Every time I read these threads, I'm
1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago)
2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)
Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn't provide marketing scale and is extremely expensive. The goal is to have the biggest possible audience, while still applying one or two critical filters. You could hit all 1000 people in a pool for $100 each, or you can hit 1000 people in a pool of 1 million for 50 cents each.
The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting. This means that people selling VR-adjacent services, products, and content can reliably advertise to their core market without wasting money on non-users. Or maybe they can filter out that segment to show different ads to non-users that convince them to buy their first device. I know most on HN hate any level of targeting, but this has a massive benefit to the VR ecosystem because it allows VR companies to reach their customers much more effectively and sell more products.
FB is actually stripping away features from our targeting system and removing inputs because we spend too much compute power ($$) driving optimizations that don't have any material impact on delivery value. Basic is better. There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home. Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
>Every time I read these threads, I'm 1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago)
>2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)
That's odd, then why does Facebook show me targetted ads based on my whatsapp and messenger conversations, youtube videos I watch, websites I browse, and places and people that are nearby me when I'm signed into Facebook on my phone
Not to be rude, but your post seems like a lot of bullshit just based on things i've seen Facebook do too many times to call it a coincidence.
>There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home.
This is just straight bullshit. Those things are a direct window into finding out exactly what people buy, pretty much the solid gold, diamond encrusted wet dream of advertisers.
You seriously believe that the encrypted communications platform that the US government desperately wants a backdoor in is secretly backdoored by Facebook for ads? Something that mundane?
The platform (WhatsApp) that is subject to huge public skepticism, who's source code is so limited in scope that it's probably been audited by every security researcher that is interested in posting a "I found Facebook being evil" blog post?
And you believe they are using this data for ads? The most obvious thing ever to see if you audit/monitor the app?
This is why theories like this borderline paranoia. FUD. Nothing more. Statements like that discredit your entire argument.
-- And yes, of course Facebook uses trackers on sites to figure out what sites you've been to. Of course they use unencrypted data available to them to target ads. Your data is already in their database. Just because it's in another table to allow the "big bad ad agencies" to target you (data the ad agencies can not even see) does not make it any different.
Everyone does this. Everyone will continue doing this. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with that status quo. The only part that can be morally wrong, is if a human themselves inspects the database without respect for privacy.
And this is why we have laws for dealing with malicious employees, robberies, house break-ins, etc. Things happen whether it's online or offline. All of this was possible (arguably even more so) before Facebook. It's just more centralized now.
This paranoia simply needs to stop.
EDIT: Adding, it makes complete sense that Facebook's A-team is not working on ads. Taking a page from Google: Diversification. Ads are auto-pilot income, have hit their tech ceiling, and Facebook's longevity depends on investment outside of their core business. I am unaware how this is so unbelievable to some.
Facebook doesn't need to backdoor your encrypted messages to use WhatsApp for ads, there's still a lot of interesting data they can get based just on the metadata of who you converse with.
And that's not paranoia, it's openly something that Facebook is doing right now[0].
> In a blogpost, WhatsApp announced it would begin sharing names and phone numbers with its parent company, to allow its more than 1 billion users “to communicate with businesses that matter to you too” – like notifications from airlines, delivery services or your bank, for example.
> Facebook will also use that data to make friend suggestions and combine that data with the reams of information it has already collected so that it can tailor ads even more specifically to your interests.
If you think that Facebook isn't mining WhatsApp data for ads, you aren't paying enough attention to Facebook. I don't think they've backdoored the E2E encryption (though it wouldn't surprise me if in the future they started doing on-device keyword detection for ads, which wouldn't technically require them to insert a backdoor). But it doesn't really matter, they don't need to go that far.
> Everyone does this. Everyone will continue doing this. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with that status quo.
This is how all of these conversations always go. Privacy advocates are paranoid crazy people, until it turns out that companies are spying on you. Then suddenly the argument is that the status quo is fine and the controls are great and everyone always knew they were being recorded, and why is everyone making a big deal about it?
