If Logged into Facebook, Oculus VR Data Will Now Be Used for Ads
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Every time I read these threads, I'm 1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago) 2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)
Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn't provide marketing scale and is extremely expensive. The goal is to have the biggest possible audience, while still applying one or two critical filters. You could hit all 1000 people in a pool for $100 each, or you can hit 1000 people in a pool of 1 million for 50 cents each.
The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting. This means that people selling VR-adjacent services, products, and content can reliably advertise to their core market without wasting money on non-users. Or maybe they can filter out that segment to show different ads to non-users that convince them to buy their first device. I know most on HN hate any level of targeting, but this has a massive benefit to the VR ecosystem because it allows VR companies to reach their customers much more effectively and sell more products.
FB is actually stripping away features from our targeting system and removing inputs because we spend too much compute power ($$) driving optimizations that don't have any material impact on delivery value. Basic is better. There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home. Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless.”
My $500 device should not be exploiting me
Full stop
Without these Ads plans, your device would probably cost $1000, as the Valve Index shows us.
My 2 cents.
Good. Let me decide if the full cost without ads is worth buying the device. Hint: if it doesn't send my data then it might be. Double-dipping is egregiously wrong.
Seriously.
The only reason the Index costs 1000$ is because its absolutely cutting edge and its controllers and tracking systems are expensive. If it had inside out tracking and normal controllers it would be around the price of the Index.
Also, the "clear history" feature should be rolling out (or maybe it already rolled out in your country) that lets you dissociate any 3rd party info from your profile.
Your company has proven it cannot be trusted and will do anything it can get away with and has already crossed the line of "lying is totally OK, and if we're caught we're just gonna publish a bullshit PR-speak fake apology".
Why should anyone trust it this time?
What are they working on now?
I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
The dialog even obnoxiously says "There could also be more factors not listed here." Yes, I know, that's fairly obvious. I clicked the dialog to figure out what those were.
How do you know this? I get ads for male pattern baldness all the time but I'm not even genetically at risk. Half my ads on hulu are for tampons, and no woman lives in my house. Ads really aren't that good. Facebook might've just gotten lucky...
Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/, they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them.
If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interest in or like Pages related to Psoriasis Awareness". Chances are good I'm one of them.
Visited /r/gaming or kotaku? You'll get an ad for a switch.
Plenty for Facebook to have creepily accurate targeting without needing a microphone listening in.
The advertisers are probably choosing to target everyone on FB in that age range, but asking FB to optimize for conversions. Then the FB algorithm finds more people who look like people who are clicking and converting.
Sorry for the dumb question but if you're implying one particular bidding mechanism benefits from FB algorithmic experience in a way that's meaningfully more accurate (serving the ad to the guy or girl with the condition), why would anyone do anything different?
Non conversion optimised ads can work for small audiences of really high value, but that's a pretty niche use-case.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
2: Real conversation I overheard: "I was talking to my friend about buying a switch and the very next day I got FB ads for it!" - well duh, it's the holiday season and game consoles are very popular gifts.
Speech to text and keyword search are both fairly mundane.
I like to believe it is not.
I'm sorry but this sounds so naive to me. As you say in your last paragraph Facebook was tracking a ton of info about everyone. This is why a lot of people distrust Facebook. You might find this entertaining but this happens when you spy on people. We can't know what Facebook does with the data.
There are also people who targeted a friend as prank and succeeded. So it is possible to target very specific people. With enough money you can do a lot of evil with this (Cambride Analytica).
Because we don't know how they use the data a lot of people now actively block requests to Facebook when they visit a website.
I don't think this is very entertaining.
There was nothing at all. No predictive power. Total waste of money and it's funny this example keeps coming up
What matters is that you can target specific people when you have a lot of money because Facebook gathers/gathered that data.
Selling my Oculus as soon as the Index comes down in price a bit. Thanks for the ride.
If the A-Team isn't working on ads, that actually concerns me. When I think of mediocre performers, I think of people who respond most strongly to short-term incentives, not people making nuanced ethical decisions involving a lot of foresight.
> Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
I mean, it sounds to me like the A-Team were the ones motivated enough by the technical challenge to not care about cost, ethics or the "big picture". I know plenty of "A-team" engineers like that— they're in it for the technical challenge and to prove themselves, not to be "slowed down".
