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Exactly that.

I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but when - thanks to the GDPR - that hive of scum and tracking that underpins the modern internet was revealed I was really shocked.

Clicking one of those "manage your cookies" links is a truly enlightening experience.

How should Average Q User even begin to grasp the implications of this fucking datasucking hydra?

I was glad having "deleted" my Facebook account some 4 years ago.

Man, I didn't no 10% of the shit that's really going on.

As a fellow geek, of course I was aware of the potential abuse.

Being party to conversations with C-level sociopaths is what really brings it home.

One example: One employer railed at the injustice (loss of profit) of not being able to share the millions of patient's medical records we'd accumulated with Big Pharma's marketing machine. This employer spent considerable effort trying to figure out how to work around the law (eg plausibly deniable anonymization).

add to this also the target audience.

FB may have started out as an invite only thing for technically savvy(ish) college kids, but those days were completely over the minute they got their app so tightly integrated with iOS and Android. So ... circa 2010 maybe?

FBs target audience now is literally the same as or even wider than television. We don't expect granny to understand the economics of her cable box.

She's used to paying the cable bill, seeing a few ads and feeling free to use whatever is on offer. Because she paid for it.

For instance the guide channel is not "free" from her perspective, and she has no expectation that she should need to be suspicious that for insance, the guide channel is tracking her viewing habits and customizing the programming on offer so as to massively sway public opinion and elections.

Average US consumers are used to this model, whether or not the fine print spells out something else. They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.

While I completely agree with your comment, it also omits something that just serves to underscore your point that consumers make assumptions about how things (economically) work.

> They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.

Your example switches from "I pay <somebody> that enables access to <somebody else>" and you don't even have to go that far.

The guide channel is not tracking her viewing habits, but her cable box certainly is. The industry term is Addressable Media[1], and if she has any modern cable box from any major provider then she's being tracked and targeted for targeted ads just as highly as Facebook would be, despite her paying her cable company for the privilege of watching it. And while it's not customizing the programming itself that she watches, it is customizing the ads she's seeing. It's effectively the same as Facebook, where the she's using whatever is on offer and being subtly influenced by highly targeted excerpts being interspersed into it.

Ever experience weird glitches for commercials that start and end almost immediately, or randomly lack sound or any number of weird quirks that would make you think "man, someone just spent a lot of money for a messed up commercial spot, how did that get passed QA/QC?!"... chances are that was just a hiccup for you specifically as your cable box dynamically inserted an ad, and not hardcoded as part of the wider broadcast.

Cell phones are the same. Even though you're paying the cell company for network access, they're also double dipping by selling targeted audience capabilities based on their data of you based on ads that are seen while using their network.

[1] https://martechtoday.com/addressable-tv-state-cross-device-a...

Most of the people I've talked to seemed to think that ads were how money was made from services like that. Promoted content that's constantly in their face trying to blend into normal content.

In fact, so much so that it's been hard to get people to realize that the recent issues haven't been related to ads at all. Facebook itself stills seems to be trying to blur the lines between data collection and advertisement.

To me there's nothing wrong with ads. Even content-targeted ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves). But the push towards creating profiles that follow you around to target ads to you on multiple platforms based on your previous behavior is just creepy and dangerous (when political ads and control over the data comes into play).

ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves)

That’s what genuinely baffles me. If I were a manager of a gardening company and I wanted to do targeted advertising I would just buy space in gardening themed publications. The idea of showing people my ads while they’re on other websites and not in a gardening mood anyway makes literally no sense. All this tracking and profiling ads zero value for the ad buyers, so why are they paying for it?

Because it does add value.

Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.

You can do that kind of advertising without collecting this much data and creating psychological profiles on every user (think: Coca-Cola).

And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike).

If people are likely to be consumers of those things then they'll probably digest media related to those things or other media in the same demographic. This is classic marketing and it doesn't require the level of privacy abuse that Facebook has been trying to justify.

Agreed.

You do that because its not an either/or decision, and the bidding nature of digital advertising means the lower effectiveness will be reflected in what you're paying. You can be paying a premium for people searching to buy gardening gloves, a little bit for people reading gardening stuff, and then a pittance for people that may be related to gardening in some fashion.