If you're frustrated that people come up with crazy theories about Facebook turning on their microphones, those theories might exist because smart TVs and mobile devices already use audio to track you[1]. Every time that someone raises an alarm on a privacy violation, and people tell them they're paranoid, and then the paranoid people turn out to be right, the theories about tracking get a little bolder in response.
If advertisers want the paranoia to stop, maybe they should stop giving people reasons to be paranoid. The current state of privacy conspiracy theories is entirely, 100% the fault of the advertising industry and other mass data-collection industries and government departments.
These types of companies won't get any good press no matter what they do. Everyone will find some way to justify their actions as evil. Everyone will find some way to say "they are still evil on the inside, just pretending not to be." People are not understanding this encourages these companies to stay the same. You can not satisfy those who do not want satisfaction.
But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database. There is no privacy implications of them using data, your messages, your pictures, and metadata that is already in their database or one of their children companies databases, for ads.
The only data you could question is trackers on third-party sides, but the "everyone else is doing it" argument makes it silly for Facebook to not do so as well to compete considering the reach that they have. Call that a weak excuse, but they are offering a free product in exchange for translating to money and are one of the few social startups that have actually been able to pull it off without hemorrhaging money.
The amount of press for example that Facebook has received the last 2 years on almost completely FUD topics is absolutely astounding. Cambridge Analytica was even FUD, and is still to this day misunderstood. Cambridge Analytica leaked data from your Facebook account via an exploit and phishing. This was a feature designed to give developers more opportunities. The amount of damage this has done to real legitimate apps in the Facebook ecosystem can not be understated, and since then Facebook's product quality has backpedalled considerably. All because the media spun this incorrectly, did not understand the technical details at hand, and pushed responsibility onto Facebook.
My 2 cents: We need to focus on the facts. There are real problems with privacy in society, and we are wasting so much time focusing on misunderstood problems to focus on the real ones. These are not scandals. These are weak news days.
Issues like this get all the limelight, make all the headlines, and reduce visibility to actual real life problems incl. those related to privacy. That needs to stop.
> But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database. There is no privacy implications of them using data, your messages, your pictures, and metadata that is already in their database or one of their children companies databases, for ads.
On a related note, my lawyer already knows where the money is buried, so are there any privacy implications in him giving the police a few tips? Privacy isn't just about who has my data -- it's about how my data gets used.
The use of ads to target me against my will, or to allow other people to target me against my will is a violation. Facebook does share data with other companies, but even if they didn't, there's no practical difference between a company targeting me directly based on my data and a company asking Facebook to target me based on the same data. Facebook is just acting as a proxy.
> But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database.
False. I've been a WhatsApp user for many years, I've never been a Facebook user. So they definitely extracted data from WhatsApp that they didn't have before.
> But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database. There is no privacy implications of them using data, your messages, your pictures, and metadata that is already in their database or one of their children companies databases, for ads.
The GDPR begs to differ. By that logic, your web hosted would also be free to take your server logs and database contents and use them for their own purposes, since it's already on their server. Would you be fine with that?
But ok, assuming your argument were right, wouldn't then the rational thing be to contribute as little data as possible to tech companies' databases? And yet all industry trends, cloud advocates, IoT providers and modern IT projects in general point in the other direction.
Please. Ads are Facebook's core business. I don't have any reason to believe you're not telling the truth about basic facts, but the "aw shucks" part is a bit insulting to my intelligence.
If the A-Team isn't working on ads, that actually concerns me. When I think of mediocre performers, I think of people who respond most strongly to short-term incentives, not people making nuanced ethical decisions involving a lot of foresight.
> FB is actually stripping away features from our targeting system and removing inputs because we spend too much compute power ($$) driving optimizations that don't have any material impact on delivery value.
> Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
I mean, it sounds to me like the A-Team were the ones motivated enough by the technical challenge to not care about cost, ethics or the "big picture". I know plenty of "A-team" engineers like that— they're in it for the technical challenge and to prove themselves, not to be "slowed down".