Like if it's HN's policy to not call things astroturfing, fine, I'll accept that. But if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and posts in it's own defense for no apparent reason like a duck...
Regarding the “new account” argument: HN encourages throwaways. Maybe OP didn’t want to lose karma on their main account. Maybe they don’t want people knowing who he is? It doesn’t matter.
And adgineer is claiming various things without any evidence at all.
The problem is the fundamental information disparity. The guidelines want us to treat anonymous astroturfers with the same deference we treat "a source familiar with the matter" as reported by a national news publication. There's a difference though: journalists ostensibly act as a filter and a guard against bad faith[1] use of on background or off the record conversations, and try to fact check or cross reference those statements. And journalists usually know who their sources are, and statements in error can result in that source no longer being valued or used.
Hacker News as a discussion site has none of that. We have no way to know if this person actually works at Facebook, actually conveys true information about Facebook, and if it turns out 6 months from now that they're an astroturfing troll or PR firm, the damage is already done. Disinformation online works so well because the initial comment, like this one, gets so much traction and it's unlikely any retraction - if it ever comes - reaches the same audience and causes a reversion of their prior beliefs.
I think it's very silly that the policies ensure the site is exceptionally vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, and too many people presume good faith in an age of anonymous online bad faith discourse.
[1] - let's not wade into the current dialectic, but this is the ostensible purpose of journalists knowing sources, but not divulging them
The other side is that internet users massively project "astroturfing", "shill", "spy", "foreign agent" and so on, onto other commenters and opinions they happen not to like. That's actually the larger problem; in fact, based on countless hours I've spent investigating these phenomena on HN, it is overwhelmingly the larger problem. It's not a close call.
Users taking such cheap shots at each other degrades discussion in really bad ways, so we don't allow it unless they have some basis for what they say. If you look closely at how often it comes up, you'll see that people almost never provide any basis—not a glimmer of anything objective—beyond just disliking what someone else said. Someone posting an opposing opinion on the internet is evidence of nothing but that people have differing views. That is no basis for denouncing someone as a traitor or a criminal, least of all on a site that asks users to be kind and thoughtful and make substantive comments.
So HN's rule is that it's not ok to lob such accusations, or insinuate them, unless there's something more than pure imagination to go on. If people are worried, they are welcome to contact us; we investigate, and if the data gives some reason to conclude that abuse is happening, we crack down on it. But if we look and find no evidence of manipulation, we don't. That seems obviously the right policy to me. The alternative would be to punish users without evidence. That wouldn't be right.
Does that mean we're vulnerable to super sneaks who manipulate the site so cleverly as to leave no traces in the data? Yes, any internet community is vulnerable to that. The best we can do as a community to defend against that is to do what we should be doing anyway: refute bad arguments.
There is a ton of previous explanation of why we moderate HN this way in the archives: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Edit: To continue to refute your own bad argument, you wrote here:
> (1) don't comment about shilling (astroturfing/bots/trolls/spies) unless you have specific evidence, keeping in mind that the presence of opposing views is not evidence
But the reason disinformation works online is that such information isn't readily accessible. You've tautologically put user "adgineer" above reproach. Even asking whether the user has a conflict of interest is against the rules, as you've told me personally before.
To summarize, dang, you have a bad argument here: HN policy encourages astroturfers and disarms the community from asking people about potentially disingenuous behavior.
New accounts are coloured green for a reason.
Furthermore, while it's interesting to read about this good intent, that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Your post actually bothers me more than pure maliciousness or opaqueness, because I know it's entirely possible these systems and workflows could be out of control... which is reflected extremely well today in the major complaints and scrutiny of the platform.
The tinfoil hat side of me does not believe this is a genuine account, but eh, there's no way to know here, and at least it opened up an interesting discussion
And that'll be the company line, until there is 'business value'. FB is just investing in facial recognition technology to "help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you" [1]
Regarding ethics, have their been any meaningful changes since the FTC handed down the $5bn fine for data privacy violations? Or was it just an unfortunate set of actions taken by individuals and aren't representative of the company's philosophy?
Will there be any changes forthcoming when the Illinois class lawsuit alleging illegal collection of biometric data without user consent goes to trial? [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/technology/facebook-facia...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/09/facebook-...
