Facebook announces privacy-enhancing technologies
facebook.com
facebook.com
Nothing in there about the users at all. Just “we’ve been forced to do this by others.” Facebook truly believes privacy is just an obstacle to their revenue, not something good for the people who use their product.
If there were any signal that Facebook is really, truly a net negative for humanity it’s that opening paragraph. Christ.
Trying to spin their amoral business setup in any other way is just an exercise in (self)lying.
But they couldn’t muster that.
Well, because they were. Apple poked them with a stick, Facebook responds in the most blithe, un-entertaining fashion possible. No surprise there, since everyone in the privacy community knew this was a pissing contest from the start. If we want real change, we should be holding people accountable and forcing transparency everywhere possible. Until then, it looks like the corporate interests-that-be are more concerned with slowly destroying one another using their liquid assets than improving the "user experience".
How soon before we declare a war on it? We need to spend trillions to fix it like we did WMD, terrorism, drugs and communism.
Since we're on HackerNews, I also can't wait for millions to be poured into dozens of blockchain_crypto_privacy_big_data_new_company.
Firefox not even mentioned
What about having control over our own minds? What about spending our moments in the present? When did life become about discovering "new products" and not just living in the world?
Here's a city that banned advertising: https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/04/london-be...
Are we seriously going to claim that the citizens are deprived now that those ads like barnacles are not covering these historical buildings? Think of the products they could be discovering! It's time to realize that ads are a net negative for society.
However, the pic is a bad example: if you look just a little to the left there is currently a HUGE screen[1],
Piccadilly Circus in London has been known for it's adverts in lights, then later screens for decades.
[1] See pic on google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5097908,-0.1348659,3a,75y,30...
More info
Personalized ads are ultimately cheaper than non-targeted ads because you don't need to buy as many impressions to hit the audience that you're looking for.
As a rationale, consider the targeted tax difference the price of collecting, storing, and using radioactive personal data.
If Facebook had to pay a higher tax rate for targeted ad revenue, their priorities would start to shift.
Whether or not we want to admit it or not, we've all had a a product we have bought as a result of advertising that has provided us a good amount of value/joy/utility. There is clearly some utility for society in companies, especially newer ones, being able to reach new audiences, especially if they are making good products/trying to do it in a more sustainable way/changing the status quo in some net positive way. You can't rely on just word of mouth alone.
Banning them is such a no-brainer, and it only takes visiting a country which allows them vs. a country who don't to see why.
Could probably make millions before ad networks become compliant.
This policy alone would make me consider moving to parts of the country I've never wanted to even visit.
It makes think of G.K. Chesterton's quip "What a glorious garden of wonders the lights [of Broadway] would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."[2]
1: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
Really Facebook sees the writing on the wall that Apple and Google are about to cut off the firehose of data Facebook collects via mobile devices, and is scrambling to find a way around this by pretending to give a damn about your privacy.
See: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/Secur...
From that perspective alone, it would be utter lunacy to believe that they have your "privacy" in mind. If so, then the definition of privacy has become so perverted as to not mean what it actually is meant to mean: keeping things to one's self that are not meant to be shared with anyone.
Then again, people freely share on Facebook that which should remain private in any case. We've devolved to the point that we're now worrying about privacy on a platform that depends on sharing things that shouldn't be shared and we're worried that it will get shared beyond what we want. Social media is such a rats nest.
> This adds a new privacy concern, however. Revealing that a person is in a treatment or control group is just a random value, but revealing the fact that they had an opportunity could reveal much more information, such as demographics used for targeting of the advertising campaign. (Note: revealing a person’s treatment/control group assignment isn’t entirely private, as it could reveal membership in a group, which we often want to avoid in general. Opportunity logging, though, can reveal much more information.)
I understand that if I were to see that Johnny Individual was served ad campaign X, and X was targeted towards 35 year old male identifying individuals in Colorado, I would know that Johnny Individual fit the bill according to the ad network.
What I can't understand is: Who are we trying to keep this info from? The ad network needs to know this to properly run the campaign. In the example they provide, I believe the ad network is running the lift test and reporting aggregate results.
Could someone please point out what I'm missing?
[1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/fbpcf/blob/master/docs/P...
> Today, this type of reporting requires at least one party to learn which specific people made a purchase after seeing a specific ad. With MPC, say one party has the information about who saw an ad and another party has information on who makes a purchase. MPC and encryption make it possible for both parties to learn insights about how an ad is performing, without the need to entrust a single party with both data sets.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/privacy-enhancing-technolo...
The years prior to 2010 or whenever they jumped into advertising would argue "You're wrong, Facebook."
> We are optimistic that new privacy-enhancing technologies will prove that personalization remains possible and effective as our industry evolves to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
"Evolves"? Or "Was shoved off the cliff when people actually found out what you were doing and were given the option to push?"
> We’re also exploring applications for on-device learning, a technology that could improve a person’s ad experience by processing data locally on their device rather than sending individual data to a remote server or cloud.
And back around to the PC era (local computation) from the mainframe era (most recently cloud datacenters)... and the cycle continues...
> As we work with the industry to answer these questions, we know businesses — especially small businesses — are counting on us to help them navigate through these changes. Many of them don’t have large marketing budgets — or even marketing teams — so they use our tools to deliver and measure their ad campaigns efficiently.
Would these be the small businesses that, during the pandemic, figured out that "paying to get someone to your site when they search for your company name is more expensive than people simply finding your site as the first hit when they search for your company name"?
The whole "Facebook, we care about small businesses!" shtick is getting pretty old and transparent. Facebook in advertising trouble? "Oh, but this will hurt small businesses!" Bravo Sierra.
> New technologies take time to develop, but we’re confident that through our ongoing work and engagement with the broader industry, we can build solutions that will support a free and open internet.
Uh huh. Long as you sit in the middle, profit, and make sure that people think "free and open internet" means "Load Facebook."
I admit I was hoping that the article was just a redirect to the "Delete your account" page. :(
For better and for worse, we've seen pretty significant shifts in advertising over the last decade that has led to the collapse of brand names' domination over certain categories.
There are over 1 million tiny ecommerce businesses on Shopify that could never afford or rationalize a mass-market TV, print, or radio commercial but they can still be generate meaningful profits with only $100 worth of digital ads that are delivered to the right people.
It's undeniable that small businesses are benefiting from these types of ads, though you're welcome to question the macro-economic implications of that.
But don’t worry, they still want to track you enough to tailor ads to users (their words).
The post does point out that by next year one such privacy-enhancing tech would be made broadly available.
> ...they still want to track you enough to tailor ads to users (their words).
Yes, but using MPC (multi-party computation) and other (zero-knowledge) techniques gathering steam as of late: "These technologies will help us minimize the amount of personal information we process, while still allowing us to show people relevant ads and measure ad effectiveness for advertisers."
I dislike Facebook's data handling practices as much as the next guy, but: Whats proposed is better than what we have today, though it isn't absolutely the best they could do. That's the price to pay for free, I guess. After all, advertisers are their paying customers.
But the union of people who read HN and people who would hit a button to erase Facebook and all of its employees off the face of the planet is probably larger than one might expect.
What Are Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and How Will They Apply to Ads?
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/privacy-enhancing-technolo...
Wow, facebook kinda admits that it hates the privacy measures, but are helpless and will have to abide.
How could they selectively disable trackers for paying users without tracking when paying users are on third party sites? Seems like a an impossible service.
I might pay $1/mo if facebook stopped all third party tracking and ads within the service, but that is such an outlandish hypothetical I'm not even sure it's worth entertaining.