You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.

I suppose that's true. Before Facebook I basically just talked to people over AIM and email lists. I remember setting my status on AIM so people would know how things were going. Initially creating a Facebook account did feel like just filling out your user profile in your AIM account so your friends can find information about you.

Perhaps someone was also mining the AIM data, but that would never have occurred to me to do. I doubt the tools to analyze and monetize it existed yet in any case. I'm not even sure the tools existed to monetize a social network when Facebook started.

It's a kind of weird conceptual leap to be honest, when compared to thinking about just selling ad space or perhaps targeting it based on people's interests.

On a similar to theme to the ever present facebook button, I wonder how much tracking Google is able to do through Google fonts, an absolute ton of sites use Google's CDN to deliver fonts to your browser.

Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.

I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and their dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC.

Realistically, I think we have three choices:

- We can't have nice things.

- Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information.

- Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies.

But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).

I think another thing that bothers me about this mindset is that we have started viewing "consumer" action as the only valid response, which is really convenient for some people for the reasons you mention.

But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials.

This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.

I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to

a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

But surely all the evidence suggests that it is unrealistic, given that reality shows us over and over that people don't read these boxes before checking?

Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

Actually, I do(almost always). But, that leads to it's own set of issues. My banking session timed out before I finished reading it. Another service I've been using for over 10 years just added new legal that I don't agree to... now what? That service has a network effect... so, I have to leave? drat! Truth is, most online services ask for more than I am willing to concede. That is an issue.

Not to mention the services that alter their TOS and "notify" you by updating a web page. No email, no summary of changes, just a quiet update to a 20 page document that you automatically agree to by continuing to log in.

If you were to actually sit and read those agreements for everything you use, more than half of all productive time for humanity would be reading licensing agreements. You can refuse to click on these things,but these companies continue to try to insert themselves into more and more of society until we get to the point that you can either chose to spend all day confirming companies aren't taking advantage of you, or checking out of society.

This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far

All sensible choices last only till antagnositc action occurs.

In the case of legal documents -

1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.

2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.

Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.

you have to evaluate this position in the context of comparing it to the alternatives. Do you propose government regulating every moderately complex activity because people can't understand it? First of all, people are smarter than you give them credit for and secondly, Soviet Union tried this. It just doesn't work.

The Soviet Union didn’t live in the modern era - and the country which is comparable today is China - and they’re doing very well. I’ve heard many credible claims that the Chinese state will fail, but it hasn’t till date.

So that point may need to be re-thought.

Doing what very well? You are making too handwavy of a statement. they are regulating some things they care about very heavily and others not at all. And very well is all relative. China is a poor country still, comparing it to US is not reasonable at this stage

> After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.

It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people.

Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as actively as they used to.

Granted, that could just be a normal fall-off since the 2016 Presidential Election season was a "special" time. But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp. Sure, that is also a Facebook joint, but it sends a real signal to Facebook as to what the market values in a social media platform, and it seems it's not the Facebook model.

> But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp.

I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).

(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)

I've been trying to do the same. Most of the communication has moved to WhatsApp and the "here's what's going on in my life" blasts have moved to Twitter and Instagram. It seems like people have reverted back to using plain old email (or Evite) for event invitations (thank God for the former ehhh on the latter).

The big impediment left has been Facebook's function as a social space to share photos with all and sundry. If not for it being the place to post photos of kids, weddings, vacations, etc. I don't think people would be spending much time on it. Seeing pictures of their nephews, nieces, kids, and grandkids on there is definitely what keeps the old people plugged in.

There really isn't another service that fills the niche either. Instagram is geared towards individual photos rather than albums or chronicles of events. Flickr kind of did, but it's basically dead now and its narrow focus on photography alone wound up gearing it towards pro or hobbyist photographers and didn't get much buy in from everyday users.

Facebook also seems to be something of a default space to host a bulletin board or community forum. Next-door has been trying to muscle in on that territory but it's been plagued by problems with racist usage patterns. Those would probably go away if it was more common, but it's created some real issues with optics. Also, I have no idea what their security practices are like so who knows if it's an improvement.

Google Photos isn't bad for making and sharing albums. But then again you're just trading one giant for another.