Facebook's money comes primarily from it's ads.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-fac...
What you're saying seems unlikely
>2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)
That's odd, then why does Facebook show me targetted ads based on my whatsapp and messenger conversations, youtube videos I watch, websites I browse, and places and people that are nearby me when I'm signed into Facebook on my phone
Not to be rude, but your post seems like a lot of bullshit just based on things i've seen Facebook do too many times to call it a coincidence.
>There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home.
This is just straight bullshit. Those things are a direct window into finding out exactly what people buy, pretty much the solid gold, diamond encrusted wet dream of advertisers.
You seriously believe that the encrypted communications platform that the US government desperately wants a backdoor in is secretly backdoored by Facebook for ads? Something that mundane?
The platform (WhatsApp) that is subject to huge public skepticism, who's source code is so limited in scope that it's probably been audited by every security researcher that is interested in posting a "I found Facebook being evil" blog post?
And you believe they are using this data for ads? The most obvious thing ever to see if you audit/monitor the app?
This is why theories like this borderline paranoia. FUD. Nothing more. Statements like that discredit your entire argument.
-- And yes, of course Facebook uses trackers on sites to figure out what sites you've been to. Of course they use unencrypted data available to them to target ads. Your data is already in their database. Just because it's in another table to allow the "big bad ad agencies" to target you (data the ad agencies can not even see) does not make it any different.
Everyone does this. Everyone will continue doing this. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with that status quo. The only part that can be morally wrong, is if a human themselves inspects the database without respect for privacy.
And this is why we have laws for dealing with malicious employees, robberies, house break-ins, etc. Things happen whether it's online or offline. All of this was possible (arguably even more so) before Facebook. It's just more centralized now.
This paranoia simply needs to stop.
EDIT: Adding, it makes complete sense that Facebook's A-team is not working on ads. Taking a page from Google: Diversification. Ads are auto-pilot income, have hit their tech ceiling, and Facebook's longevity depends on investment outside of their core business. I am unaware how this is so unbelievable to some.
And that's not paranoia, it's openly something that Facebook is doing right now[0].
> In a blogpost, WhatsApp announced it would begin sharing names and phone numbers with its parent company, to allow its more than 1 billion users “to communicate with businesses that matter to you too” – like notifications from airlines, delivery services or your bank, for example.
> Facebook will also use that data to make friend suggestions and combine that data with the reams of information it has already collected so that it can tailor ads even more specifically to your interests.
If you think that Facebook isn't mining WhatsApp data for ads, you aren't paying enough attention to Facebook. I don't think they've backdoored the E2E encryption (though it wouldn't surprise me if in the future they started doing on-device keyword detection for ads, which wouldn't technically require them to insert a backdoor). But it doesn't really matter, they don't need to go that far.
> Everyone does this. Everyone will continue doing this. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with that status quo.
This is how all of these conversations always go. Privacy advocates are paranoid crazy people, until it turns out that companies are spying on you. Then suddenly the argument is that the status quo is fine and the controls are great and everyone always knew they were being recorded, and why is everyone making a big deal about it?
If you're frustrated that people come up with crazy theories about Facebook turning on their microphones, those theories might exist because smart TVs and mobile devices already use audio to track you[1]. Every time that someone raises an alarm on a privacy violation, and people tell them they're paranoid, and then the paranoid people turn out to be right, the theories about tracking get a little bolder in response.
If advertisers want the paranoia to stop, maybe they should stop giving people reasons to be paranoid. The current state of privacy conspiracy theories is entirely, 100% the fault of the advertising industry and other mass data-collection industries and government departments.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/whatsapp-...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...
But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database. There is no privacy implications of them using data, your messages, your pictures, and metadata that is already in their database or one of their children companies databases, for ads.
The only data you could question is trackers on third-party sides, but the "everyone else is doing it" argument makes it silly for Facebook to not do so as well to compete considering the reach that they have. Call that a weak excuse, but they are offering a free product in exchange for translating to money and are one of the few social startups that have actually been able to pull it off without hemorrhaging money.
