Facebook has always sold data to advertisers, and it probably always will

I disagree with the premise. The accusation only holds if your definition of &quot;selling data&quot; includes any transaction where data is leaked as part of a transaction. Importantly, in the ad model the information leakage is an unintended (but unavoidable) side effect. If Facebook could sell ad slots without revealing information about you they would. In fact over the years they&#x27;ve tightened their constraints around targetting to ensure that individuals cannot be targetted and data about individuals can&#x27;t be derived by targetting hacks.<p>If you asked an average person what &quot;selling data&quot; means, they would describe a much more straightforward exchange: you pay me, and I tell you the names of woman interested in skiing.<p>Consider a real world comparison. You run a ski class for woman. I pay you $100 to distribute vouchers for a range of ski equipment at my store. If a customer shows up with a voucher then I know that they&#x27;re taking your lessons. I can infer their skill level and that they can afford to pay for private lessons. Was that an instance of you selling your customer&#x27;s data?

This essay is just wrong.<p>Just because a person ends up on an advertiser&#x27;s site after clicking on an add targeted to [whatever] doesn&#x27;t mean the advertiser has the data. It doesn&#x27;t know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad.

You probably could use this type of granular targeting described, and infer personal data from Facebook users using UTM codes on your campaigns.<p>But it doesn&#x27;t tell you who this information is about. You&#x27;d have to trick the user to reveal their identity on the attacker website.<p>I guess this could happen if the victim had previously visited the attacker website and identified themselves using say their email. Store a cookie of this user. Then when the click the information leaking ad they identify themselves on the attacking website with this cookie. Now you can link the information leaking targeting with the user and potentially leak data.<p>It&#x27;s misleading to say that Facebook is selling data to advertisers. Rather they might leak personal data through covert channels.

A lot of comments are missing the fact that there are data sources other than Facebook that can turn a click into an identity, or near enough. Facebook can&#x27;t claim ignorance of all of those.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;panopticlick.eff.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;panopticlick.eff.org&#x2F;</a> for one conceptual demo.<p>As an innocuous example, have you ever noticed that Maps seems to show the right neighborhood when you connect a non-GPS laptop to a friend&#x27;s wifi?

Real question: Should opinion editors be judged by the practice of the journal that publishes them?<p>The NYTimes does admittedly worst than Facebook on that front (the key aspects for me: I can’t see the targeting for their ads before clicking on it, refuse some ads on their website, I can’t access, edit or delete what their partners know about me; I can do all that on Facebook). That makes the claims of that editor seem very disingenuous.<p>Should we judge him based on that? Or is he a user of NYTimes and a victim of their disputable privacy practice, like he is a user of Facebook and an avowed victim of the Mark &amp; Boz’s decisions?

Its not only advertisers buying your data. I had a boss who paid a subscription to a service that monitors as much of your internet activity as possible. He got alerts everytime i and other colleages did anything public. He bought it cause he was paranoid, or a voyer. Stuff that you do that is public, is more than just a facebook post, it is slso a google+, steam, wordpress, gravatar, linkedin, discuss, readdit, and loads more. The more you can link up a particular person, the more you can track across domains, the more its worth, even to the person being tracked. Think credit scoring companies who sell there tracking back to you and also to banks. Your governments pay billions to security contractors to collect your data. Newsagencies that suggest your data is only valuable to adveriserz are engaging in distraction.

This is tricky. I sort of agree with the author and sort of don&#x27;t.<p>It boils down to: if you own an algorithm f: H-&gt;R^n and show m number of (k, v) pairings such that f(k) = v, does it follow that you have revealed all or part of the algorithm? (Where user data is folded into f.)<p>This would necessarily have to do with how big m is and whether it is enough to infer a f with reasonable accuracy. Not sure what are good metrics for &quot;reasonable accuracy&quot; though.

How is ad matching performed exactly? Is a users data profile basically matched against some set of ad network defined properties and then served to the end user?

I agree with this article, thanks for sharing. With the advent of big data and capabilities to draw conclusions from what seems like an anonymous information Mr. Zuck sill goes for the simplified explanation &quot;but we&#x27;re not giving it directly...&quot; The violence case in Myanmar showed that Facebook has much broader consequences without directly doing anything. The same goes for third party involvement, they can deny it and it makes me question do they themselves understand the scope of the problem and manipulation.

This is so on point that even Congress should be able to understand it.

As a culture, we all signed up to participate in a business model funded by collecting our data and selling it. The natural outcome is that people with money would use that money to influence public opinion. We walked straight into this trap.

<p><pre><code> &gt;Please disable your ad blocker &gt; &gt;Advertising helps fund Times journalism. </code></pre> No I don&#x27;t think so - uBlock Origin all the way.<p>Internet advertising fuels the Facebook problem.<p>The smaller we can make internet advertising, the smaller the Facebook problem becomes.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Targeted_advertising" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Targeted_advertising</a> is included in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;update" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;update</a>

I don&#x27;t know why we pick on FB for this practice, just because they&#x27;re better at it than existing marketing data out there that&#x27;s been accumulating for the past 40 years on people. Companies like Axciom, Experian, etc. have been doing this far longer than FB...