I appreciate you posting this as it flies in the face of the generally accepted opinion among HN regulars and privacy-oriented technologists (both groups i am included in). The value of HN for me is, in part, getting critical views from multiples sides of an issue and your comment is more earnest and believable than hours of Zuck's congressional hearings.
Your systems are sophisticated enough to make people believe their phones are listening to them in the background even when that's not the case. So even if you think they are primitive, a lot of people thinks they're more than sophisticated enough to be creepy.
Facebook's not helping this conspiracy theory with their "why did I see this ad?" dialog. I'll see a clearly hyper-targeted ad (for example, a psoriasis medication) and click that button and it'll say "they wanted to reach people in the United States between 18-65!"
I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
The dialog even obnoxiously says "There could also be more factors not listed here." Yes, I know, that's fairly obvious. I clicked the dialog to figure out what those were.
>I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
How do you know this? I get ads for male pattern baldness all the time but I'm not even genetically at risk. Half my ads on hulu are for tampons, and no woman lives in my house. Ads really aren't that good. Facebook might've just gotten lucky...
Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/, they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them.
If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interest in or like Pages related to Psoriasis Awareness". Chances are good I'm one of them.
Just because that's an option doesn't mean that the ad you saw used it. Advertisers might get a better rate with a wider net; everyone in that audience has done at least a little bit of research, and might be less willing to switch than a random male would be to start using any medication at all.
The advertisers are probably choosing to target everyone on FB in that age range, but asking FB to optimize for conversions. Then the FB algorithm finds more people who look like people who are clicking and converting.
Ok, so dumb question. Why _wouldn't_ you optimize for conversions then? Unless you want some immeasurable branding value type lift.
Sorry for the dumb question but if you're implying one particular bidding mechanism benefits from FB algorithmic experience in a way that's meaningfully more accurate (serving the ad to the guy or girl with the condition), why would anyone do anything different?
Is there any evidence to suggest those rumors are actually the result of unusually high levels of sophistication on the part of Facebook's ad targeting systems, and not just an artifact of confirmation bias and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
2: Real conversation I overheard: "I was talking to my friend about buying a switch and the very next day I got FB ads for it!" - well duh, it's the holiday season and game consoles are very popular gifts.
> there's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home. Also, ethics.
And that'll be the company line, until there is 'business value'. FB is just investing in facial recognition technology to "help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you" [1]
Regarding ethics, have their been any meaningful changes since the FTC handed down the $5bn fine for data privacy violations? Or was it just an unfortunate set of actions taken by individuals and aren't representative of the company's philosophy?
Will there be any changes forthcoming when the Illinois class lawsuit alleging illegal collection of biometric data without user consent goes to trial? [2]
> Without these Ads plans, your device would probably cost $1000, as the Valve Index shows us.
Good. Let me decide if the full cost without ads is worth buying the device. Hint: if it doesn't send my data then it might be. Double-dipping is egregiously wrong.
Uh, no. Lenovo and Samsung manage to make better HMDs than the Rift S for 250$. The only disadvantage they have is slightly smaller tracking area, but that's not cost, the cameras are like 2$ each.
The only reason the Index costs 1000$ is because its absolutely cutting edge and its controllers and tracking systems are expensive. If it had inside out tracking and normal controllers it would be around the price of the Index.
With regards your last paragraph, is there any evidence of this? Any place Facebook says "we do not, and will not, use information X for ad targeting"?
They claimed they would never use 2FA phone numbers for ad targeting (which I didn't believe to begin with)... and guess what, at some point they started using them for ads and when things blew up they issued a fake apology and continued as usual.
Not sure if there's a public document as granular as "information X", but that $5b FTC settlement came with a bunch of policies.
Also, the "clear history" feature should be rolling out (or maybe it already rolled out in your country) that lets you dissociate any 3rd party info from your profile.
> the "clear history" feature should be rolling out
Your company has proven it cannot be trusted and will do anything it can get away with and has already crossed the line of "lying is totally OK, and if we're caught we're just gonna publish a bullshit PR-speak fake apology".
BTW I was wondering about that, I have a recurring reminder to check it every week and months after it was "launched" it still says I'm not eligible (I live in the USA). Do you know when it is actually going live?
