Facebook has asked U.S. banks to share financial information about customers
wsj.com
wsj.com
“We don’t use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads,” said spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana. “We also don’t have special relationships, partnerships, or contracts with banks or credit-card companies to use their customers’ purchase data for ads.”
How do journalists expect me to interpret this? The first sentence says Facebook made a promise, and the second paragraph reads like a supporting quote. The quote doesn't make the promise claimed in the first paragraph. Should I assume that a Facebook representative made the promise, but the actual quote got cut. Or should I assume that three different authors can't critically read a sentence to tell that the quote only makes statements about current practices? Why do we accept articles from major outlets without publishing the full text of the interview with Facebook?
I am more inclined to believe that marketing spin, lawyer-approved press releases, and asymmetry of resources for vetting (reporter)/preparing (Facebook) lead to spun views for normal reasons; not to speak of other pressures and less friendly corruption that might occur.
Still, what can Facebook be thinking? Given all the controversy over Cambridge Analytica etc, you'd think that they'd be pushing some privacy PR. But no, they're digging deeper. What is up with that?
Also, at some point, you'd think that people would just stop using it. Again, time will tell.
The fears here seem to be somewhat overblown and misrepresented by the article - certainly by its headline.
Technically, telling the truth, in a weasely way.
Both are arguably true. But for a publicly traded company, the "Why" must always come back to the bottom line. The ultimate goal is to build value for shareholders. Any answer that doesn't include some reference to the bottom line is utter BS.
By being vague in the pretense of that power-wielding landed this subject the benefit of the journalist doing the last mile dirty work of being specific. The hope is that this will buy her another interview, and another interview, and so on. They (the journalist) may have another plan in mind, but their power to execute it is limited by their professional mobility and utility to the subject.
No "freedom of the press" in the US is commonly understood to mean that the press is free to publish any opinions they wish without being subject government censorship. It is codified in the First Amendment with:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
"Freedom of the press" has absolutely zero to do with freedom of access to subjects the press might be reporting on. And it certainly has nothing to do with PR flaks at powerful companies. These are not even a common misconceptions either. So no "Freedom of the press" is not a "misnomer" at all.
My point is just that a free press, as commonly understood and as in the constitution, is not free. Americans are quick to get upset when legal regulations are placed on press freedoms but slow to recognize the less obvious.
I’m not interested in discussing any further. You appear to just be looking for a disagreement. Good luck.
And your point is patently untrue. Freedom of the Press is not "commonly understood" in that incorrect way in the US.
Honestly it sounded like you yourself didn't understand the meaning of the phrase "Freedom of the Press." You even called it a "misnomer." Accusing people of "looking for a disagreement" simply because they corrected you seems kind of lame and uncalled for.
"The freedom of the press is currently not being limited, directly, by laws, made by the government"
Just makes it sound like powerful corporations are beyond reproach, no matter how influential.
"Facebook says it doesn’t plan to build a system to let US customers review their checking accounts; the company also claims it’s not seeking access to credit card usage data; Facebook suggests it’s interested in offering transaction alert tools and other services via Messenger; the firm already provides similar features in many other countries"
Don't worry, what could go wrong?
So - the first sentence refers to the potential program in question i.e. FB doing some kind of financial integration. The second part I think is FB's 'furthermore' in reference to the fact they don't seem to buy data from VISA to integrate into ads. Since the later is a rather common thing, I guess they felt the need to clarify.
It's funny that everyone is up in arms about FB using FB data to make ads ... when VISA, MC and AMEX basically sell all transactional data to pretty much anyone for any purpose. And this has been going on for some time and there doesn't seem to be a big fuss over it.
Personally I think the sale by Visa of all your transactions is a much worse violation of privacy because it's financial info, there's no overt 'opt in' for this, and it's sold and used willy nilly for whatever.
But to your point I don't think that too many people are aware that Visa is selling data so the context required for the later comment may not be obvious.
Any way to opt out of this?
Without an 'event' like Cambridge Analytica and without some kind of underlying momentum (ie FB appearing in front of Senators) it's probably difficult for the story to catch fire. Then you have to get the press to ignore their business folks who will want to never talk smack of some of their revenue sources ...
s/offer new services to users/increase revenue per user/
Once you've reached the levels of market saturation that Facebook has the only way to grow is value per-user, specifically in 1st world countries where there's actual value to be had.
