Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same | Hacker News Reader

Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

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409 pointsColinWright79 comments

It's perfectly possible for Facebook to not track users at the moment and simultaneously prepare for a future where this is not only acceptable, it's expected.

Facebook has placed a long-term bet that people will willingly share pretty much everything they do. When they file patents like this, they're skating where the puck is headed, not where it is now.

Moreover, if you've stumbled on something patentable that could potentially be useful to you (or any competitor) at any point in the future, of course you patent it.

To me this line of thinking lines up precisely with the notion of interest – they see it as something valuable for the future (and happen to be doing it now) – I'm not sure how all of that could lead to any conclusion other than Facebook having very real interest in tracking people.

Yeah. It's also possible, and indeed true, that Facebook is lying through its teeth, aggressively tracking now while claiming not to, introducing ever-more-pervasive and invasive tracking without notifying users or giving them an informed choice in the matter, thus forcibly paving the way for the future that will place them in the most powerful position.

Let's be real. Facebook has not "placed a long-term bet"; they are actively engineering that reality right now, despite loud and frequent objections from users.

I agree that Facebook's attained a position of power that lets it actively work towards making its long-term bet a reality. Good for them. I also hope to one day change the world in the direction I'd prefer it to go.

That said, there's no concrete evidence that Facebook is 'lying through its teeth'. If they are, the truth will come out - organizations of thousands can't hide bald-faced lies for long. But it would surprise me, because Facebook as an organization doesn't seem particularly stupid, and getting caught lying about cross-domain tracking (especially given our current activist FTC) would be really, really stupid.

bold face lies, i.e. "in print".

If Facebook is "lying through its teeth" it will only hurt them in the long run. What is even more realistic is that they are getting (have become) so big that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. That becomes typical in a large organization.

This could also simply be a way for them to protect themselves in the future, as we've all seen just how heated the patent space is becoming for the big boys...

It only hurts them in the long run if they're wrong about what people want. There have been many cases in the past where people raged against something new they didn't want, but the long term view demonstrated that they actually did want it. Potentially scary if this is one of those situations, of course. Certainly, people should have seen the writing on the wall long before this.

> If Facebook is "lying through its teeth" it will only hurt them in the long run.

Because after all, we see corporations being punished every day for lying by the powerful and effective consumer protection organizations in the United States.

Hmmm... I never made any such claims about consumer protection organizations. This is something you've conjured up on your own.

The bottom line is, if this is something we (the users) do not want, we have the power to make Facebook change it. We've seen examples of this in the past with Facebook (ex: their friend recommended ad's).

I don't believe we can rely on our government run organizations to wholly protect us, nor have I made any such claim. But we sure as hell can vote what we want and don't want, from a private company, through our buying and/or usage patterns.

See this for why your thesis that the market will naturally reject this is probably wrong, even if it's abhorrent to them now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

It's very easy for liberties/expectations to be eroded imperceptibly until they're gone and people think that's the norm because that's the way things are, and everyone seems to be OK with it.

It's very easy to see why that's a problem. But it should be equally easy to see the long-term results when we attempt to use the strength of government to ensure market outcomes. It doesn't take long for the regulatory agency to wind up working for the goals of the very entities they're intended to police. This is called Regulatory Capture, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture .

This isn't a problem of bad politicians or people not trying hard enough to solve the problems. It's fundamentally implied by the nature of the beast. We need to have experts in the role of regulators; but where do experts come from, except from experience as past workers in those industries? This is all basic public choice economic theory. No amount of voting for the right candidates, or carefully crafting the regulations is going to get around the problem.

Yep, there are problems there too, the point of my post was to refute the parent's opinion that the market would naturally take care of it.

I'm afraid I don't have a good solution short of some way of screening for only people who are allergic to cronyism.

Thanks for the link on Regulatory capture, I didn't realize that that phenomenon had a name, but I'm glad it does. It's one of the more infuriating things about the US government and the SEC in particular when it seems to handle lots of things with kid gloves when they should be prosecuting them with all the zeal they seem to have for prosecuting minor drug dealers.

I don't believe the "market" will naturally take care of it. You're looking at this through blurred glasses. People, not markets, will have a choice (if they so decide) to use or not use something. Buy or not buy something. That is their power and we have copious examples through out our history of this indeed working should enough people get together and want to make this change. Again, we are talking about a private company (Facebook) who relies on these very same people for it's success, this is NOT a reference to a form of government that is running out of control. We've seen FB change in the past (see my previous comment), no reason for them not to do the same in the future should WE decide they need to.

There is a huge difference.

I'm not. The boiling frog principle still applies. The revolutions you're talking about require people to get together and foment them, and I don't think it will happen at sufficient scale for FB to care, or to prevent them from having a very large negative effect on society.

