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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

That’s an absurd analogy that doesn’t fit at all.

FB uses the data it can’t find or tell you anything about to successfully sell ad space to third parties targeted back at you.

Let’s make it concrete.

We know FB keeps track of which webpages you visit. We also know they use that data as a way to help target ads. That data isn’t in the data export they give you, as far as I can tell from a brief search.

Is there data coming in about which Instagram profiles you follow and what pics you clicked and liked? Is there other data they keep track of? Undoubtedly.

I’m not surprised nobody knows the answer to what all it might be. But pretending that data is fungible like money is just misdirection.

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Agreed, Facebook definitely has the ability to provide timestamped interaction events as part of "Download my Data". Maybe legislation will force them to provide that information at some point, but that won't really have any effect on user privacy.

The hearing seems to want to get more to the heart of the issue, but is inept to do so. The stored data isn't the concern, it's the predictive capability of models built on it. The decision of a predictive model isn't any more traceable to a single piece of data than a brick in a road is traceable to a given taxpayer, which is what I was trying to get at with the analogy.

After reading some of the transcript, the special masters seem very on the ball, and it's more the spin of the article I take issue with.

But it is not absurd. Facebook doesn't target ads at you, Bob Jones.

It takes all of Bob's activities and pushes them into bins based on how they characterize Bob; Male, lives in Iowa, 18-25, etc. a bin (Moves to LA, for example), his data will contribute to different bins. This activity is disconnected from Bob at this point; and the data is aggregated away from single interaction events. "Bob visited foo.com" as a single event is gone at this point.

The models grind on these aggregate data bins.

Then when ads are targeted at Males who live in Iowa, aged 18-25 -- those ads get shown to Bob, because he is tagged with those tags.

They don't "keep track of which webpages you visit", not for more than a day. Those events get pushed in large aggregate stores of activities pretty fast. These aggregate stores are vastly smaller than if you kept all the individual data, hence much cheaper.

Exactly. If Facebook can target ads at specific users to begin with, then how can they possibly claim they don't know where the data is or how to find it? Then how do they know the users are being targeted "correctly" or at all? It's a ridiculous argument that falls apart under any scrutiny. Their entire business model relies on them knowing how to target specific users using huge graphs of information.

Engineers know how to find a service or a data store that meets a particular need. If extraordinarily skilled, they might even know how to find the best one. Wizards know how to go exploring in the wilderness beyond an API boundary to track down particular problems. A god’s eye view of all services, all data stores, all relationships, and all flows can at best be machine generated. Only extreme zoom levels of tiny regions are of any meaning to a human reader. It’s the difference between going shopping and accounting for all the flows of goods and services in an economy.

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