jonbarker

Interesting take. I actually read that as a 'softball question' from one supporter of adtech 'free as in beer products' to another. As in, aren't these people who are outraged funny? How else could we create something for free? It was in effect a signal 'don't worry, this won't turn into any meaningful regulation affecting your bottom line.' Don't be duped by people who 'play dumb'. There are many examples of people who don't understand technology in Congress, I don't think this is one of them.

Can we stop referring to 'controls in plain English'? ML models that microtarget people cannot easily be explained in plain English, and that is what they are doing.

For those who have struggled as I have with the Zeigarnik effect attempting to do David Allen's GTD or other list-based systems, there is an answer: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-...

More on Zeigarnik here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect

This is fair, then my system will give credit. V1 of this list is here: https://qz.com/1234502/how-to-block-facebook-all-the-urls-yo...

More geared toward people who don't know how to write to hosts files.

I wrote a batch script that writes to your hosts file a bunch of tracking URLs which are designed to take data from non users in order to enrich the 'social graph' of people who are either logged out or don't have FB accounts. Please ignore all the flask stuff for now; I plan to turn it into a SaaS app that writes to your host files and continually pushes new tracking URLs as I discover them: https://github.com/jtbarker/nofbtracking (btw the irony of me sharing this on a social site for programming is not lost on me).

The most troubling defense from FB I've heard is that product companies that charge for products and don't have ad supported models are inducing "Stockholm Syndrome" in those who defend that approach vs the free ad supported model. To me it seems that that analogy is stronger for those who don't pay for free products, as they are arguably more locked in than those who can 'vote with their wallets' and stop buying.

When you buy ads programmatically, and define those purchases with parameters instead of through a GUI, aren't you arguably buying access to an API?

Sorry, was reading multiple articles on this topic at once. Yes this is a newsroom post, however they plan to let individual users know via their newsfeeds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-... "Facebook says it will tell people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds starting April 9, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica."

I find it ironic that they plan to let users know they've been compromised via the newsfeed. What about users who have either deleted or never log in? How will they find out? Is their likely defense 'ignorance is no excuse' really a great defense if the only way to avoid ignorance in this case to log into their platform?

Non moralist argument against the alcohol industry: most of the alcohol revenue comes from a very concentrated core of heavy drinkers who blow through the liver health guidelines and definitions of binge drinking. So the industry would suffer a massive shock if the relatively small group of people damaging their livers were to decide to stop doing so. This means that the industry relies on the intentional harming of a small group of people's bodies in order to survive.

How is Netflix not at the mercy of major movie studios? Their originals, while popular, are not a proven business model. No tech company to my knowledge has proven that taking content 'in house' improves the bottom line, yet. Pandora attempted to get into tickets and I don't think that went well although I am not sure a true stratechery style analysis of that has ever been done to my knowledge.

How do we know this isn't just correlation with risk taking in general? Like someone who piles away cash is probably also less likely to own motorcycles etc... just saying.

Also, many mobile users name their device their whole name, effectively deanonymizing all their app usage for the massive ecosystem of marketing companies out there. Having worked in the mobile marketing industry I was shocked at how many people were doing this and probably had no idea this was the case.

FB is like a phone company where everyone can call everyone else, all the time, in some type of huge broadcast style phonecall, where people who miss the calls can listen into the recording later. As a matter of fact, that's where the analogy between phones and the internet breaks down too.

Agreed. In addition, tech companies are successful because they enter into mostly unregulated markets (this is a truism of new markets in general, govts can't predict where new markets will pop up so they aren't regulated when they do). Regulation and experimentation are kind of inherently at odds. Unfortunately what we are learning about FB is that regulation probably should have happened when the CEO started referring to his company as a utility.

FB seems to be using these tools as an engagement hook, ie. find the users they know are not engaged or lurking then lure them in with targeted emails about face recognition and privacy features. They probably love all the publicity as it gets people back in app to configure their privacy settings. I also suspect that the privacy settings' backends are 'being figured out' and users are just turning knobs that aren't connected to anything.