Are you new here? Facebook has "lied through its teeth" from day one and it's never hurt them.

I think the context is slightly different: when an employee says "we do not track users on other domains", he means that they don't record your loading of a page with a "Like" button, even though they could. The patent claim is for a system with facebook "receiving one or more communications from a third-party website [containing] an action taken by a user", which they then incorporate into their ad-serving wizardry.

This could be quite interesting, actually: imagine facebook launches a system where any third-party website can give it a stream of "actions" taken by facebook's users, and pay them based on how good the data are for predicting ad preference. Site owners would then have a financial incentive to report to facebook every single thing their users do.

Imagine if HN did this, reporting to facebook the literacy level of your comments, the speed at which you read the comments, what subjects you spend the most time reading, what you comment on, etc.

You don't patent something because you built it. You patent something because you think someone else might build it, or because you don't want someone else to prevent you from building it.

And that's exactly the problem with the patent system.

Both reasons imply an intention to track users. But there is a third possibility. They could have patented it because they are so convinced that user tracking across websites is evil that they want to save the world from it by preventing others from ever doing it.

After all a company that has 600 million users has a responsibility to make sure all these people are not put in harm's way. Just imagine how Mark Zuckerberg's feelings could get hurt if even one of his users ("the dumb fucks") were to be taken advantage of by some evil, data greedy, ad funded search behemoth.

And isn't it completely obvious that Facebook, unlike other major Internet companies, has no interest in tracking users? What on earth could they possibly do with that tracking data? Sell targeted advertising? No no no, Facebook isn't _that_ kind of company! And doesn't their track record of honesty and openness speak for itself?

I'd like to try to respond to this, but I can't, because you've gone out of your way to obscure whatever point you have with three paragraphs of ultra-sarcastic nonsense.

Fundamentally though, I think your point is, "I don't trust Facebook because of statements and privacy mistakes they've made in the past." That's a fine opinion to have (even though I obviously don't agree with it), so please, for the sake of discussion, state it like that instead.

Edited to add that, in response to your first point (the non-sarcastic one), it doesn't necessarily imply an intent to track users. Filing defensive patents is nothing new at FB (Facebook patented the News Feed and hasn't yet sued anyone for infringement).

The abuse of Occam's razor in this discussion warrants that level of sarcasm.

And speaking of obscured points, what are you trying to say? Are you saying Facebook is _not_ working on an ad network that does cross domain tracking of users and displays ads based on social graph data, and this is simply a defensive patent? Or are you saying they are developing this feature, but we should trust your company to not abuse it?

All I was trying to say was that there are reasons beyond desire to implement a product that would make a company file for a patent. I don't know anything about any product designed to do this, but I also don't know everything about every product at Facebook (it'd be impossible to get my own work done if that were the case).

That's fair, but you can see why everyone is skeptical that is the reason behind this patent filing?

Shame on me, but I don't follow Facebook's announcements about privacy enough - it never even occurred to me they'd deny something like thi Just like Google started out monetizing the semantic graph (and providing them an superior search engine in exchanges is their goal. I thought that was the whole point, and the reason behind the $80B valuation (ads served in a Google like way using the social graph instead of the semantic graph). It just follows that this would require a certain degree of integration between ad partners and user tracking.

ps -I'm not trying to single you out and lay the blame for all my gripes with Facebook on you, I hope it doesn't seem that way.

Last week, everyone lost their shit about Facebook's logged out cookies. Your traditional megacorp is going to say "oh well, so it goes, repeat the party line" and move on. Internally though, this spurred some engineers to actually investigate it, which lead to an audit, which lead to the discovery that we'd forgotten to delete the user id out of the cookies, which lead to a fix and a blog post and a clarification of our policies.

So, beyond understanding the skepticism, I actually think it's really important, and personally[0] encourage it. We're not going to get better at privacy if people don't jump our shit over every perceived misstep, because we've either failed to make the right decision, or we've failed to communicate our decision effectively.

All I'd ask is that we try to keep this communication as high signal as possible, and avoid going down roads with no plausible resolution[1]. I think that's best for Facebook, the internet, and discussion in general at HN.

[0] I speak for myself and not my employer, Facebook Inc, blah blah blah.

[1] If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

Nothing you can say, perhaps, but here's something Facebook can do: establish a years-long history of having new privacy options/controls default to the setting which reveals the least information to other users. Doing that for several years should help Facebook overcome their reputation for not doing so (a reputation which it has for a reason).

No, my point is not that I don't trust Facebook and I don't think they have made a single honest mistake. My point is that their intentions and interests are a logical consequence of their business model. Claiming to have no interest in collecting as much information as possible about their users is absurd because that is what they sell.

