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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.

Why on Earth would/should anyone believe this after Cambridge Analytica?

They absolutely should not. FB is either lying to the public, or to itself. It has shown zero capacity to self-regulate, and as soon as someone there has a monetization scheme sufficiently powerpointed out, its a toboggan run down a mountain of turd to the result.

Moreso, why on earth would they then need this data in the first place?

They will use the data for ads.

Then in a few years when we discover it, they'll say they're sorry and they're trying to do better.

Facebook is changing.

Probably not directly, but I can't imagine what purpose this would be except to sell ads. That's what Facebook's business is all about.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to run some sort of regression of behavior against bank balance and debt load. So sure, they're not using your bank account for ads, just a proxy of your bank account for ads.

Finding proxies for income is decades old (zip code and magazine subscriptions being the classic example), but I'm not aware of anyone doing at this scale and with direct input from banks as opposed to volunteered information.

To launch a paid subscription version of Facebook with loyalty discounts?

Get in Facebook, get your LinkedIn subscription 50% off for coming 20 years! (this is made up)

Disclaimer: Not a Facebook employee.

And their CEO will write a blog post about how they are "asking themselves hard questions." Followed by an FB advertising campaign stating "financial fraud is not your friend."

Exactly.

Just like they repeatedly say "we don't sell your data!" they will come up with their own meanings of words and phrases to try to pacify people.

Well, did Facebook ever say it wouldn’t share data with third parties prior to Cambridge Analytica?

My own impression is that they were always very open about reserving the right to do whatever they want with all data, until the CA scandal first caused an actual nontrivial number of people to care.

I'd love to be pointed to relevant facts I might be missing.

On the one hand, that's probably a valid point-if a very dangerous game of technicalities to be playing.

On the other hand, I'm less perturbed by what Facebook says it will do-and what Facebook actually does in the absence of a governing policy to begin with. Like, for example, not vetting applications that utilize the swaths of data it consumes from its users

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/26...

Exactly. I mean, what use of the data does it have otherwise?

I’d believe it. There are plenty of other ways to make money off private data. This sounds like they were specifically saying they don’t use data in a that particular way.

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