Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

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I work at a telco/ISP, where I am directly responsible for multiple web-accessible and internal applications that have to be GDPR-compliant. I assure you that I am absolutely not trolling. As a professional, I take the GDPR extremely seriously, and in my private life I am very interested in keeping my private information private.

Have you downloaded FB's data dump of you? That is only the bare surface of what they collect. They do not give you access to the underlying profiling and the social graph they have built on your information. All you are getting is chat logs, uploaded photos/videos, a list of contacts/friends and some simple keywords. That's not even scratching the surface of the data model FB has on every single user.

The data you think you're giving them and the data they actually have are orders of magnitude apart.

The "well you can just choose not to use them" argument falls completely flat when you realize that many businesses and organizations have no internet presence outside of Facebook. They've set up a Facebook page because "everyone has Facebook, right?". If you cannot see the problem with that, then I'm not sure what to say.

I am aware that they use the data I put in in form of friends, posts, etc to inform ML models. And it makes sense that they don’t deliver those when I download my data!

Frankly I would argue that the ML models they create from usage data are theirs! Regardless of how useful they would be to me as a individual to download or not.

Now about the FB tracking pixels and the data they collect, I consented to those when I used the third parties websites they were in and accepted their TOS...and I have a choice to not use those sites or if I choose to block the pixel from firing via technical methods.

FB tracking pixels are on less then .1% of all websites...so I also don’t buy that arguments that Facebook follows anyone around, because it’s simply not true!

Update: so I was curious to see how this actually works and looked up the documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/events-a...

So there is two ways to do it for third parties: get user consent before starting to use the website or use their advanced API and delay firing of the pixels until users have consentent later in the process...like for example on the checkout page!

> They do not give you access to the underlying profiling and the social graph they have built on your information.

There are hints of it though. I noticed in my most recent data dump there was a list of "contacts." Some of those were people who I was never Facebook friends with and included contact information (e.g. alternate emails) that I never had.

It seems like this data was built off of people's phone contact lists. It definitely seems like my contact list was the root of mine.

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