Many of us, as software developers, are taught to solve general problems instead of specific instances whenever we can. That's what I see as wrong with 99% of the commentary about this recently. Sure, there might be a bug in Facebook. Maybe it's a serious bug, and it really needs to be fixed. But it's a bug that manifests in many other places too. It's even possible that Facebook is neither the first nor the worst. Facebook doesn't have "assistants" that listen to your every word like Google and Amazon and Apple do. It doesn't have all of your email, or your entire search history, or the very OS on a device you have with you all the time. But I digress.<p>The real point is that targeting any "fix" too narrowly toward Facebook, or Google, or any one party doesn't fix it for the others. It might even distract from or interfere with development of a more general solution. But that's exactly the path a lot of people seem to be going. By all means, criticize Facebook if you think they've done something wrong, but <i>don't stop there</i>. Make sure you understand the full scope of the problem, and the options for addressing it <i>in a general way</i>, and the benefits or drawbacks of each approach. Progress doesn't come from everyone saying "me too" on a bug report. It comes from people talking about and then implementing ideas to make the bug stop happening <i>anywhere</i>. I've seen precious little of that.
I have nothing against Amazon and I had been a happy customer, but when I ponder which company has the most valuable information about me, it's Amazon - by far.<p>When it comes to Facebook (or other social media companies) it's all about self-portrayal and in the end we have control which information we provide. To some degree at least.<p>Amazon on the other hand has direct unfiltered buying behaviour data. Isn't this advertiser heaven?
Databrokers enable this - take a look at something like Acxiom's developer APIs.[1] You'll find that they have some quite interesting stuff, like whether someone's interested in gambling.[2] Facebook partners with these folks (as do many others) to enable them to build this aggregated database.<p>Interestingly, you can log in and see your own profile there. I did that a few years ago, and introduced subtle errors into it (e.g. I changed my car to a different brand of car, and the "extended warranty services" robocalls around a year later started calling about my nonexistent vehicle).<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.myacxiom.com/code/api/data-bundles/main" rel="nofollow">https://developer.myacxiom.com/code/api/data-bundles/main</a><p>[2] <a href="https://developer.myacxiom.com/code/api/data-bundles/bundle/gambling" rel="nofollow">https://developer.myacxiom.com/code/api/data-bundles/bundle/...</a>
FYI: this article & website are plugs for the owner's "private" search engine:<p><a href="https://www.searchencrypt.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.searchencrypt.com/</a><p>which seems to be heavily ad-laden (e.g. searching for "free" gets you ads, which it doesn't on Google).
Spotify reserves the right to sell your details/listening habits when their terms of use changed... (ie genres of music you like, the types of musicians etc)<p>Is this facebook data being funneled back to the record labels and their parent companies to sell advertising? my research says its likely, this feels similar to the CA situation, just not as political..?
To me it's an issue of cost vs reward.<p>While I would love to see greater privacy awareness and consideration from all entities I use, the fact is that there are certain web properties that I find indispensable and without a privacy considered alternative.<p>Facebook I can live without, likely even happier than with it. I also think that the social contract of "sell me as a product in exchange for enabling my social communication" is not the correct paradigm, and once there's a user friendly alternative similar to secure scuttlebutt (i.e. Mozilla level friendly), that best represents the proper social contract (I'll provide hardware resources to enable my social communication).
It's not news that Facebook is gathering and storing TONS of information about its users (and even non-users). Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft are all guilty of the same thing.
Completely by the by but is the scrolling on this page screwed up for anyone else? Seems to have a weird slow non-native scrolling method for me. I'm running Firefox on Android
And Cambridge Analytics isn't the only election campaign "influencers". But for some reason, the focus is only on facebook and cambridge analytics.
Perhaps the government should protect us more actively. It could hand us fake-ids we can use when dealing with these companies. And it could give us fake home addresses, etc. Like a witness protection program, but for everybody. And it could provide an API for sending (e)mail to real users, using their fake info. And it could set up a VPN service for everybody to mask IP addresses.
What? Who would have thought?<p><a href="https://prism-break.org/en/" rel="nofollow">https://prism-break.org/en/</a>
Yes, the other companies are probably just as bad, but one at a time, please. It is very hard to keep the attention of the man on the street, we should not split it across multiple companies.
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).