good feel for what their interests are. And I can't imagine a more transparent display of interests than activity on a social network, it's almost explicitly interest-bound.

I don't think it would have a significant negative impact on Facebook at all

All I can tell you is that Facebook had a large audience before the pixel, and few advertisers were able to generate ROI from Facebook ads. Now he is suggesting that we will return to this state. Showing irrelevant ads to people based upon basic things - like being one of 150 million people that like Coke’s Facebook page - just flatly doesn’t work.

But you're not stopping pixel. You're going to be tracked again. All you're doing is resetting the clock. How long after pixel was implemented did it take for the value of Facebook ads to skyrocket? A few years? And Facebook gets to keep all that they learned during that time, just not the original data they've derived all that wealth from. It's like losing training data for ML. It's not a big deal when you get 10s if not 100s of millions or more data points every day.

> It will decimate revenue.

So it will remove a tenth of the revenue? (decem = "ten")

Huh? I did spell it correctly.

dec·i·mate /desəˌmāt/ verb

1. kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of. "the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness"

The OP is pedentically referring to the original Roman use of the word, which mean to kill/remove a tenth.

Nobody uses the word in that way anymore, but some people want to show how clever they are, so they bring it up.

> If a significant percentage of users actually exercise this option, that will be the end of Facebook as a significant channel for ad spend. It will decimate revenue.

That's what he meant when he said it will worsen your experience right? :-)

We need browser extension that clears facebook history every 15 minutes.

If that gained widespread use, you wouldn't need it anymore because Facebook wouldn't have enough revenue to keep their servers running.

I would be happy to donate for such an extension after the feature ships!

My understanding is user activity and user data are distinct, and I'd imagine by now Facebook has enough user data that this might not be as huge a concern as when they were getting started.

No. They announced that people can remove themselves from the custom audiences created by the Facebook pixel. No custom audiences, and the effectiveness of Facebook ads drops dramatically along with Facebook ad revenue. The pixel has become standard operating procedure in most marketing plans and conversion funnels. Many companies lose money on initial traffic acquisition but make it back plus a profit through retargeting. That ability would be gone.

What choice did they have? Either do this or be regulated and forced to do this.

Said another way: when you become successful enough, the government becomes a stakeholder in your business.

Looking at the 2008 crisis debacle and “too big too fail”, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. If your company has an impact on the level of a public utility, maybe it should be regulated like one.

And God knows that Zuckerberg’s lifestyle wouldn’t change much if he was only a “simple” billionaire instead of a multi-billionaire ;)

I imagine regulation is coming. If not specifically for Facebook, then changes in privacy law in the US to edge closer to what the EU enjoys are forthcoming as soon as the US elects a Democratic House.

The US is a capitalist country. It will see how much negative impact the GDPR has on businesses and consumer choice, as websites block EU traffic in droves, and will not make that same mistake.

All developed countries are capitalist.

And I really want to see how many websites block EU traffic :)

Let’s not even go down this road, it has been the source of very long discussions. I’ll just say that nobody in the US wants the liability of EU traffic under GDPR except for very large companies with expensive legal teams.

That follows from "successful enough" meaning impacting a large fraction of society in some way - which is the government's area of competence. So they definitely will be interested in your impact, and whether or not your market-driven priorities are at odds with well-being of society.