> One large U.S. bank pulled away from talks due to privacy concerns, some of the people said.
Good for them. I wish I knew which one.
> Banks face pressure to build relationships with big online platforms, which reach billions of users and drive a growing share of commerce. They also are trying to reach more users digitally. Many struggle to gain traction in mobile payments.
That's an industry problem, not an individual bank problem. Also, credit cards are already very convenient and near universally accepted. It's hard to compete with that. Only the uninformed would use a different payment technologies with less convenience and weaker chargeback/fraud guarantees.
> Bank executives are worried about the breadth of information being sought, even if it means not being available on certain platforms that their customers use. It is unclear whether bank customers would need to opt-in to the proposed Facebook services or what other privacy protections might be offered.
It's unclear to me what segment of bank customers would knowingly agree to anything remotely close to this.
Don't ask me how I know, don't believe me, but its Wells Fargo.
> It's unclear to me what segment of bank customers would knowingly agree to anything remotely close to this.
Customers would not agree much, correct. However since credit cards are not your money, you are limited in the ways to tell the bank how and what to share or not to share with other players on the market, since its bank's money you operated with, and bank's goal is to make as much money off of lending it to you as possible. (of course I don't like; jsut so you know before you downvote)
This is in fact even right in your face. Any new card (or renewal you got in mail) has a few pages attached to it, called something like "what do we do with your information and how can you stop us", where it clearly draws a matrix table with YES/NO of what information they share, with whom, and in which example you can change their default behavior (hint: not always)
I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Wells Fargo is still asking for forgiveness in their Jon Hamm narrated Earning Back Your Trust[0] commercial. It would be incredibly stupid of them to engage in another scheme to take advantage of their customers at this time.
I'm asking anyway because a statement like this absolutely demands more than what you're offering for anyone to take a statement like this, in this context remotely serious.
Not even an article or something published from WF to support the claim, that the rest of us may benefit from?
How would this translate to debit card transactions? That is my money. I'll tell the bank exactly what do with my money including give it all back to me, right now, so I can put it somewhere else. I have been on the fence about doing this anyways in favor of a credit union, but laziness always wins. This would be the absolute last straw for me if my bank shared anything with any social platform.
I remember a few years ago some hedge fund friends pitching Facebook as a digital age "value investment" because of its competitive moat and compounding returns. Idea being the more users you get the more revenue you get, and these benefits compound.
The issue with that is, as you mention, they already have most of the users they'd plan to get. To continue to grow, they need to better monetize users by 1) more ads per user or 2) higher price per ad
Seems like they tried 1) the last few years and it failed. Now maybe they are trying 2), but the best way to get higher price ads is through better targeting, which will require deeper privacy intrusions
I suspect this is why Facebook is so insistent on the "free" price point. Less from a revenue perspective than to make it impossible to stay in business long enough to compete with them.
Oh, come on. Maybe it's a US thing, but credit card is the last but one (just before a manual transfer) payment method I use (in Europe, Poland most of the time). It requires providing full credentials to every merchant you transact with on-line. It requires taking out your wallet and typing all this data in. Or taking out your wallet and taking photos of both sides in some modern apps, then checking for correctness. I actually use PayPal as my card payment gate to minimize the number of parties that see my complete set of payment authorization data. Credit cards are moderately convenient when used off-line and completely unadapted to being used on-line.
Edit: except for small transactions when 75 doesn’t apply. Also I don’t know if it’s in Poland too, but I’d guess so.
FWIW I take the same option, because it does feel nice to buy from a website without typing credit card information into some ad-hoc javascript form they came up with.
Note that this is not the same thing as making a payment from a Paypal account.
• iDeal (convenient Dutch banks' system)
• PayPal linked to bank account
• I've usually paid at this point
• cryptocurrency
• credit card because it's such a pain in the ass
Venmo?
Why trust PayPal which has nugatory regulation and is prone to freezing account's on a whim
So technically speaking it is cool idea but some of us are forced to use it and if you don't, you're risking withdrawing all money really fast from your account (e-payment may be not available in small cities or in the countryside) or face risk of being eaten by fees. Cashlessness is popular in Poland but it's always good to have real money with you because you never know what may happen.
Over on the Western fringes here, we had a similar push behind "contactless" payments. We also have Apple and Android pay, but nothing as slick as this.
