Everyone is all dramatic about the Facebook data thing. I am baffled.
Really? Are you the same people that got all spazzed out about the NSA collecting phone data? Hello McFly! That is what they do!
News flash: Facebook sells your data to advertisers. Everyone say it with me “If you get the service for free, you are the product.”
If you don’t want the whole world knowing it, don’t put it on Facebook. I thought that was Internet 101.
Thats it, everyone needs to go to remedial Internet class. Go!
I wasn’t surprised. I don’t post any useful information, only engage in general chatter about life. I don’t think my voting pattern has changed in several decades, and I doubt some goofy meme could swing me.
And cat pictures.
I’m not surprised either. I cringe every time a friend posts one of those “results” that showed they just let another company have unfettered access to their account…which is like a half dozen people/posts a day. Sure, these friends are probably putting some of my data at risk too but Facebook is not my personal secret database. Any data I’ve got up there, I put up there.
And they do serve me very relevant ads, which frankly, I appreciate. If I had to see ads for gun shows and Cialis all day long I’d quickly be off the service.
The point is that Facebook *didn’t *sell the data. Instead a non-American company you’ve never heard of before stole the data and used it to create carefully tailored fake stories to influence the American election on behalf of their clients.
So if they had paid Facebook money for the data, you would feel better about it?
It was data that Facebook gave to an app, who then kept the data and then they sold it to someone else. Either way, users effectively told Facebook “you can sell this data.”
How else are you supposed to know where the parties are?
The problem comes when they tell you one thing and do something else. If Facebook said “any data you post can be used by us or anyone else,” then people wouldn’t have a right to complain. But FB told users that you could control who had access to your data, and that was a lie. Back in 2010 in a Washington Post op-ed, Zuckerberg listed the five principles under which Facebook would operate. Three of those were not true: “1) You have control over how your information is shared, 2) We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want, and 3) We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.” It’s one thing to post personal information knowing what will be done with it, and it’s another to post that information under false pretenses.
You might think that people who believed Facebook were being naive to think their data wouldn’t be misused, and you have been proven right. But it doesn’t mean people have no right to be mad that they were lied to.
This why I rarely if ever comment on anything controversial on FB, and I never post or share stuff like that.
I’m aware that my digital fingerprints get all over that stuff.
So, I really don’t care what they do with my data frankly.
No. You keep framing this as Facebook doing something with data that they had collected from willing particpants.
Facebook did not give this data to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica wrote an app that scraped the data from peoples’ contact list. The people on the contact lists - ie the people whose data was stolen - had no idea that their friends had used an app from a third party that assembled this data collection.
But that was only half the problem. Cambridge Analytica, working on behalf of the Trump campaign, turned around and used the stolen data to send political propaganda to the people whose data was stolen behind their backs. Cambridge Analytica did this with the goal of influencing the American presidential collection.
Trying to say that this is just a minor Facebook boo-boo is giving a pass to the real bad actors here.
I think you are close to the root of the issue. I was unaware that Zuckerberg ever made such a bold statement, and I would have a hard time believing they ever meant it.
Facebook doesn’t make money from users or happiness or goodwill. They make money from advertisers selling things that are targeted to users. The ads are targeted to users based off some amount of data that users put on Facebook.
If a user nods their head up and down to my previous paragraph, I just can’t seem to understand how they could get indignant about the current situation. Yea, it wasn’t 100% by the book, but the idea is pretty similar.
I think a lot of users are thinking “I’m leaving Facebook” because they didn’t’ understand the basic premise from the start.
The Trump Campaign also uses lots of other data sources to deliver millions of television/radio ads to people in order to influence the presidential election. Their job is to influence an election. That is what a campaign is. Everyone thinks this is OK.
People thinking Facebook is using their data to show them targeted ads about soap products is OK.
When you combine the ideas, along with a company that bent the Facebook rules to get extra data, and suddenly everyone is aghast and want to quit Facebook.
