Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcastm | Hacker News Reader

People often get mixed up about what causes what in these situations:

We might chat about all sorts of random things, but many times there's something that happened before, let's call it event X, that leads us to talk about a certain topic, say topic Y (like when you mention a cool shirt a friend just bought).

Then, if they see an ad about that later, folks jump to the conclusion that "Facebook was listening" to their chat. But what's more likely is that this topic was already trending among people like you, and that's why it popped up in your ads.

So, it's not that talking about it made it appear in your ads. It's more about a common event that sparked your conversation about it and also made it show up in your ads.

View on HN

Every time i've received a hyper targeted ad, it's because the person I was just on the phone with was googling the thing we were talking about.

I told my mom i wanted a vacuum cleaner for christmas - guess what, facebook advertises to all your friends what you're shopping for. "lookalike audience" - to your point.

"So, it's not that talking about it made it appear in your ads. It's more about a common event that sparked your conversation about it and also made it show up in your ads."

It's not a common event. They were totally random conversations. That's why I noticed that something is going on. I am not sure if they really listening on the microphone or what else they are doing but it's super creepy and should not happen.

No matter what exactly the mechanism is they use to end up with these hyper-specific results the end results is that by fusing data from an always expanding amount of sources companies are gaining insights into peoples lives which are nearing the almost mythical "all seeing eye" in a way that never happened before in human history. And I think we should ask really hard questions of whether society should continue to allow this or whether it should be reigned in. And we shouldn't accept vague "oh, you know, a person could do this too, so it's okay" or "companies are just persons" statements as an answer. Even for die-hard market fans there's the question if a market can work if the other side in an transaction knows everything about you.

Have tech companies ever deserved the benefit of the doubt when the plausible deniability is that solid?

If you think objectively about this issue, it's hard to see how they can get a positive ROI out of this.

Simon does a great job highlighting why this doesn't make sense from the technical and business standpoints: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/#faceb...

I'm not so worried about the corporation's ROI calculations at the top as much as paperclip maximizing middle management with warped incentives and little in the way of corporate controls or morals. We're one badly designed KPI and generic internal data collection API away from such spying falling through the cracks. Once it's there, the incentives are heavily against looking too hard at where the data came from until a public scandal draws an executive's attention.

It's played out over and over again, especially with Facebook. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, even when "logically" the ROI for the company doesn't make sense. Facebook specifically can't be trusted at the executive level either; that culture trickles down.

Sorry, I’ve worked for and known about too many companies that “spent money to make money” and went bankrupt.

You can’t use net profit as a yardstick of rationality in the corporate world, but especially Corporate America. People will seek revenue that results in negative returns on investment. There’s nothing rational about it, which is the problem.

They can increase revenue by making ethically terrible decisions. Full stop.

It doesn’t have to be something the “deserve” really. Facebook, data brokers, and other creeps have already infected the whole internet. They spy on the content you aren’t even willing to talk about with anybody. They don’t need to secretly access your microphone because they’ve openly violated your privacy more throughly than that.

Not sure anyone's asking for "benefit of the doubt". As defenses against privacy intrusion go, "Of course Facebook isn't listening to all your conversations and using that to serve ads to you. Why, that would be too expensive to contemplate. All they're doing is tracking everything you and your friends do on the web, tracking your location, noticing you're physically close to each other, inferring that you're probably having a conversation together, and using your friend's web activity to serve you targeted ads, as just one of a suite of methods for targeting ads based on your context. Also as soon as it's not too expensive to contemplate we're probably going to actually do it. We're not failing to do it for any ethical reason. It's just too expensive right now." is pretty weak sauce.

"We're not actually transcribing every word you hear and say, we're just using capabilities that the Stasi could only dream of at rates of speed they couldn't even conceive of, and it's just that these coincidences happen so often that it looks like we're transcribing your speech. Come on, be less paranoid."

Your example right here is exactly why I care so much about this.

If people think "they listen to me through the microphone" it distracts them from understanding what's actually happening - the whole sequence of things you listed there.

Which means they can't take measures to protect themselves, or campaign for better practices - because they're working off the wrong mental model of how this stuff works.

No company has ever deserved the benefit of doubt. There are plenty of examples in history where companies prioritized profits over harm to people. And they knew exactly what's going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com