Apple Pay works here since June 19th, Android Pay since 2016 but since Blik was first (2015) it gained naturally more popularity. We'll see how it withstand Apple Pay as competition
It's hard to imagine how anyone could even consider this being OK without the user being asked and being able to revoke permission anytime.
Well, in theory, offering "more aligned" (eyeroll) products to users is technically 'new services', but ugh.
Sorry. The "users" are not you. They are advertisers.
The totally misconstrued experience the article appears to be about is primarily for messenger chatbot approaches that are already in use for paypal and a few banks (BMO, Wells Fargo to name two) across the world. The user has to volunteer to start the chatbot in FB messenger, then go through a myriad of permission screens (including an oAuth) to give permission to the chatbot to see some transactions and answer a few other basic account questions ("How much do I spend on groceries?" "When is my payment due?"). Privacy policies for existing chatbots describe all data usage. Users can easily revoke their permissions and remove the chatbot.
This is the same level of data you've given to various PFM apps like Clarity or Mint. And if you haven't, cool, you won't want to do this with Facebook either, no problem. It's with clear and conspicuous permissions. Facebook has publicly and clearly said that they won't use the data to target ads, and they would be sued by everyone if they turned out to have lied about something as important as credit card or bank data. Not to say they won't get caught a year from now abusing the data, nor can anyone say that banks won't abuse any data they get from FB... but if you believe this, don't use the chatbot and they won't see your bank data nor let the bank see your FB data.
Facebook has done and facilitated some dreadful things, but letting folks access their banking data with permission via chat is the US catching up to what WeChat already has: millions of people accessing their banking via chat.
The point is that the issue is being misrepresented, not how popular or not FB is.
If you don't trust them, don't use it.
Also Tim Cook is doing the same thing FB ever did, it's just that Apple has the advantage of making $$$ by selling hardware, not personal information. They are in the enviable position of not primarily selling ads.
if your argument is 'oh you dont have to use it', that doesn't works either because they can offer you a slight service/rate discount depending upon the desperateness of you situation. remember FB already has access to a lot of your data through FB/whatsapp/insta & pretty pervasive tracking everywhere. they are rapidly achieving monopoly status in many communication forms so some panic is warranted when they go after your banking or healthcare data.
let me paint a picture not too implausible for you. you walk into a hospital, as it stands today there is no way you can find out the costs of services you are gonna consume without having to go through the complicated dance of billing/negotiation/copays etc. Now say there is a tie-up between FB/Banks/Insurance companies (and hospitals because why the heck not). they can track you, find exactly how much money you have & what your cash flow looks like. you have to be incredibly naive to think they will not use this information to create some kind of 'adaptive pricing' to squeeze every last penny out of you before they let you go. now let take this a step further, how about FB turning into a kind of payday lender for your unpaid hospital bills? All you need is one in-elastically priced service to monetize the shit out of that.
this is just one example that took me 2 minutes to think, it can get WAY worse!
the bigger issue that (IMO) bothers people deeply but they are often dont articulate is tech used to be about building bridges but now tech is basically trying to turn everything into a toll-booth.
No, you have to be highly conspiratorial to wrap up hospitals, Facebook, the banking system all working together to concoct an illegal, real-time price discrimination scenario.
What you described is not plausible, moreover, if you don't want your finances integrated into your social feed ... then don't integrate. I'll imagine that most won't.
If you go read the comments on the original WSJ story you'll notice a pattern, not a single comment echoing your sentiments, in fact, most of them fear almost exactly what I described. so basically the whole world has become conspiratorial.
Given the casualness of your response to something so serious, it makes me think you are a Fb shill or somebody who has invested a lot in FB stock. BTW since the announcement FB stock is up 5pc+, that makes me think market is pricing in such predatory scenarios.
To the point wherein if someone doesn't buy into their conspiracy, they immediately call others 'naive' and then claim they must be 'paid secret plants' by said organization.
The scenario you described is not going to happen, and analysts are not remotely 'pricing it in'. They're not even thinking about that.
They are however thinking that if FB gets into 'current account banking' for folks ... then that could be a very popular thing.
You may be surprised to find that most product managers and analysts are surprisingly normal people.
However the devil is in the details - and there are a few tricky details here:
- Why would FB be talking to banks about a chat bot integration? Surely the banks can just integrate to FB messenger for business like every other provider. This is pretty standard fare for e-banking as you mention, its been around for years.