I've just been checking the help page (https://www.facebook.com/help/2207256696182627) and waiting for the "The off-Facebook activity setting isn't currently available to you right now." thing to go away
Is there a name for this phenomena? Where we know that everybody blunders around like a caveman at our workplaces but assume infinite sophistication for everyone elses.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
I wondered about trolling too. There are examples in the comments of people taking it at face value. If it's not trolling then there would be something to learn from it for sure for successful trolling.
"2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)"
I'm sorry but this sounds so naive to me. As you say in your last paragraph Facebook was tracking a ton of info about everyone. This is why a lot of people distrust Facebook. You might find this entertaining but this happens when you spy on people. We can't know what Facebook does with the data.
There are also people who targeted a friend as prank and succeeded. So it is possible to target very specific people. With enough money you can do a lot of evil with this (Cambride Analytica).
Because we don't know how they use the data a lot of people now actively block requests to Facebook when they visit a website.
You might want to look up what was up with Cambridge Analytica - Michael Lewis has one of episodes in Against the Rules (podcast) - it's a good place to start.
There was nothing at all. No predictive power. Total waste of money and it's funny this example keeps coming up
It's documented fact that certain political entities have made heavy use of microtargeting in Facebook ads. Such entities would seem to be less sensitive to traditional ROI concerns, regardless of whether your bit about microtargeting never being worth it is actually true (spoilers: it is not true. maybe for some advertisers, but not for all).
It potentially works for un-measured outcomes. Nonetheless, even if you have a very specific audience, you would be better served (from a conversion optimisation perspective, at least) by creating a lookalike from your small, valuable audience.
Who is "we"? Thinking big picture here, from a corporate POV, it's entirely possible that the discussions of ethics around handling and retention of data is way outside of the engineering core.
Furthermore, while it's interesting to read about this good intent, that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Your post actually bothers me more than pure maliciousness or opaqueness, because I know it's entirely possible these systems and workflows could be out of control... which is reflected extremely well today in the major complaints and scrutiny of the platform.
The tinfoil hat side of me does not believe this is a genuine account, but eh, there's no way to know here, and at least it opened up an interesting discussion
Oh really? Can you give me an example of a decision actually driven by ethics? That is the decision was NOT made based on how much compute it spends, the material impact on delivery value, or because of meaningful business value, or whatever.
Because I find it hard to believe that FB makes decisions based on ethics, instead of merely highlighting otherwise motivated decisions that seemingly happen to align with ethical values.
Like, that the ethical aspect actually caused the decision to be different than what it had been if it were made purely based on business, money or resources.
I mean I could be wrong, and you could give a single example of FB being motivated by ethics, and I would be wrong.
If I want to run porn apps on my VR devices what right does FB have to vacuum up that knowledge? If the porn app has a specific sexual orientation why should Facebook get to know that?
Facebook should not be collecting this data IMO. Microsoft and Apple should be working to make it impossible to collect and governments should work to make it illegal to collect and extremely high fines if caught collecting.
I mean sure, that is why Computer Vision research at Facebook doesn’t have multiple papers on scene segmentation and understanding, where they take kitchen scenes for illustration. Your all in one home appliance spying device surely wouldn’t be used in such a way. Of course. Not to mention that in all likelyhood both the microphone and camera are hot while using WhatsApp or Facebook.
Instagram activates the camera on Windows 10 laptops when the app isn't even open, if the app is given camera access. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but that's valid because this isn't a statistic.
Having spoken with people who have worked on the FB ads team, and having heard stories of how extensive FB's tracking is, this post seems disingenuous and personally I wouldn't be surprised if the account is sponsored by FB.
This is a site guideline I fervently disagree with. Throwaways with no reputation to back them up should be treated as irrelevant - they don't face any social costs and indeed they accomplish their goal almost immediately and there is no mechanism, none whatsoever, to undo their damage.