The amount of press for example that Facebook has received the last 2 years on almost completely FUD topics is absolutely astounding. Cambridge Analytica was even FUD, and is still to this day misunderstood. Cambridge Analytica leaked data from your Facebook account via an exploit and phishing. This was a feature designed to give developers more opportunities. The amount of damage this has done to real legitimate apps in the Facebook ecosystem can not be understated, and since then Facebook's product quality has backpedalled considerably. All because the media spun this incorrectly, did not understand the technical details at hand, and pushed responsibility onto Facebook.
My 2 cents: We need to focus on the facts. There are real problems with privacy in society, and we are wasting so much time focusing on misunderstood problems to focus on the real ones. These are not scandals. These are weak news days.
Issues like this get all the limelight, make all the headlines, and reduce visibility to actual real life problems incl. those related to privacy. That needs to stop.
The GDPR begs to differ. By that logic, your web hosted would also be free to take your server logs and database contents and use them for their own purposes, since it's already on their server. Would you be fine with that?
But ok, assuming your argument were right, wouldn't then the rational thing be to contribute as little data as possible to tech companies' databases? And yet all industry trends, cloud advocates, IoT providers and modern IT projects in general point in the other direction.
On a related note, my lawyer already knows where the money is buried, so are there any privacy implications in him giving the police a few tips? Privacy isn't just about who has my data -- it's about how my data gets used.
The use of ads to target me against my will, or to allow other people to target me against my will is a violation. Facebook does share data with other companies, but even if they didn't, there's no practical difference between a company targeting me directly based on my data and a company asking Facebook to target me based on the same data. Facebook is just acting as a proxy.
False. I've been a WhatsApp user for many years, I've never been a Facebook user. So they definitely extracted data from WhatsApp that they didn't have before.
Facebook should not be collecting this data IMO. Microsoft and Apple should be working to make it impossible to collect and governments should work to make it illegal to collect and extremely high fines if caught collecting.
From the article:
> Your photos and related content like captions, likes and comments if you use the “share photos” feature to share photos from VR to your Facebook Timeline
But don't worry! An engineer has told me I can just ignore that part of privacy policy because Facebook doesn't even care about my photos. They're utterly irrelevant.
It really takes a load off my chest. Sure, Facebook is collecting info about what apps people use, what people message, and what photos people take, but that's just going into a database somewhere that will never be monetized or read or used against them. And I can definitely trust that, because when Facebook says its going to silo data, it always keeps that promise, and definitely doesn't change its privacy policy to remove that silo 4-5 years down the road.
> FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago
I'm relieved to hear it, because its very concerning to hear about a technical team building infrastructure to collect individual app usage when all that anyone at the company cares about is whether or not I own an Oculus. It's wasted effort. Y'all need to learn to tighten your sprint scope, why are you building all these features that aren't being used anywhere?
> it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
And don't worry, the CEOs that made those decisions have all retired, and they definitely won't make them again in the future. It's just old, outdated stories that keep resurfacing. Like in 2017 when Facebook experimented on how depressed teenagers would respond to ads[0], or like in 2016 when Facebook started trying to intuit people's race based on their behavior[1]. See? Decades ago!
----
In actual seriousness, I don't have any reason to doubt the author's intention, but I think this is a type of gaslighting, whether purposeful or not. I've brought this issue up before in regards to privacy debates -- but the conversations around surveillance have a habit of suddenly shifting.
Before Snowden, people who worried about the NSA were paranoid, and the response was, 'we're not doing any of that, and we don't care about your data anyway.' After Snowden, the comments became 'why is anyone surprised, and it's not even a big deal anyway because it's just metadata and metadata has always been fine to collect.'
Before the Alexa/Google Home contractor scandals, it would not have been hard to find people on HN that argued that 'the controls are perfect, and it's just a computer listening to you, and people who worry about this are just paranoid.' After the scandals broke, it was 'of course you need human reviewers to train AI, this is a nothingburger that everyone already knew about.'
So try to remember adgineer's comment, because a few years from now when it turns out Facebook is doing microtargeting based on really invasive Oculus data, the story is suddenly going to be, 'this was consistent with our privacy policy, of course everyone knew what they were getting into, it's not a big deal.'
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/faceb...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/faceb...