- Why is it valuable to them? Their share price climbed. If its a straight out chatbot integration then FB cant benefit much - You cant leverage that. Its not an interface into the bank that facebook itself can use to build services on top of and the users data will be covered by banking privacy regulations. At most it increases user retention a little.
- Then there is the usual tricky language. “We don’t use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads” => Then why am I able to target "online shoppers" as a category in an ad campaign?
Overall I think your right though. Even if they are looking at deeper banking connections its all standard with other wallets/platforms like alipay/wechat etc. These platforms are light-years ahead of FB in that respect. They will struggle to catch up in no large part due to the lack of trust after all the privacy issues.
This is not the same as Plaid and Mint, where we explicitly give those services access to our accounts in exchange for direct benefits to us.
Take it a step farther and vote against anyone with a (D) or (R) next to their name on the ballot.
The current federal government is so far out of step with the populace that a blanket anti-incumbent rule doesn't seem all that bad. The only real question is whether to vote against them in the general election, or just the primaries.
There is a very real possibility that someone else on the ballot is actually worse than the incumbent, which barely seems possible, yet here we are.
A vote "against" without communicating intent doesn't drive recourse in the way you would like.
"X is the most important issue to me this election cycle, and will determine whether I vote for you and donate to your campaign" is clearer and more powerful.
1. Refer to https://www.justicedemocrats.com for a voting guide.
2. Register and participate in local DSA. Sign up here: https://www.dsausa.org
Please excuse my tone, I'm literally (a tiny bit) and figuratively (much more so) sick with disgust.
I can't get away from any of the major data collectors while living in the US. I couldn't even get away from the data collectors living in Europe - I have so many friends here in the US. Their communications aren't subject to the GDPR.
Does the article discuss the bank account owner’s permission? I don’t see how this could be done without explicit permission.
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-to-banks-give-us-y...
Why on Earth would/should anyone believe this after Cambridge Analytica?
My own impression is that they were always very open about reserving the right to do whatever they want with all data, until the CA scandal first caused an actual nontrivial number of people to care.
I'd love to be pointed to relevant facts I might be missing.
On the other hand, I'm less perturbed by what Facebook says it will do-and what Facebook actually does in the absence of a governing policy to begin with. Like, for example, not vetting applications that utilize the swaths of data it consumes from its users
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/26...
Then in a few years when we discover it, they'll say they're sorry and they're trying to do better.
Facebook is changing.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to run some sort of regression of behavior against bank balance and debt load. So sure, they're not using your bank account for ads, just a proxy of your bank account for ads.
Finding proxies for income is decades old (zip code and magazine subscriptions being the classic example), but I'm not aware of anyone doing at this scale and with direct input from banks as opposed to volunteered information.
Get in Facebook, get your LinkedIn subscription 50% off for coming 20 years! (this is made up)
Disclaimer: Not a Facebook employee.
Just like they repeatedly say "we don't sell your data!" they will come up with their own meanings of words and phrases to try to pacify people.
What is a retail bank but some product ledgers and user identities? Banks understand that they are rapidly being reduced to artifacts of regulation. The ones I have spoken to have a primary mandate to "preserve the business model."
The identity information FB has is often more reliable and valuable than the documents governments provide. Perhaps to coin a phrase, what FB and other social platforms have is "collateralized identity," where your relationships and personal behavior data are the collateral on the assertion of identity. The documented one relatively is just a "registered identity."
Difference is the amount of friction, authentication, and recourse you have to each of them. A registered identity is mainly for legal recourse (tax, travel, and law enforcement.) What FB has might lack a bit of recourse, but it has anti-gravity frictionlessness, and a high degree of authentication.
The point at which an institution becomes indifferent to the level of recourse in the identity and switches to one with less friction, more data, and more authentication - looks pretty similar. In fact, the ones who demand registered identity are at a structural disadvantage to orgs who provide services using collatoralized identity.
There is very little to keep FB from becoming a global bank, and current banks will have the option to participate, or compete against the ones who do. It's strategic in so many ways. I don't think this is a normal business arrangement. It may more resemble offering terms on which FB will accept the banks' surrender.
Reminds me of that line from the show Narcos that translates
to, "Silver, or lead."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
/sarcasm
https://www.grahamcluley.com/facebooks-secret-plan-to-access...
