They already have, the internet is a mess.
Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data sharing widespread.
Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data sharing widespread.
It seems like Facebook is now large enough that they're effectively owning up to the unavoidable truth - there's no way that information made available to all subscribers of some largish social network isn't going to be public to the world.
And sure, I don't give every gruesome detail in the rise but I'd still claim that the overall situation is that Facebook is large enough and it's model porous enough that a variety of actors have scraped it, are scraping it and will scrape it. And given this, Facebook has to start owning up to an inevitable situation. Keep in mind, The Cambridge Analytica scandal was predicated on Facebook's claimed data model (which I'd claim isn't just false but also "can't be true"). Sure, the easiest way to scrape it is having API access, which it's hard not to give to your advertisers. But if Facebook gave no one API access, various actors would be directly scraping.
And overall, I'd say The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the thing that wasn't a good framing of the broad problems of Facebook and privacy.
Edit: "But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s)."
And I'd say, this is again actually the wrong frame. Facebook is at the center of the storm, no doubt. But there is no large social network possible that wouldn't be subject to the general privacy problems of Facebook. Facebook created the fantasy definition of privacy, Facebook violated that definition but no one could satisfy it.
A great example is M&M’s dye choice became controversial due to customer confusion over which red dyes where harmful. So, the company couldn’t simply change the dye because what they where using wasn’t problematic. In the end they had to flat out stop selling red M&M’s for over a decade, and their reintroduction was surprisingly controversial.
I would speculate, in fact, that Facebook acting now make the obvious point that of course people are going to be scraping the data of their site because after X many scandals, it's becoming obvious that people will do that, that they will do that to any site like Facebook and that they'll have much clearer cover if they "normalize" thing that are ... fricken normal.
I'd further speculate that they couldn't act when Cambridge Analytica was fresher because then they'd be seen as being self-justifying and then they had to be seen as humble and apologetic.
Never heard of that; is that cochineal?
There is a logical reason for this: one of the toughest things is knowing what your users actually want and what their actual pain points are. In advertising there's an analogous problem often summarized as: "I know I am wasting 80% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 80%."
Every single incentive on the business side incentivizes data grabbing. This will never change unless users vote hard with their wallets or unless there is protective legislation.
Hopefully someone writes a better protocol with no third party cookies and heavily restricted javascript.
> heavily restricted javascript
Is basically impossible. Any useful subset of javascript would be turing-complete, and therefore enough to do whatever's necessary to track the user. Literally all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request and bam, you can track.
> all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request
Precicely. Inability to do this is (part of) what > > heavily restricted javascript means.