Oh really? Can you give me an example of a decision actually driven by ethics? That is the decision was NOT made based on how much compute it spends, the material impact on delivery value, or because of meaningful business value, or whatever.
Because I find it hard to believe that FB makes decisions based on ethics, instead of merely highlighting otherwise motivated decisions that seemingly happen to align with ethical values.
Like, that the ethical aspect actually caused the decision to be different than what it had been if it were made purely based on business, money or resources.
I mean I could be wrong, and you could give a single example of FB being motivated by ethics, and I would be wrong.
When are people going to stop rewarding the exploitative behavior of Facebook and its offspring?
They'll try to figure out if you have any kind of disability.
If this weren't invasive, they wouldn't be doing it. What use would random data be to Facebook? Also, it is irrelevant: if I buy a VR set I want to use it for whatever I see fit, not get hooked into some data collection machine. How is it that we have come to accept that in order to use products, that we buy even, we have to hand over lots of data?
Brain-wave-scanning kind of invasive. FB (and advertising in general) will continue to become ever more invasive until it meets a limiting factor. That limiting factor will possibly be legislation (just not in the US because worshiping the Dollar overrides anything and everything else).
No, I don't think it unlikely that the next-gen Oculus might do this.
So they are not breaking any laws while still targetting you for owning the unit.
what worries me is the sampling itself. or how diverse the sample is. using VR users data to draw any conclusion is misrepresenting the larger population. now if we are all into VR or use it, this might be different...
But there are lot of problems in the world, and none of us can be sure where to rank this one.
There is something subconsciously intimate about the movements of my head. The idea of FB getting off to that (obvious to everyone, except the willfully ignorant, that they eventually would) is incredibly creepy.
No surprise really but it irks me as I wanted the rift some time ago but then Facebook bought it.
Luckily it seems like Valve Index will be a good alternative.
I think you’re saying that Google sends the search terms to the site you visit? It doesn’t do that, at least not for a bunch of years now. As a site owner you can get aggregate ideas of what queries lead people to particular pages, but you can’t tie it to individual visitors.
If your boyfriend beats you, the argument that "your next one might, too" isn't a good reason to stay with them.
This quote is entirely unrelated but I thought of it and want to share: "Valve used to make games, now they make money."
You may be confused by the fact that HTC previously had a partnership with Valve. The Index is independent from HTC.
No. They won't. They have far more than proven it at every possible occasion.
I've recommended music and movies to people without any prior compensation from the companies that put those products out.
What Facebook is doing is advertising. "Personalized recommendations" is marketing doublespeak for "pay to play".
When WhatsApp improved its popularity by claiming "privacy is important, no ads" etc and then did a U turn it was actually noteworthy and newsworthy.
I don't think Oculus ever made such claims. They were happy to "sell out" [1]. If anything, they seem to be proud members of the Facebook cult [2].
If you bought the Oculus, you knew exactly what you were getting.
Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/3/25/11624928/facebook-buys-oculus-...
[2] https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/facebook-oculus-privacy...
I was gonna upvote you, but this was unnecessary. It’s possible for someone to be positive towards something you see as a negative. People hate Trump and he has supporters. Whether you agree with them or not, not all of them are benefiting from the Trump Administration
It's Facebook Horizon[1] that's the worrisome thing. I'm pretty sure they're trying to build the OASIS from Ready Player One.
Why do you think that? They have a lot of lose and movement data from you I bet theyve been spending a lot of time trying to develop inferences you can make from it.
They also know I'm shorter than Darth Vader. They know the size of a couple of our rooms.
I acknowledge there is data they can attempt to extract value from, but that data just doesn't concern me. As VR expands, particularly with Horizon, I will be a lot more wary.
This feels like a weird non computer person answer of "I don't understand why I should be worried about metadata it doesn't concern me"
I know some people who, at least as of a couple of years ago, had dumbphones from which they'd remove the batteries when not in use so that their location couldn't be tracked.
I have an iPhone. I've got Comcast internet at home and don't use a VPN. I have a Facebook account (which I access in Firefox only using the facebook container). I don't use gmail, and my primary browser isn't logged into Google and has various bits of tracking protection.
So it's a pretty conscious choice. Maybe it's misguided, but I just think the data Facebook is getting from my Oculus Quest is pretty low value. Lower value than Likes, for example.