My wife had a very early ruptured ectopic pregnancy (which she wasn't aware of), which nearly killed her. On the week that the baby would have been born, Enfamil launched an acquisition campaign targeted at expectant mothers that month, kicked off by a Fedex package containing bottled/powered formula (worth about $60) and including Facebook campaign targeting new mothers.
This was very upsetting to us, so I dug in, found out from the company where they obtained out information, and obtained the list. I spoke to a couple of physician and nurse friends who are pretty confident that it was a combination of the ER admission, an imaging claim, and a drug that was prescribed and filled in the hospital that made it highly likely to an observer that she was pregnant -- but didn't provide enough detail to determine that she left the hospital not pregnant.
It turns out that information regarding hospital admission, insurance claims and prescription fulfillment is available and slurped up by various parties, who are able to de-anonymize it. It contained alot of information, including accurate salary history, cars we owned, approximate credit score, where we bought baby stuff for our previous child, etc.
I make it a point to share this whenever appropriate, as it was a very painful violation of our privacy, and really threw me for a loop, as I couldn't fathom that our medical providers were selling our data to help pitch diapers and formula. Facebook and many other companies either has access to this information by buying lists, or can extrapolate by looking at advertiser patterns.
That would be a very serious breach of HIPAA.....and wow turns out I am wrong, after a quick google search, I'm now afraid you may be right- that they did not de-anonymize you but somehow botched a targeted anonymous profile. Absolutely bonkers.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-data-brokers-...
With drugs, physicians are treated like sales representatives by the pharmaceutical companies, who get real-time data from the pharmacies about prescriptions as they are filled. They are assigned quotas based on demographics and "education" or other programs are targeted based on how they prescribe.
I was less successful in learning exactly what information was shared re: the medical treatment, but because my employer administers hospital coverage separately from physician billing, we believe that only hospital related claims were used. The folks who I spoke to theorized that if I used an HMO, the anesthesia would have lowered my wife's "score" for further marketing.
The hospital network is good at not answering questions and I've gotten very little from them over 3 years -- I'm now thinking about lobbying a state legislator(s) about it.
They also have information about the doctors that allows them to tailor the marketing message.
This might be a good place to start learning more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2517975/
Facebook still seems to misunderstand its role as a communications platform funded through adtech and data harvesting. And as a company with 2 billion+ customers ('users' in reality, as their customers are actually advertisers), they need to understand that they have an ethical role to play in using technology (yes, even communications technologies) and need to address their Orwellian bones.
The obligation to maximize shareholder value for companies like Facebook (or legacy AT&T doesn't align with the public interest). You also have companies controlled by small numbers of people with unusual world-views. (Remember when Twitter was bragging about sparking the arab spring?) You need distributed regulatory force to compel behavior, just like how many aspects of electrical rates are governed in the US by state commissions.
I can’t remember the source but I recently read that Facechook has a PR team of 1,100 (WTF?!) and that even The Zuck (™ pending!) has a personal media team of 15-20 making him look like a Saint. Spoilers: outside of HN and many tech sites, it’s working - even in the light of Cambridge Analytica, et al.
The real issue stems from the fact that very few elected Politicians or Technocrats understand technology and its implications, OR, are too fearful to attack the FANGs as they are very powerful, OR are susceptible to soft propaganda efforts; otherwise known as lobbyists.
It’s clear to me at least that an unregulated Facebook is a potential danger in many parts of the world: USA elections, Myanmar, etc. It obviously has great utility too - hence its absolute success - but the days when Google, Apple, Facechook, et al, say they are not media companies are hopefully in the past.
[1] although not under the current FCC regime!
A few years back there was the case where Target was using mailed ads specific to the profile they'd built for the recipient, and a man went in angry about the pregnancy stuff being advertised to his daughter. He went into the store outraged. Turns out, she actually was pregnant and hadn't yet told her father.
Ever since then, I've been more conscious of my purchasing patterns. I'm sure there are still technological advancements to track cash transactions, but it at least makes it more difficult.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
...though the anonymous mask would work just as well.
(Heck, I might switch just for asking.)
Luckily I bank with a credit union (not for profit) which does not constantly try to monetize me.
Now they are directly partnering with the banks to gather this data and more, with the stated purpose of offering products based on this data.
Why is it OK for Facebook to use this data to sell things directly, but not when they partner with external advertisers? Why should the public trust Facebook with this highly sensitive data?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/29...
