{"id":14048,"date":"2019-01-26T22:08:39","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T22:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/the-facts-about-facebook.html"},"modified":"2019-01-26T22:08:39","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T22:08:39","slug":"the-facts-about-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/the-facts-about-facebook.html","title":{"rendered":"The facts about Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a critical<\/span> reading of\u00a0Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes Mark, you\u2019re right; Facebook <\/a> turns 15 next month. What a long time you\u2019ve been in the social media business! We\u2019re curious as to whether you\u2019ve also been keeping count of how many times you\u2019ve been forced to apologize for breaching people\u2019s trust<\/a> or, well, otherwise royally messing up<\/a>\u00a0over the years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true you weren\u2019t setting out to build \u201ca global company\u201d. The predecessor to Facebook was a \u2018hot or not\u2019 game called \u2018FaceMash\u2019 that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom<\/a>. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others\u2019 attractiveness \u2014 and you weren\u2019t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college\u2019s online facebooks and grabbing people\u2019s selfies without permission.<\/p>\n

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it,\u00a0<\/span>you wrote<\/a>: \u201cI almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.\u201d Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The seeds of Facebook\u2019s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.<\/p>\n

So while you may not have instantly<\/em> understood how potent this \u2018outrageous and divisive\u2019 eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be \u2014 oh hai future global scale! \u2014 the core DNA of Facebook\u2019s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.<\/p>\n

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship \u2014 gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! \u2014 and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it \u2018social\u2019.<\/p>\n

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from \u2018social\u2019 platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it\u2019s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a \u201ccrazy idea\u201d, or by implying that \u2018a little\u2019 amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and \u2018socializing\u2019 everything.<\/p>\n

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he\u2019s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? \u201cI have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,\u201d said Russell in an interview with the BBC<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n

After her death, Molly\u2019s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves.\u00a0\u201cWe didn\u2019t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,\u201d said Russell.<\/p>\n

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.<\/p>\n

So when you write about making services that \u201cbillions\u201d of \u201cpeople around the world love and use\u201d forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don\u2019t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide<\/em> anywhere in the world\u00a0\u2014 as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar<\/a> \u2014 it\u2019s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.<\/p>\n

And if your algorithms can\u2019t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don\u2019t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don\u2019t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.<\/p>\n

Yet your article shows no sign you\u2019ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don\u2019t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.<\/p>\n

You focus instead on what you call \u201cclear benefits to this business model\u201d.<\/p>\n

The benefits to Facebook\u2019s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue<\/a> to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don\u2019t even sound like you\u2019re trying.<\/p>\n

You do write that you\u2019ve heard \u201cmany questions\u201d about Facebook\u2019s business model. Which\u00a0is most certainly true but once again you\u2019re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) \u2014 deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you\u2019d much prefer we were all sold on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers \u2014 to smirk at the \u2018dumb politicians\u2019 who don\u2019t even know how Facebook makes money.<\/p>\n

Y\u2019know, like you smirked\u2026<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don\u2019t explain \u2014 you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business\u2019 strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics \u2014 such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Dodging is another special power; such as how you\u00a0dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians<\/a> to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.<\/p>\n

The Zuckerberg \u2018open letter\u2019 mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words<\/a>, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp<\/a>, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked<\/a>, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.<\/p>\n

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It\u2019s pure spin. We\u2019ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm\u00a0Facebook\u2019s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.<\/p>\n

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it\u2019s little wonder you\u2019re moved to pen again \u2014 imagining that another word blast is all it\u2019ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.<\/p>\n

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We\u2019re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year<\/a>: \u201cI remain to be convinced that your company has integrity\u201d.)<\/p>\n

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means\u00a0there\u2019s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform\u2019s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won\u2019t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts \u2014 you let stuff happen and then send in the \u2018trust safety\u2019 team once the damage has been done.<\/p>\n

You might call designing against negative consequences a \u2018growth bottleneck\u2019; others would say it\u2019s having a conscience.<\/p>\n

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook\u2019s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage \u2014 hence the old mantra of \u2018move fast and break things\u2019 \u2014 whether it\u2019s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.<\/p>\n

