Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkjkls | Hacker News Reader

It's not really selling it's user data for money; it's selling access to it's users for money. Sure, user data allows some advanced targeting, but the reason they make the profit they do is that people are buying ads for people to see, not data about them. That's an important distinction.

View on HN

Most people are buying ads for people to see. Some others, however, are using the platform as access to user’s extensive 3P data, once they click and are shuffled through multiple shady ad exchanges gathering and selling data, including the social graph.

Some others, like CA and ilk, also get easy access to user’s psychometric data, by embedding the psychometrics into A/B tested ad content.

The adage “you are the product” has only become more true as FB has advanced, whether by their intended or explicit policies or not.

Facebook has cut down more and more on that as they've decided to be an advertising company instead of a platform. The vast majority of their data issues come from pre-2015 when they were still experimenting with their business model.

Honestly, at the moment, Facebook has huge economic incentives to keep as much data to itself as possible. Facebook being the only place where you can microtarget to such an extent is a huge moat around their business.

Even with their data policies, FB (and any ad platform) enables massive data-mining by the third parties which host the ad exchanges and destinations.

And microtargeting can be abused (or just plain used, depending on your perspective) to infer only additional data by incorporating it into the 3P analysis once users click and start loading non-FB content. Microtargeting by its nature leaks information about the target segments ...

Figuring out the data FB uses to microtarget is simply a matter of buying enough ads, or getting in the middle of enough campaign-to-user relationships (as a central 3P ad exchange or tracking service).

I think there are some pretty large differences in scale between "buying ads to target people with specific attributes and saving the situations where they interact with your ad" and "enabling any application to view all of the information about any friend who has connected with the app user".

I wouldn't argue that micro-targeting can't end up with very specific privacy concerns, but I don't think it's nearly the same scale as "you should probably assume that if you signed up to enable the Graph API on Facebook all information about you prior to 2015 is available to people you probably don't trust".

It’s a different scale only in the timeframe of a single campaign. 3P trackers have an *ongoing central vantage over many campaigns, giving them data which they accumulate and sell to each other, causing leaked “private” data to accrete and spread in essentially a viral fashion.

The resulting dataset over even short periods (< 1 yr) time is comparable to a total datadump, including an accurate social graph. A “very specific pivacy concern” it is not.

They are selling market making for an ad market. Any market is a trade of both value and information.

I disagree, because Facebook's incentive is to keep all their information to themselves in an advertising business. If their the only ones who have it, then in order to get the same form of targeting you have to pay them.

It’s not possible for them to keep targeting data to themselves.

Targeted campaign products leak data about the user’s targeted attributes by their very nature.

If you want FB’s targeting data, simply buy targeted campaigns and associate the target attributes with the users who click once they are on your server. At scale, the targeting data is transparent.

Big ad analytics companies and ad exchanges can and do basically sit in the center of many campaigns and slurp up the targeting data which is naturally leaking from FB by virtue of their selling capaigns based on those targets.

Whether they want to or not, they are selling their data.

Edit: Care to reply instead of downvote? Is everything above not true?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com