Facebook To Let Advertisers Bid on Your Browser Data | Hacker News Reader

Facebook To Let Advertisers Bid on Your Browser Data

latimes.com

35 pointsakandiah55 comments

We all know Facebook is creepy, getting creepier, and shows no sign of slowing down. They are in an arms race to mine your data (you are their product) for their customers.

That's why people are leaving.

I posted about how the experience of leaving is effortless and generally improved my life -- "Leaving Facebook is easy and fun".

http://joshuaspodek.com/leaving-facebook-easy-and-fun

"Real-time bidding technology is already used by Google, Yahoo, AOL and other companies to target ads to consumers as they surf the Web."

You should probably leave the internet in general.

I think everyone here understands that these are all layers of data-mining, and all the big players are doing it.

But it's the subtlety. Google (at least Google of old, who knows in the future) sort of offers you help as you're looking for things, just like in the example below about hotels in Istanbul. The average person probably doesn't understand what's going on under the hood there. People don't really know what Google knows about them. Facebook, on the other hand, is openly saying "We have all of this private information on you, and we're going to sell it to the highest bidder." It's the same, but different. One is PR friendly, the other is a PR nightmare.

This can't be a long term strategy for Facebook. People don't want to know that their information is being sold. They will tire of this.

I key this back to all of the social akwardness of the Facebook CEO. Honestly, that guy is a little weird. Even weirder that a billion people have trusted a socially awkard guy with their full browsing histories and every aspect of their social life.

This latest move just proves to me that Zuckerberg really is there to take advantage of you and spy on you. At first with the open graph and the like buttons and all of that people were speculating that Facebook could easily follow and gather internet crumbs and store them for later. And now here is a press release openly saying they are going to be selling this data for profit. There is ZERO tact in this.

It will take a while, but I'm starting to get the feeling that Facebook will destroy itself in its never ending quest to justify its hype.

"I key this back to all of the social akwardness of the Facebook CEO."

This truly doesn't really matter. It's not as if extroverted socially amiable people always make the best decisions.

I'd like to believe that socially well adjusted people understand that digging into browsing history outside of Facebook for profit is creepy.

From the users' standpoint, ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.

Telling people how their data is being used is much more preferable to doing nefarious things behind the scenes. This transparency allows users to make their own decisions about what to do with their data.

>That's why people are leaving.

Are that many people really leaving Facebook?

To play devil's advocate, is this any different to what Google is doing at present? Spend a few hours researching, say, hotels in Istanbul, and you'll see the ads that appear on Adwords-enabled sites change accordingly.

Yeah I think its the same idea - the article mentions Google, AOL and Yahoo are doing it already. It happens to me on my own blog, which has a google adsense banner (but if I click on it then I'm violating google's terms of service).

I would say the difference is that, regardless of how it is used or presented, this ultimately links the information to a specific person, not just some generalized IP address.

This, but also Google does it a little differently.

Google: What can I do for you?

You: I need to do a search on hotels in Austin, TX.

Google: Great, here you go. We'll watch your behavior so we can serve better ads and give you better results in the future.

You: Thanks google!

-------

Facebook: IF you give me all of your information, then you can talk to your friends at my house and I'll record everything for you.

You: Uh, I guess thats OK. I need to talk to my friends.

Facebook: I'm following you everywhere now.

For those of us with gmail addresses it's pretty strongly linked to our identity too.

Anyone with access to my google history including my email could tell much more about me than my facebook data; for starters they could easily find out my home address.

The real issue is that I just trust google more than I trust facebook. Facebook has had a lot of privacy issues in the past, while Google seems to have avoided them. Google is run by adults, facebook is run by children.

yeah. The thing about google though is that you can just sign out of your google accounts and they dont track you, I believe. Facebook -- nope. We're with you all the time !!!

And the pressure to hit quarterly targets begins. I have stopped using Facebook frequently since the IPO and now only login in Incognito Mode so that the cookies are sandboxed.

"Facebook isn’t giving any advertisers information about users" So there's no evidence for the inflammatory headline here.

Of course they do. I mean, they don't package it up and send it in a spreadsheet. But when a company makes an ad, they can target it to users who meet certain criteria. So whenever a user clicks an ad, the advertiser knows they fit that criteria. They can know your gender, age, what city you live near, how much money you make, etc.

But you needed to click on the ad

Will there be a comment under the Ad saying:

"By clicking this advert you will be informing company x that you recently visited the URL y"

No? Then they're collecting and selling that information on without your knowledge and without your permission.

Will there also be a notice and button under the advert so you can permanently and fully delete your browser history and tell Facebook to not collect it in future? No?

This obviously wouldn't work for smaller sites but ...

What if Facebook was transparent about how much they earned on advertising per user. Would you pay to use their service without the ads (and associated tracking cookies)?

Hmmm ... as I reread that, it kind of sounds like "protection". But I guess there are a lot of companies that won't make money without shaking down their customers in some way or another.

Advertisers should bid to me. If I accept, Facebook gets a substantial cut.

I feel like the privacy issues and misaligned incentives would be corrected if only Facebook saw themselves as a broker between advertisers and consumers rather than Lord of the Data.