It's, in theory, vaguely better. When partnering, they have a contract with the external party, and not you. So there's nothing stopping their partners selling it to whomever.
That being said, Facebook is already on 'thin ice' with me. But it doesn't seem to deter them too much, other than feel good ads about how Facebook loves us all.
You'd think with all the privacy pledges it's made over the past few months, that FB would think twice about doing something like this.
Facebook, why don't you focus more on developer relations and the community that made FB a platform and worth what it is today. Go on forums and the developer Pages and you'll see how strained and alienated developers are. From instant API shutdowns (Instagram) to turning off access to apps that have paying clients that rely on FB API because the app review failed (thanks to reviewers who often don't read the testing notes) and sudden rate limits or access restriction without prior notice, developing on the FB platform has been frustrating.
Ask random coworkers why they use the bank they do - "Well, that's what my parents used" or "that's what was convenient" is the usual reply.
Anytime I ask people if they pay fees for regular banking, they look at me like I'm a crazy person - "of course I pay fees all the time, but I don't pay very much..." Most banks are terrible and treat you terribly unless you keep enough money with them to get the special treatment.
For savings accounts the value of shopping becomes more apparent. But if you are getting hit by bank fees then savings account APY is really not a primary concern.
Ally is offering 1.80% on savings right now. Wells fargo is offering at most 0.15%.
Wells Fargo has obviously done the math and realized that their customers simply do not care to switch accounts even though the interest they offer is abyssmal. Pretty weird stuff. As rates rise slowly it will be interesting to see whether the frogs finally get hot enough to jump out of the pan and abandon wells fargo, forcing them to raise rates.
https://www.wellsfargo.com/savings-cds/consumer-account-rate... https://www.ally.com/bank/view-rates/
I work for a bank, and I want to confirm this. Banking relationships are astoundingly "sticky". The bank that I work for tries hard to compete by offering better products and treating customers fairly, but it is difficult because customers so rarely move to a new bank.
Seriously, folks: if you are unhappy with your bank OR IF YOU ARE HAPPY WITH IT, go ahead and look at the offerings from some of their competitors. You might find that someone else offers better rates, lower fees (or no fees), or treats you more fairly. And if you happen to bank where I work, please do the same thing... if our competitors are treating the customers better then I WANT to lose customers (what else will pressure us to keep our standards high?).
Funny that people complained so much about GDPR being bad for business and then get upset when things like this happen. It's almost like the two are related or something...
On this particular case I would probably agree with you, but I'm not sure it's true in general. From what I understand, for example, Facebook doesn't use your messages for ads. It seems unlikely but not 100% implausible that it could be the same here.
I don't like entering my bank password in mint just for it to scrape the account balance. There should be a separate read-only service with a token that can send that information to services I want to have it. Coinbase seems to manage to do this pretty well.
The only question is if Facebook develops a sufficiently compelling financial product for the mostly not concerned to share this data.
You might not think it is a good idea. I don't think it is a good idea, but plenty of people will determine that the tradeoff is worth it.
I wonder what kind of value would Facebook provide you if you give them their financial data though.
But the kind of thing they could provide would be just like any other financial service like Mint.
You're assuming here that the "tradeoff" will be clearly presented, which we know it will not be. The "tradeoff" will only be realized when it is too late and the multi-national advertising corporation called Facebook, Incorporated is caught (again) mishandling user's data, except it will be financial.
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
Idiots. no quotes.
I have no reason to give FB my data. I've never consented to give them the data. There is no product they could offer that would encourage me to give them more data.
It's two entirely different things.
I get that you would never consent to sharing, even if they competed well with Mint.
But their goal here is at complete odds with your comment, "It's two entirely different things." They are hoping it will be "two products similar enough to be considered competitors."
Facebook, however, is trying to go in through the backdoor. From the article: "It is unclear whether bank customers would need to opt-in to the proposed Facebook services or what other privacy protections might be offered."
To mortenjorck and inetknght, I've not said that the typical individual user would have an easy go of things. What I did do was present options for userS to employ, en masse, in attempts to effect the changes they desire.
It's funny to me how people bother to coordinate efforts for all sorts of essentially meaningless events, but when it comes to things that they profess are important they suddenly decide that they'll wait around for someone (who probably doesn't have their best interests at heart) to swoop in and do the hard work for them.
To borrow from a post above "don't ask me how I know" but, your elected officials and "regulators" are unlikely to change these things unless business needs or public sentiment require it. That leaves the onus on you to make it happen.