The problem is the fundamental information disparity. The guidelines want us to treat anonymous astroturfers with the same deference we treat "a source familiar with the matter" as reported by a national news publication. There's a difference though: journalists ostensibly act as a filter and a guard against bad faith[1] use of on background or off the record conversations, and try to fact check or cross reference those statements. And journalists usually know who their sources are, and statements in error can result in that source no longer being valued or used.
Hacker News as a discussion site has none of that. We have no way to know if this person actually works at Facebook, actually conveys true information about Facebook, and if it turns out 6 months from now that they're an astroturfing troll or PR firm, the damage is already done. Disinformation online works so well because the initial comment, like this one, gets so much traction and it's unlikely any retraction - if it ever comes - reaches the same audience and causes a reversion of their prior beliefs.
I think it's very silly that the policies ensure the site is exceptionally vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, and too many people presume good faith in an age of anonymous online bad faith discourse.
[1] - let's not wade into the current dialectic, but this is the ostensible purpose of journalists knowing sources, but not divulging them
You're only counting the cost of one side. Anything will look bad if you evaluate it that way.
The other side is that internet users massively project "astroturfing", "shill", "spy", "foreign agent" and so on, onto other commenters and opinions they happen not to like. That's actually the larger problem; in fact, based on countless hours I've spent investigating these phenomena on HN, it is overwhelmingly the larger problem. It's not a close call.
Users taking such cheap shots at each other degrades discussion in really bad ways, so we don't allow it unless they have some basis for what they say. If you look closely at how often it comes up, you'll see that people almost never provide any basis—not a glimmer of anything objective—beyond just disliking what someone else said. Someone posting an opposing opinion on the internet is evidence of nothing but that people have differing views. That is no basis for denouncing someone as a traitor or a criminal, least of all on a site that asks users to be kind and thoughtful and make substantive comments.
So HN's rule is that it's not ok to lob such accusations, or insinuate them, unless there's something more than pure imagination to go on. If people are worried, they are welcome to contact us; we investigate, and if the data gives some reason to conclude that abuse is happening, we crack down on it. But if we look and find no evidence of manipulation, we don't. That seems obviously the right policy to me. The alternative would be to punish users without evidence. That wouldn't be right.
Does that mean we're vulnerable to super sneaks who manipulate the site so cleverly as to leave no traces in the data? Yes, any internet community is vulnerable to that. The best we can do as a community to defend against that is to do what we should be doing anyway: refute bad arguments.
Refuting bad arguments doesn't work if the argument is made, has its persuasive impact and reach, and then it's later discovered it was disinformation.
Edit: To continue to refute your own bad argument, you wrote here:
> (1) don't comment about shilling (astroturfing/bots/trolls/spies) unless you have specific evidence, keeping in mind that the presence of opposing views is not evidence
But the reason disinformation works online is that such information isn't readily accessible. You've tautologically put user "adgineer" above reproach. Even asking whether the user has a conflict of interest is against the rules, as you've told me personally before.
To summarize, dang, you have a bad argument here: HN policy encourages astroturfers and disarms the community from asking people about potentially disingenuous behavior.
That may be true, but this is also the sole comment from this account, made to defend the ad policies of a company known to take veeeeeery large liberties with the data of it's userbase, both to enhance features and to sell ad targeting.
Like if it's HN's policy to not call things astroturfing, fine, I'll accept that. But if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and posts in it's own defense for no apparent reason like a duck...
It doesn’t matter. One is still claiming astroturfing with nothing but circumstantial evidence. If you have actual evidence that this account is a troll, post it.
Regarding the “new account” argument: HN encourages throwaways. Maybe OP didn’t want to lose karma on their main account. Maybe they don’t want people knowing who he is? It doesn’t matter.
I never said we should believe him. Just that we shouldn’t claim astroturfing without evidence. We shouldn’t necessarily believe OP without evidence either.
Realistically, on a social site without additional evidence, the default assumption on the modern web should be that a given account is being compensated for what they're posting. An account's history might allow us to adjust that prior.