The reality is also plain to see for anyone who knows the least bit about web technologies. The way they designed their like button, their logout, their privacy defaults, etc is just too obvious and their public lies are a calculated attempt to mislead people who don't have a clue how these things work.

Then why didn't you say that? You'd have cleanly communicated your point with minimal confusion, and it would have let us skip out on the snarky stuff.

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a Facebook PR drone here, I just want HN to not suck, and one of the reasons it didn't suck before was the lack of snarky crap.

I would take your concerns about HN quality a lot more seriously if this wasn't about sarcasm directed at your own employer and if it wasn't about a story that exemplifies the truly breathtaking duplicity of the corporation that pays your bills.

You never know it may be built but just not released. I think its perfectly fair to patent it even though it sounds creepy. The expectation of privacy are changing in people's minds. Probably Facebook thinks that they want to keep the feature ready and not release it until the time is right. And obviously if anybody else releases it before them (most likely Google) then they can use the patent to prevent them from doing so.

When you have less credibility than an investment banker on a cocaine bender, you've got some trust issues.

I'm still trying to figure out if anyone will care. My faith in humanity is being tested.

Prepare to be disappointed.

Why should people care about this, they don't actually care that 1000s of people a day die of starvation. But you consider this is worth caring about?

It is the way of the world, too many important things to care about.

Well, if I turn of my computer, nobody gets to eat.

Vs tech-centric folks, the "average" user seems to move ever so slowly towards the tech centric, meaning (non-data supported), average users being more aware of just how much non-privacy they have with FB, LinkedIn (their weird opt-in media campaign for using ones profile pictures).

I have more faith that more connectivity will accelerate this process.

As Confucius said, in one of his most famous take-downs, "始吾於人也、聽其言而信其行、今吾於人也、聽其言而觀其行。At first in dealing with people, I would hear their words and trust their deeds, but now my way of dealing with people is to hear their words and observe their deeds."

"hear their words"? Easier said than done. Here's a blog post I wrote about how the things they say aren't very consistent. http://blog.arunbalan.in/2011/09/28/hey-facebook-ive-got-a-q...

That's precisely the point. To adapt the lawyer joke:

Q: How do you tell that a Facebook spokesperson is lying? A: Check to see if his lips are moving.

Facebook has demonstrated on numerous occasions from the earliest days of the product that it holds user's privacy in contempt. What else do you need to know?

The f_c_book brigade will be here soon to downvote you.

They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.

There is the old saying "Actions speak louder than words." But that saying predates mass media, and the existence of schools in which one can learn marketing and political speech as actual formal degrees, and the rise of postmodernism and its ethic of relative truth making it permissible to pretty much say anything in the pursuit of a goal.

I would update it as simply "Actions speak, words don't." Perhaps somebody can come up with a more pithy version. But it's amazing the amount of BS that you can cut through with this metric, and just how unbelievably worthless the torrent of words coming from our politicians and businesses are. I mean, worthless on a philosophically profound level. Astonishing amounts of effort are burned on ensuring that words are as disconnected from reality as possible.

Facebook will say whatever they think will advance their agenda, only very loosely constrained by laws and with many educated people who know exactly how to skirt those laws with precisely-constructed vague statements that sound like one thing but legally say another. (The easiest and most popular are statements carefully qualified to in fact say nothing at all.) Meanwhile, their actions are clear as day: Track everything, expand their tracking as much as possible, and worry about the details later.

Link to patent application: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

This feels like blatant sensationalism to me.

This particular patent describes the process for 3rd party sites to tell Facebook about something the user did (new Open Graph API, anyone?), which subsequently can be shown as an ad to the user's friends, i.e. "Your friend blah has bought something on This Service, do you want to do so too?" (some peer context for ads, which facebook already tries to do for things like fanning pages).

This is quite different from the meaning implied by this post, which the first 2 quotes were addressing, that Facebook tracks and correlates browsing patterns of users across the internet without their consent.

Its getting to a point where I will have a dedicated virtual machine just to check Facebook.

or, a different browser on a proxy :P

Only so long as facebook doesn't use flash cookies as those are cross browser. (Or you constantly delete flash cookies)

Luckily we live in a world where Flash is no longer a real requirement for most websites, and browsing with it completely disabled, or even uninstalled is not an issue.

Flashblock is a wonderful thing.

afaik, facebook does not use flash cookies. In the initial blog post that caused the cookie uproar, I thought he mentioned that? Otherwise maybe it was somewhere else I read it.

Like that idea. One should be able to create some "rules" for a browser, e.g. that any Facebook related url is going to be opened in a "clean" browser space. Ideally where one can attribute certain basics, such as proxies beforehand.