It's stuff like that which makes me happy that I have never owned a Facebook account.

I wish somebody would develop a browser which would let me use facebook but automatically hide data from it.

Now, let me think... who in the world is a major browser manufacturer who would have an incentive to prevent facebook from being able to serve well-matched advertisements?

Incognito mode?

Yes, I just want a streamlined incognito mode that (a) automatically activates when I look at facebook and (b) remembers my login credentials.

Actually you wouldn't need it to be specifically targeted at facebook, you could target it at any domain you like.

There are extensions that do the first part:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gedeaafllmnkkgbinf...

Remembering credentials can be done with something like 1Password.

It's called "request policy", it's a Firefox extension, and it does that and a whole lot more (although it does need a little configuration. And it will make you appreciate how much data random sites are giving about you to other sites who collect data)

Does anyone have a link for that Firefox add-on that protects your privacy?

On Firefox, Options > Privacy, check "Tell websites that I do not want to be tracked". Not sure if all websites respect this setting.

Thanks, but that's not what I meant to ask. There's a Firefox add-on that knows about about all the privacy-invading companies out there, and prevents Firefox from connecting to their servers.

It would be pretty optimistic to assume that Facebook wouldn't store your historical data, if you're deliberately logged in with your account but sending DNT: 1. Facebook's whole user experience pretty much relies on the historical data it collects of the logged in users' actions.

(I mean this from the point of view that you are a Facebook user who doesn't want to receive profiled advertising as described in the article.)

Ctrl-Shft-P is "Start Private Browsing" (also available in the "Tools" menu (on Linux). Private browsing is described here: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-browse-....

Chrome has a similar feature if you open a new "Incognito Window".

Ghostery? https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/ghostery/ or Priv3? http://priv3.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Yep, thanks, Ghostery is the one I had in mind. I'll take a look at Priv3 as well.

Request Policy Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

Better than "Private Browsing" or "do not track" for 3rd-party surveillance, because it will not load other server's tracking images / javascript.

Only downside: expect some frustration when shopping online. It will break your first attempt at paying for anything via 3rd party payment services (which often use 3-4 different redirects to obscure banking providers - and each redirect / iframe will fail, of course). You can whitelist those, but it is more work.

I use the hosts file from http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

That blocks advertising sites regardless of browser. I also have added facebooks's domains to my hosts file (needless to say I don't use Facebook).

> “It will certainly open up Facebook inventory to companies that want to reach people in this manner,” she said.

I like how she refers to Facebook users as inventory and people at the same time.

Also, I feel like some Bill Hicks ^^

The 'inventory' they refer to is ad inventory.

Okay, then I don't like how she refers to people as inventory, but how the sentence would parse that way also; seeing how it's close to an interesting truth, instead of some blurb only advertisers would care about. HN doesn't stand for Ho News, does it. So there.

you are not the user, you are the product. but it's for free;)

facebook should give a cut of the revenue to each user whose data was used.

why?

wouldnt this flip the issue. rather than users complaining about their data being used, they'd be involved in a marketplace to make their browsing data more valuable.

Sounds like such a setup could be easily gamed to me.

how is this not good? it's exactly how "seo" became an everyday term...

"How is this not good? It's exactly like [NOT GOOD THING]..."

Google Adsense is much worse than it could be for advertisers because of people gaming it. Why should Facebook add an element of gaming to their own system which in turn makes it much worse for advertisers?

Also, it would cost a fortune to build and maintain a system for sending payments out to millions of users.

Also, they could just keep the money to themselves instead of giving it away.

the whole point is that if they keep the money then the users won't game the system, they'll complain that fb is selling their data...

Users complain when Facebook changes a font size, or a button color. They complain no matter what, and Facebook has gotten quite good at just letting them whine away for a week or two until they give up and shut up.

No they wont. They wont complain about it, because they wont know or care about it. It's not worth it for Facebook to sink billions of dollars to appease a handful of people who actually care about their privacy.

And send you an invoice for use of the site that exactly equals it?

why? facebook would benefit a ton from crowdsourcing their revenue. users could artificially drive up the value of their browsing history through various tricks that would develop.

You're getting use of Facebook for free. If you want a cut of their revenue, why shouldn't they charge you for access?

I think people in hacker community are always way too afraid of where privacy is going. We should all understand, it's gone already. Facebook's remarketing is same as Google + Bing. Notice all those Tigerdirect ads. Personally I like ads on sites. They tend to be related content and helps site owners monetize. I think the conversation shouldn't be best way to stop cookie tracking but how to control what you want out there in a single place. It's really crappy to have to worry about privacy settings on hundreds of websites. I don't want to use the web on privacy mode.

I don't understand why people are worried. Every time you use a loyalty card in a supermarket your data is tracked, analyzed, and you're served up personalized ads in the form of the coupons that print out when you ring up. Every time you send an email in gmail, it's searched for keywords and targeted ads are served up to you. Every time you use your Macy's card your purchases are tracked and you get personalized coupons in your inbox.

I have never heard an argument against Facebook/Google/whatever that was any deeper than "But but but MAH PRIVACY!" Privacy was kaput when the first phone book was printed.

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