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit<\/a> to force your company to dribble a little more resource into\u00a0doing something<\/em> about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook \u201cads\u201d wrapper. (Albeit, you\u2019re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)<\/p>\n

Funnily enough \u2014 though it\u2019s not at all funny and it doesn\u2019t surprise us \u2014 Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.<\/p>\n

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can\u2019t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren\u2019t famous. Not\u00a0public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do\u00a0something<\/em> about how its platform supercharges scammers.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s slippery call to \u2018fight bad content with more content\u2019 \u2014 or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting\u00a0even more of the apparatus of civic society onto<\/em> Facebook<\/em><\/a> \u2014 fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.<\/p>\n

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over \u00a3500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams \u2014 who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures \u2014 before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.<\/p>\n

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it\u2019s donating \u00a33M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide<\/em> consumer advice charity.)<\/p>\n

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets \u2014 using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for \u2018fighting fake news\u2019 that also entails Facebook offloading the lion\u2019s share of the work. (It\u2019s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can\u2019t).<\/p>\n

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook\u2019s mess \u2014 in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform \u2014 even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook\u2019s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook\u2019s purposes to be able to point to them trying.<\/p>\n

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.<\/p>\n

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is \u201crelevant ads\u201d); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.<\/p>\n

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn\u2019t \u201cleave harmful or divisive content up\u201d. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?<\/p>\n

As for Facebook being a \u2018free\u2019 service \u2014 a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post \u2014 it\u2019s of course a clich\u00e9 to point out that \u2018if it\u2019s free you\u2019re the product\u2019. (Or as the even older saying goes: \u2018There\u2019s no such thing as a free lunch\u2019).<\/p>\n

But for the avoidance of doubt, \u201cfree\u201d access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook\u2019s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public\u2019s attention and to social cohesion).<\/p>\n

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if \u201ceveryone\u201d is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn\u2019t the Internet. Facebook doesn\u2019t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, \u2018connect\u2019 (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.<\/p>\n

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook\u2019s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.<\/p>\n

Actually, Mark, it\u2019s a fundamental human right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business\u2019 bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.<\/p>\n

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are \u201cmore than 90M small businesses on Facebook\u201d which \u201cmake up a large part of our business\u201d (how large?) \u2014 and claiming \u201cmost\u201d (51%?) couldn\u2019t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a \u201cglobal survey\u201d (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found \u201chalf the businesses on Facebook say they\u2019ve hired more people since they joined\u201d (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we\u2019re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that \u201cmillions\u201d of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.<\/p>\n

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others\u2019 hard work because, well, it\u2019s politically advantageous for you to do so?<\/p>\n

Whether Facebook\u2019s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people\u2019s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that\u2019s an unacceptable trade off.<\/p>\n

\u201cMillions\u201d of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great \u2014 but you can\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s also not forget that some of the small business \u2018jobs\u2019 that Facebook\u2019s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the\u00a0Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news<\/a>, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren\u2019t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.<\/p>\n

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users \u201ccomplete control\u201d over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON, DC \u2013 APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Yo Mark! First up we\u2019re still waiting for your much trumpeted \u2018Clear History\u2019 tool<\/a>. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).<\/p>\n

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform\u2019s pervasive abuse of its users\u2019 data.<\/p>\n

Truth is, there\u00a0is no master \u2018off\u2019 switch for Facebook\u2019s ongoing surveillance.\u00a0Such a switch \u2014 were it to exist \u2014 would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn\u2019t offering it.<\/p>\n

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre \u2014 if they even realize they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n

\u2018Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!\u2019<\/p>\n

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It\u2019s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook\u2019s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.<\/p>\n

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there\u2019s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.<\/p>\n

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it\u2019s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they\u2019re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.<\/p>\n

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he\u2019d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook \u2014 with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.<\/p>\n

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was\u00a0still just a \u201csnapshot\u201d<\/a>, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s \u201ccomplete control\u201d wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook\u2019s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.<\/p>\n

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can\u2019t clear.<\/p>\n

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it\u2019s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year \u2014 which led to this awkward exchange<\/a> where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.<\/p>\n

EU MEPs also seized on the issue<\/a>, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security \u2014 by claiming it\u2019s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep \u201cbad content out\u201d. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly<\/a> that mission is generally going for Facebook.<\/p>\n