I seem to recall that part of Mozilla's work on bringing identity management into the browser was the idea that you could have different tabs with different sets of cookies associated with them.

Would that include pages that don't have anything to do with Facebook except that they have a Like button?

In my case I have these blocked out with NoScript. But if you click on these and are not logged in you are most likely redirected to Facebook, right? So it would just open these in the separate FB environment (i.e. proxy&clean browser).

Way ahead of you!

I use the IE9 one of these.

For the sake of accuracy, here's what I should have included:

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/blob/master/ievms.sh

Easy way to set up a Microsoft (IE7/8/9) browser for testing in VirtualBox, if you are running on Mac OS X. Beware though, these are quite large images.

I have personally been using http://www.sandboxie.com/ to use facebook only.

or a free EC2 instance.

They can certainly say they're not using the data now, but store it and change their minds later, no?

We could use this thread to give some feedback back to Facebook. They'll hear it and might even listen. Because this isn't black and white. All the web developers on here "track users" on their websites, it can be as mild as logging for AB testing. Facebook is now needing to do this across domains because their application extends across domains. Where do you draw the line?

I mean, by the patent description couldn't this just be the ticker auto-sharing stuff?

I think something along the lines of what they've done where you have to approve a given app (or domain) before you can be tracked on it and maybe otherwise it logs things anonymously with a hashed UID like Facebook asks facebook app developers to do with all their logging.

More telling how many elite programmers have gone to Facebook, and support these policies by proxy of employment and/or silence.

I wonder how many Facebook and HN readers are using Spotify along with FB's auto-publish feature?

I used it and forgot it was auto-publishing my tunes to FB. I went back to FB and was embarrassed to see it had published a song I wish no one knew I was listening to. Since then I updated Spotify and only listen in "Private Listening," mode.

Spotify is great, but automatically sharing everything I do/listen to is out of the norm. We as humans share when we want and been doing so since well forever.

I'm not a patent lawyer, but I tried reading the patent application (http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...).

It sounds like Facebook Connect/open graph, where you can Like something on a third party domain, or read something, etc. Is it just saying "You will now have an activity feed for all your likes, etc on third party websites on your timeline"? The 9/22 F8 date seems to suggest that.

But HN is a lot more skeptical than I am. Are you just worried that it may mean different things in the future? What's the deal?

It also sounds like "Don't try this, Google. It's my turf"

No, this was filed in February, and is automatically made public 6 months later. Nothing to do with f8.

Also, I can think of definite prior art for this, from a company called Google. I did read the claims.

So not much to worry about, as usual.

Not necessarily contradictory. Not enough context to conclude anything.

As far as I know, if this was Google, for sure everyone would argue "they patent this tracking system just to avoid other less reliable companies to do so".

(I still think that facebook is malign, though)

They are obviously asking for the patent to prevent others from using this technique.

Not sure to vote for you since I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.

yes

I don't get the anger here. Surely all of us has written code at some point that tracks what a user is doing, even if it's just to keep state.

What's the difference between that and what Facebook might (/must) be doing? The difference as far as I can see is that Fb has a public image tarnished by privacy issues, and it makes for a good story.

Of course it's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation for Fb. It's not lying, it's just what happens when PR spin and reality get caught in the same room.

The big difference is that this application is for tracking what users are doing on other websites outside of facebook.

Read the abstract: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

Wow. I didn't know that. What about cross-domain policy? Is this trying to legitimise XSS or are they trying to patent the use of iframes?

One can't help but wonder... Did they just get that idea from us?

"Everyone thinks we track users"

"But we don't!"

"...Well, we're already getting the PR flak for it, maybe we should?"

After seeing what it was, part of me was thinking "is this a spoof site pretending to be real?" while another part was thinking "this is too well written to be a joke." I wonder why they chose to file for the patent right when they were getting bad press for it. Maybe they were hoping it would go unnoticed and filed after discovery so noone else could scoop it up?

They filed in February. It is a (notable) coincidence that the application became public just now.

There is no entailment relation from the second fact to the first. However, nothing Facebook does in service of their goal to own people's online identity and experience would shock me.

Suspicious, sure, but filing a patent doesn't mean they're actually using it.

Sure. And buying a car doesn't mean you go anywhere in it. But usually...

That might be a valid analogy if we lived in a world where the majority of cars were bought simply to prevent other people from getting it instead.

Do as I say, not as I do..

patent registration is the nash equilibrium of the current US legal climate. patent collections are ammo in corporate wargames.

facebook does all sorts of evil like releasing full user history without a subpeona, but the OP's tone and these comments are FUD. bad.

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