Maybe you don't have the capabilities to make meaningful predictions that you can sell to marketing departments at the moment however, you still have all of the data that you collect and free reign to do with it as you wish. The problem we have is less about what you're doing right now and more about what you could do in the future. Let's face it, Facebook (and other surveillance capitalists) don't exactly have a track record for respecting privacy rights.
> The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting.
From the article:
> Your photos and related content like captions, likes and comments if you use the “share photos” feature to share photos from VR to your Facebook Timeline
But don't worry! An engineer has told me I can just ignore that part of privacy policy because Facebook doesn't even care about my photos. They're utterly irrelevant.
It really takes a load off my chest. Sure, Facebook is collecting info about what apps people use, what people message, and what photos people take, but that's just going into a database somewhere that will never be monetized or read or used against them. And I can definitely trust that, because when Facebook says its going to silo data, it always keeps that promise, and definitely doesn't change its privacy policy to remove that silo 4-5 years down the road.
> FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago
I'm relieved to hear it, because its very concerning to hear about a technical team building infrastructure to collect individual app usage when all that anyone at the company cares about is whether or not I own an Oculus. It's wasted effort. Y'all need to learn to tighten your sprint scope, why are you building all these features that aren't being used anywhere?
> it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.
And don't worry, the CEOs that made those decisions have all retired, and they definitely won't make them again in the future. It's just old, outdated stories that keep resurfacing. Like in 2017 when Facebook experimented on how depressed teenagers would respond to ads[0], or like in 2016 when Facebook started trying to intuit people's race based on their behavior[1]. See? Decades ago!
----
In actual seriousness, I don't have any reason to doubt the author's intention, but I think this is a type of gaslighting, whether purposeful or not. I've brought this issue up before in regards to privacy debates -- but the conversations around surveillance have a habit of suddenly shifting.
Before Snowden, people who worried about the NSA were paranoid, and the response was, 'we're not doing any of that, and we don't care about your data anyway.' After Snowden, the comments became 'why is anyone surprised, and it's not even a big deal anyway because it's just metadata and metadata has always been fine to collect.'
Before the Alexa/Google Home contractor scandals, it would not have been hard to find people on HN that argued that 'the controls are perfect, and it's just a computer listening to you, and people who worry about this are just paranoid.' After the scandals broke, it was 'of course you need human reviewers to train AI, this is a nothingburger that everyone already knew about.'
So try to remember adgineer's comment, because a few years from now when it turns out Facebook is doing microtargeting based on really invasive Oculus data, the story is suddenly going to be, 'this was consistent with our privacy policy, of course everyone knew what they were getting into, it's not a big deal.'
Honestly, it doesn’t matter what you think or how cozy you feel with your employer. Fact is it will now be requiring users to cede their identity and data, where it was not required before. Whether FB uses the data or not is irrelevant.
Selling my Oculus as soon as the Index comes down in price a bit. Thanks for the ride.
Personal attacks like this will get you banned here. Not cool.
For most people, their work is the thing they know most about. If a person shows up here to discuss that and is met with this sort of harassment, it disincentivizes them—and probably others reading—to contribute about what they know. That makes HN strictly worse.
I know the counterargument for posting like this, but there are lots of places on the internet where shaming is the norm, and you can take this there. This is a community where shaming is not the norm (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and we're not going to let that slide.
Whether ads (in general, or specifically FB ads) make the world a worse place is up for debate, but the casual hatred in your comment directed at this person is actually making this world a worse place to live in.
Feels pretty good to subsidize internet access in the developing world and serve as the primary growth engine for millions of small businesses who wouldn't otherwise be able to reach their customers at such a low cost.
> subsidize internet access in the developing world
Are you talking about Facebook's abuse of power to strengthen its monopoly position in developing nations?
If so, 83% of voters in the USA thinks what you are describing as "subsidy" should be illegal here[1], and it would better be described as neo-colonialism than a subsidy.
Is there some other way in which facebook is "subsidizing internet access"?
...and accelerate the concentration of wealth and power to the point where the top 10% are starting to complain about the top 1%. Moving into developing nations is just the system expanding to extract what little surplus value they create.