I think a lot of the outrage is basically the fact that people don’t like Trump (hey, I don’t either) and if it has to do with his campaign, then it must be extra super evil.
If all this data stolen stuff happened in an effort to sell more soap ads, no one would have batted an eye.
I am not bothered at all. Never been on facebook. Never will.
Here’s an interesting thing that I’ve noticed, although I admit right off that I haven’t paid a ton of attention in the past. However, generally it seemed that the ads I was served on Facebook related not to anything that was ever posted on my feed, but to things I was doing online outside of Facebook, such as shopping. I would look at widgets at Amazon, and bingo bango, the next time I opened Facebook, there would be an ad for widgets.
A couple of days ago, based on this controversy, I disabled Apps, Websites and Plugins on my Facebook. Since then, all the ads I have been served have been very generic, and unrelated to any online shopping I have done. I approve of this difference, even though it prevents me (for example) from linking online news stories to my feed.
I make these comments here because I never thought much about the mechanism through which those ads were served. This controversy caused me to do that thinking and taking this step. It allows me to stay in contact with my friends, without (apparently) sacrificing so much of my privacy. Or anyway, whatever privacy I am sacrificing across the web, at least it is not thrown in my face every time I open Facebook.
Nope, not spun out about Facebook. The price of using free content is an agreement that nothing you post is private; I’ve always assumed that any site I give info to is leveraging it for money – it’s the cost of doing business and I’m careful about the info I parse out (ex: I use “burner” email accounts if I’m doing a one-time order, etc, with a vendor).
Of course, I have enough critical faculties that I don’t believe Hillary was running a satanic pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza joint nor do I respond to faux Facebook messages that ask for my password and credit card numbers. I basically use FB to post dog pictures and “like” friends’ cute kid/brunch/cat pics.
I do have an acquaintance I had to unfriend because she posts about Hillary’s satanic ring, false flaggers, birtherism, and so on. I doubt that abolishing fake news from social media would have any effect on her deranged ideas – she’d just get the material elsewhere. She wasn’t exactly reading the NYT or WaPo prior to the rise of social media.
The internet is not free. Whether it is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Amazon - it is supported by showing you ads.
YOU are in charge of how much data you give them.
To limit that data… Lock down privacy, don’t stay logged in all day (or use their app instead of web interface), don’t click on ‘share this’ or ‘Sign in with Facebook’ buttons and don’t like or share anything unless you know and trust the source.
Randall, as usual, had a good take on it today. https://xkcd.com/1971/
As I understand it, the endless flow of cute quizzes on fb were very valuable to the Trump information program. What kind of dog would you be, What really pisses you off, What do you think about chemtrails, What is your deepest secret (or fear), Who do you trust, Do you believe the 9/11 massacres were done by a gov’t conspiracy, Do you buy US-made goods, etc.? In short, they dissected Americans’ desires, fears, and prejudices. Once they had that, the campaign talking points and ads were built around that framework of anger and fear.
I never bit on any of those quizzes. I figured they were data mining devices, designed for aiming targeted ads. Lots of people found them entertaining, though, and they cheerfully provided marketing info.
I’ve never heard it put so succinctly before. I like it. It’s right up there with the colloquial "Ain’t no such thing as a free … "
I had friends leave facebook in mid 2016 because they said it was toxic, and was causing them to be anxious and stuff like that.
I dunno, I’ve been on facebook since 2009, but I’ve probably been to my “timeline” less than a dozen times.
Its messenger is very convenient. I can send a message to someone, and it will show up on whatever device they are logged into. I play some games occasionally, and I use it to communicate things to clients about my business. For my business, it’s been pretty valuable. I’ve paid them very little (I’ve done a few advertising campaigns, but they weren’t all that useful), but have received quite bit in exposure and the ability to reach the community.
I will be upset it facebook goes the way of myspace (especially as it seems most of the people that are upset about facebook are going to facebook owned instagram), as I have quite a bit of time invested in it, and it has brought me quite a bit of business over the years.
Yes, this was really well put!