The only thing keeping all most people's app download history from getting leaked is fb's (and others') threat of kicking the app download ad partners off their platform. They usually don't do that, and it's always reactive, meaning the damage is already done.

Cloud storage is 'kind of' commoditized. Like the price per gig for buckets or blobs is pretty similar. But it's hard for most folks to collaborate on with buckets or blobs. They're in the collaboration market, which is bigger than the storage market.

Dropbox is on my list of reasons why I no longer naysay anything run by technical founders with some product sense. I remember hearing they were just essentially re-selling AWS storage back in the day (before they started building their own data centers). I thought 'why would anyone want to buy marked up AWS storage'. Then a few years later I learned to stop doubting great product focused entrepreneurs ever.

I still don't think online will take off soon as a popular way to buy for toys. There is a reason why almost all toys come semi demo-able with buttons you can push and open-ish boxes. Amazon is apparently behind in apparel for a similar reason, you can't try anything on!

I think once they get to 'as good as people' we should let them on the road, because they are 'as good as people' but never get tired, angry, and/or drunk :)

I have family members who think that fb is the operating system of their ipads, and that google search is the same thing as a URL on a browser. And when you say targeted ads is a problem, they think of focus groups and demographics a la Mad Men, not natural language processing on everything you've ever posted, analysis of every app you've ever used either on your phone or in fb app marketplace, tracking URLs across the web to track non logged in fb users and non users, and social login providing even deeper analysis of your content habits through partnerships with various media companies.

Have to say I respect the guy for what he built up to around 2008 but I have to call this one. He's basically following the old tobacco 'four dogs' strategy if you follow his statements. Some examples from just the past couple of months of statements mostly from last night (all paraphrased):

1) First of all, I don't have a dog. -> 'The idea that someone affected an election with ads on fb is pretty crazy.'

2) And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. -> 'Facebook is a force in the world for good, because it connects everyone, and my job is to work on something my kids will be proud of, as long as facebook is important.' (benefits outweigh the harms, equating FB with the internet). This is dubious.

3) And if I had a dog and it did bite, then it didn't bite you. -> 'Security is a problem that is never solved, so we like everyone else will always be working on it forever.' Implication: if I weren't working on internet security, someone else would be, and security design problems would still be a threat to internet users, so stop complaining about the state of internet security, because odds are it hasn't affected you, and by the way, look how much I am investing in it by hiring thousands of people to do content moderation on everyone's behalf.

4) And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog. -> '#deletefacebook is obviously not good, but nobody is acting on it in any meaningful numbers' (calling everyone's bluff and in my interpretation actually daring everyone to try and create a more secure and beneficial internet experience without facebook).

Please reply with modifications; I think the essential gist is there.

I like his methodology, mainly because of a couple reasons. 1) We don't have that many civilization level societies to study in history, and 2) no society specifically sets out to implode, in fact there is tremendous benefit in not doing so. So even if we only had one collapse to study, we probably should do so and learn as much as we can from it, careful not to put too much value in the 'this time it's different' thing for our own prospects.

Steve Jobs actually envisioned building an ads product where the ads were actually beautiful and enhanced the user experience, in his final years. That was the idea behind iAd. I occasionally get these types of ads from youtube where I'm actually glad they showed it to me. No other ad product has ever met this bar for me including fb so that's why I think they deserve the market's current skepticism, that and allegedly selling political ads at different CPMs to different parties (this is not legal in other types of media).

If I am reading fb history correctly they had a business (apple and party poker ads) even when they were distributed (one server and mysql db per school).

I feel that Jared Diamond's book Collapse belongs on your list of references https://archive.org/stream/CollapseHowSocietiesChooseToFailO...

Light field cameras always fascinated me because they are the example of the literal opposite of evolutionary biological inspiration (this is not an insult by the way). The first biological 'eyes' were probably light sensitive spots on skin with no lenses or shape, which then became cavities for directional sensing and then lenses and retinas developed to enable image recognition.

What changed is awareness. I would like them to provide a resource which allows users to know which microsegments of facebook audience network they are showing up in, without spending any money.