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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

See, the trick here is to put all the personal data onto an oddly specific t-shirt that's for sale.

Available now, size "Large" t-shirt for sale!

"I'm a proud dad living in Seattle who attended the University of Washington and once went on a trip to Central America for a while. I have a dog and like to read and occasionally complain about politics."

I'd buy this if I saw it, if just for the lulz and nihilistic outlook when it comes to privacy.

In fact... if I were a privacy-focused company, I'd 100% do this as a marketing stunt.

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OMG. This is just brilliant on so many levels. It's not just subversive against FB's rules but also can be the start of some kind of art project as a statement about what tech companies know about us. But the project itself gives us a choice in what is shown to others whereas FB doesn't give us that choice when selling the info to advertisers. It'll probably get shut down real quick by FB though once they know about this.

Edited: as my sibling comment mentioned, I too would buy one of these shirts.

This has existed since 2014, in embryonic form.

The exploit was that FB put your name in the public response from the Graph API. I remember discovering that, saying that might be abusable, and moved on with my life.

About a year later, I started getting oddly specific t-shirts like all <last names> do <x good>.

I would buy one that describes the total opposite of me and watch the confusion on people's faces.

I so wish this was a thing but I doubt Facebook would allow using their graph for this kind of marketing.

A crude version of this exists: https://www.reddit.com/r/TargetedShirts/

Except this is Tshirt manufacturers coming up with generic slogans on Tshirt ads that correspond to your interests.

The scale of 'my boyfriend has anger issues' shirts is really dark...

Dog mom's got anger issues, too... it's kinda fb's bread & butter

Ridiculously targeted t-shirt ads on Facebook are actually a thing, but probably not for privacy awareness purposes: https://thehustle.co/who-makes-those-insanely-specific-t-shi...

This article got dark very fast

Even without seeing the result, it was entirely predictable what was going to happen when someone let a computer generate phrases from word lists. The guy who went out of business generated 700 different combos algorithmically and then did not proofread them. That seems absurd. 700 isn't really that many, a few hours of manual labor to cull the bad ones, and his business may have made money.

I think other people have made money successfully with the few hours of manual labor version. At least, I think I've seen their customized products continue to exist and be available...

Where did you get the number 700? The article says they had 22 million shirts

From the article:

"In the end, he generated about 700 variations of the phrase on t-shirts, and put them up on Amazon."

700 "Keep Calm and ___" shirts, they also generated 22 million "___ a ___ who ___ and __ " style ones for their catalog and listed 550k of them on Amazon.

All of the examples shown in the article were of the "keep calm and ___" variety. With 550K more in the catalog, I imagine there were plenty of wild ones.

With four options he may have only had to check a few hundred words. 68^4 ~= 22 million

https://www.reddit.com/r/TargetedShirts

I really really like those cell phone cases.

They made me laugh out loud for a few minutes. Did anybody actually buy those? There has to be someone with the right sense of humor.

Even better: phrase it in relation to the person reading the shirt, not the person wearing it:

"You are seeing this shirt because [advertiser] wants to reach people who are friends with individuals who are [age], interested in [topic], located in or near [city], who wear [size] shirts.

As someone else pointed out, personal attributes are prohibited from ads.

My feeling is, communicating a compelling data collection story, even strictly positivist things like how much data is collected, let alone normative ones like we should collect less data or prohibit collecting it - you're not going to tell that story with some neat hack inside the system.

I remember seeing a t-shirt ad that said something along the lines of "March people are X"... and I'm born in March. It just made me that I contributed to Zuck's data hoard.

You can get very close, I had an ad on Facebook the other day with transliterations of hindi/urdu words on it. When I clicked to see why, Facebook thought I was interested in a Pakistani newspaper (I think I'd read some articles on it on my phone, I guess the trackers picked that up). I guarantee you 99% of readers of the newspaper where I am (or probably anywhere) are of Pakistani descent. The ad wasn't telling me my race/national origin, but it was clear Facebook knew.

Relevant facebook group: Shirts marketed to extremely specific demographics

https://www.facebook.com/groups/smtesdthemain

It hurts to admit, but I would probably actually buy one of these

You aren't alone - I know of a company that bootstrapped themselves by abusing the graph API to sell t-shirts.

Considering this is the top post on HN, it's only a matter of time before someone offers these for sale and has a Show HN post about it. I just hope they have a coupon code for HNers!

I wonder if this tactics could be used to increase click rate. Sound like a good idea to grab someones attention and maybe reduce spending by targeting niches.

As a FB marketing expert, this wouldn't work. Yes we could target you, but the market is too small and not worth the effort. The minimum audience worth targeting

Ooooh I like the idea of wearing those types of shirts ironically

I'm probably not going to, but I do like the idea

this.. would have worked and I would've believe the shirt was made for me..

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