If you don't like the terms presented to you by a service provider, try to negotiate them anyway. If the provider is unwilling to accommodate, go elsewhere. Worst case scenario, create your own solution. Isn't that one of the big things about this whole tech/hacker scene, creating solutions to unaddressed pain points?
And to the simpler question about striking language from electronic contracts, try paper(?) or making a PDF and amending it(?) You'd be surprised what serves as a passable solution because, as someone mentioned in another thread, a lot of people just don't put much effort into their work.
I now humbly await your down votes.
So how can we fix that? Putting the data in the hands of government, where it’s probably more likely to be stolen? I assume that facebook has better cyber security than any government agency and a better incentive to keep their customers’ data secure. Or maybe breaking facebook up into multiple companies in an anti-trust litigation that will take a decade to settle?
I might end up sounding like a blockchain proponent here. To be honest I think that most blockchain applications are scams or an overly complicated solution where an old fashioned data base would be totally sufficient. I actually think that blockchain technology has a very big draw back, because ownership is an important part of markets and creating the right incentives for companies. I’m very convinced that the majority of people who are working on some blockchain project don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about. I can’t claim to really understand blockchain in every detail either. My credentials are that I studied undergrad economics at Columbia and helped found a bitcoin exchange software company in 2013 and worked there until last year.
So from an economics point of view, my guess is that blockchain, despite the drawback of eliminating ownership, could be a solution to this specific type of market failure. Here's a video that explores the trade off between ownership and censorship resistance in a bit more detail: https://youtu.be/pHOYORGZrps
“Net neutrality” for the banking sector. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
We either need people to have either greater control over the data companies have retain and use (Europe's approach). Restrictions on what that data can be used for and the ways in which companies and people may treat you differently due to that data.
Once the guy gets busted, he must be thinking about how he got caught. It is banks' active spying: under regulation, banks have become active spies. It is a new way of spying: force private entities to comply for suspicious activity, with a huge discretion given to regulatory bodies on the scope of what the word 'suspicious' entails.
This sounds to be like typical FB weasel-wording. "We don't" as in "we don't currently"? Which is not the same as "We won't." But even if this statement lacked ambiguity does anybody believe anything FB says at this point?
We already know that FB purchases "offline" third-party data from data brokers[1], so why else would an advertising company buy even more data from if not to make more money from advertising?
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-user...
Its difficult to believe there are groups of people working on these kind of programs who do not see anything wrong.
At this point shaming will not work, people know what they are doing and can't claim ignorance. Perhaps there must be a wider acknowledgement of the ethical vacuum in technology, and we do not deserve the public's trust and are actively building the very dystopia some of us postured so heavily about.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-building-8-explored...
Feel like this only pertains to time of publishing. They will just wait a month or two until everyone forgets and do it anyway.
I where him id start firing one or two board members
When software can implement ideas in a short period of time, we need laws that can work even faster. Speed up the process somehow, and “default answer: No”, or something...
so then FB pay the bank for your financial data anf FB then mines said data they purchsed from entity you authorised to do so... then FB "anonymizes" data which it in turn sells as a product whereby the completeness and/relevance value of the productized FB data is higher as it is informed by the data that they purchased.
pluas it is trivial for facebook to correlate you with your bank and etc...
so, yeah, looks like fb can evily get around stupid TOS checks.
How it currently works is that Chase etc knows how much money you make and other banking information, so they can upload your contact info and run targeted campaigns with a combination of Chase's information on your banking & credit card info and Facebook's targeting. The change would allow Facebook to categorize you based off your Chase financial info and let other companies start paying a premium to advertise to you as well.
In practice, it means that when you get approved for an auto loan and start shopping around, you'll magically start getting advertisements for cars and dealerships, since there's now something like an "approved for an Auto loan in the last 30 days" category that these businesses can target with their advertising. Or when you open a business checking account you'll start getting advertisements for point-of-sale systems.
Banks will say they are only handing over antonimized data... and Facebook will find away to pair spending with location and de-anonymize the data —- a move the banks anticipated and agreed to all along.
So shady.
How is sharing financial information helping me to connect with my high school buddies?
As was said above, cash is probably one's best bet, which is part of the reason that there is currently so much talk among gov't officials about doing away w/it.
[1] https://metropolitan.fi/entry/tax-authorities-in-finland-mat...