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Comment by jnorthrop | Hacker News Reader

It is always important to keep in mind that Facebook (et al) does not sell your personal information, the sell access to a generalized profile. Now, that may still make some people uncomfortable, but it is not in Facebook's best interest to identify individual users to advertisers and not only would that be illegal (in violation of their policies) but it is not a sustainable business model. They want you and these advertisers to keep coming back.

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I never understood this argument of "selling your information" to advertisers. As far as I'm aware they allow advertisers to target demographics. What company that sells advertising does not?

The only ones that don't end up with the lowest common denominator of ads: scams, insurance, loans, and diploma mills, which is as much of a UX loss as a revenue loss.

I think what that means is the advertisers don't know your identity as a target. Facebook shows them filters for whom the advertisers want to serve their ads. If you click on an ad, then probably your identity is shared, not otherwise.

This is based on my limited knowledge of display advertising, so please correct me.

Don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be possible to target one specific individual (yegg wrote http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted... about it), and it was possible to cross reference this with other RTB venues (e.g., adnexus) - so that, while they didn't give out your details - if you were targeting someone specific, you'd actually get to see a significant part of their web traffic (everything that had ads through those RTB venues).

It all boils down to what you mean by "identify" - if you include "complete name, address, age, etc." - then, no, FB doesn't directly identify you. But if you mean "know whenever that same user does anything else anywhere", then - yes, they do let the advertisers identify you.

> It is always important to keep in mind that Facebook (et al) does not sell your personal information, the sell access to a generalized profile.

I don't know if they reversed this policy, but last I heard, if I "liked" Coke on Facebook, they would use my name and photograph when advertising Coke to my friends.

That's not directly selling data to advertisers, but for me, it's just as objectionable. "Liking" a page and endorsing usage of my name for advertising that page to my friends or publicly are two very different things.

As most things on FB, there's been a slow march about what certain actions mean. In the case of 'likes' it's something on the order of:

"I think this is cool" -> "+ please subscribe me to your updates" -> "+ please tell everyone I know, repeatedly, that I unreservedly endorse this product/company/whatever - while not paying me anything."

You can probably detect my cynicism in the above.

You missed the part where you stop getting most of the updates from the liked company unless they pay Facebook.

Which is a natural function of an increase in the number of pages you like and the number of friends you have, an in crease in the number of pieces of content they produce and your non-increasing attention span. You will see less of content from any one source as a function of time. The source can work around this by producing more interesting content that the algorithm decides you're more likely to want to see or by paying to have their content shown to you.

The fact that people think this is reasonable really worries me.

If you got them all you would be aware of what you had liked but was sending you too much uninteresting stuff and you would unlike them or you could organise them to either 'get everything' or 'highlights only'.

FB's non-optional control and filtering of the feed is to benefit them and give them a monetization option, it isn't a service to you.

I could not actually say this better. +1

EdgeRank is an extortion for businesses.

You can disable that specific behavior at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social, for what it's worth.

It used to be they could basically pin that to the top of a persons News Feed. They removed that ad unit, now, when you pay for an ad, you just get the social context of who likes that product. Since you are using Facebook, a platform with an explicit goal of connecting the world through sharing, it shouldn't be surprising that what you do on it will be seen by others. This social context will only show to your friends, by the way, since people who don't know me are probably not that interested in the fact that I like Topo Chico.

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