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is \u201cgenerally important for security and operating our services\u201d \u2014 using this to address what he couches as \u201cthe important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would\u201d.<\/p>\n

So, essentially, Facebook\u2019s founder is saying that the price for Facebook\u2019s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.<\/p>\n

Though he doesn\u2019t express that \u2018fact\u2019 as a cost of his \u201cfree\u201d platform. RIP privacy indeed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business \u2014 an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use \u201csecurity\u201d to justify eroding privacy<\/a>\u00a0really are \u2014 bubbled into view\u00a0last fall<\/a>, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.<\/p>\n

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA \u2014 though Facebook only added the\u00a0ability to use an app for 2FA<\/a>\u00a0in May last year.<\/p>\n

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in\u00a0Zuckerberg\u2019s WSJ post \u2014 where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook\u2019s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of \u201cmore relevant\u201d (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.<\/p>\n

Au contraire,<\/em>\u00a0it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads \u2014 despite free choice being a requirement under Europe\u2019s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).<\/p>\n

If Facebook users are forced to \u2018choose\u2019 between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it\u2019s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of \u2018forced consent<\/a>\u2018.)<\/p>\n

Add to that,\u00a0as we said at the time<\/a>, Facebook\u2019s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform\u2019s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.<\/p>\n

\"darkened<\/p>\n

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research<\/a>). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you\u2019re sitting in the dark.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: \u201cUltimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.\u201d But all the privacy-hostile choices he\u2019s made; and the faux controls he\u2019s offered; and the data mountain he simply won\u2019t \u2018fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.<\/p>\n

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for \u201ctransparency, choice and control\u201d) users won\u2019t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.<\/p>\n

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people\u2019s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data \u2014 such as by saying he doesn\u2019t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download \u2018all their data\u2019; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.<\/p>\n

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.<\/p>\n

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc\u2019s new privacy regime have\u00a0shown they can have teeth\u00a0<\/a>and so bite back against rights incursions.<\/p>\n

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let\u2019s take a final look at his description\u00a0of how Facebook\u2019s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the \u201ctransparency, choice and control\u201d issue he\u2019s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)<\/p>\n

In the article, Zuckerberg claims \u201cpeople consistently tell us that if they\u2019re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant\u201d. But who are these \u201cpeople\u201d of which he speaks? If he\u2019s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn\u2019t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that\u2019s not a very affirmative signal.<\/p>\n

Now if it were true that a generic group of \u2018Internet people\u2019 were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don\u2019t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)<\/p>\n

So Zuckerberg\u2019s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most<\/em> creepy ads is really a very odd one.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s now turn to Zuckerberg\u2019s use of the word \u201crelevant\u201d. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it\u2019s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it\u2019s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of\u00a0exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.<\/p>\n

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without<\/em> being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don\u2019t have to be behaviorally targeted.<\/p>\n

Ads can be based on \u2014 for example \u2014 a real-time search\/action plus a user\u2019s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.<\/p>\n

And here Zuckerberg gets really\u00a0disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook\u2019s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories \u2014 for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain \u2014 and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,\u201d he writes,\u00a0with that slipped in reference to \u201cother signals\u201d doing some\u00a0careful shielding work there.<\/p>\n

Other categories that Facebook\u2019s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include \u201cjew-hater\u201d, \u201cHow to burn Jews\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and \u201cHitler did nothing wrong\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories\u00a0in his glossy explainer of how its \u201crelevant\u201d ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook\u2019s business sticks on people.<\/p>\n

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up<\/a>. Zuckerberg\u2019s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.<\/p>\n

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook\u2019s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It\u2019s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)<\/p>\n

Simply put, adtech doesn\u2019t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don\u2019t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market \u2014 eyeballs and advertisers \u2014\u00a0and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.<\/p>\n

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who\u2019d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?<\/p>\n

But it sure is a long way from \u2018move fast and break things\u2019 to trying to claim there\u2019s only one business model to rule them all.<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/1cJIebdyw3M\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a critical reading of\u00a0Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook.\u00a0 Yes Mark, you\u2019re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-14048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t