If the point about small businesses was true, we'd see a worldwide surge in their numbers. I don't think we do.
It makes sense, too — the overall pile of disposable income didn't meaningfully increase thanks to Facebook, so it's a zero sum game between small businesses and Coca-Cola. We know who wins that in the long term. Although now with local papers out of business, gutted by facebook.
What about the fact that ads are the only reason garbage such as clickbait and misinformation exists? A lot of that garbage wouldn't exist if its only revenue stream wasn't there.
What about the countless scams or dubious products advertised in Facebook ads while you look the other way because they're still making money for company? If you have the power to broadcast content to a major part of the world's population, this should also involve some responsibility and strict controls on the content, aka thorough human reviews. I don't care if it makes the prices of the ads go up; legitimate brands will still be able to afford it, and the market will become a better place for everyone (plus maybe with less crap in the ads people will actually like them a bit more).
Finally, if you want to do ads, why not just ask the users what products they're interested in, categories they belong to, etc and use that for targeting instead of stalking their every move to try and infer this information?
It's like a cult, isn't it? In no world can what Facebook's ad system teams are doing be summarized by that level of autofellatio but Facebook. Hacker News is for intellectually stimulating discussions, not marketing-speak to mask false claims. For the record, your claims are primarily false. They pulled out of most of those countries a long while ago, after they realized "colonizer killing net neutrality" is a bad look.
With all the respect due, you've got blood on your hands. We have a word for that in civilized society; I think it's "murderer," but maybe they call it something different at Facebook.
What about all the misinformation, conspiracy theories, bad medical information (which can get people killed), and false political ads? Does the "primary growth engine" marketing speak make it all better?
Wow. I can’t imagine hating someone simply because of who they work with.
Is everyone working at BP complicit with the Gulf oil spill? Is everyone working at PG&E responsible for the fires? No. That’s absurd.
Anyways, I’m not a mod, but I did flag your comment because you’re breaking two site rules:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
The BP and PG&E cases were accidents. There might've been negligence but it still wasn't in their best interests to cause those accidents, and now that they happened they've got the opportunity to learn from it and hopefully not do this in the future.
The Facebook case is different. Them stalking people isn't an accident, it's the whole purpose of the company and what pays their bills. Despite seeing the negative effects of their behaviour on society and being given countless opportunities to learn and become less nasty they are continuing as if nothing happened.
Is everyone working at BP complicit with the Gulf oil spill?
Anyone with an option to work elsewhere, yes, though keep in mind, there's a difference between "Working at Facebook" and "Working on Surveillance Dragnet at Facebook."
Workers have power, and workers at Facebook have a lot of power. It's not like they can't get a job elsewhere. That they haven't quit, or unionized and forced Facebook to stop the, frankly, evil things they're doing, is a mark against their moral character.
Working on ad systems actively makes the world worse, and hating a person for working on something that actively makes the world worse will always be reasonable (and justifiable).
I don't think it is fair to anonymously denigrate someones life choices particularly when you have no idea what that person does specifically, and there is ABSOLUTELY a place in this world for advertising on the internet.
We all know exactly what they do. I don't care what the OP does specifically, they are collaborating in building something that makes the world worse for all of us.
> there is ABSOLUTELY a place in this world for advertising on the internet
I have no idea what this means. What I do know is that adtech turns everything it touches into shit.
> They probably work on the video game Beat Sabre. (recently bought by Facebook).
And now that it's bought guess what's the purpose of this game (hint: it's not about being a game, it's about collecting even more data and getting people addicted; the "game" part is just a side-effect).
At this point anyone that works at that toxic company is either naive or unethical. There's been way too many warning signs and incidents to figure out that anything they do is in one way or another to stalk people even more and waste their time with ads.
You know what really makes the world a worse place - in-app purchases. Ads meh, I can take them or leave them (I pay a lot for content), but in-app purchases show no mercy.
Respectfully, I disagree. In-app purchases as an architecture gives me a chance to try out the software, and then purchase it to make the ads go away. That's a compromise I like quite a bit. It's a lot cleaner than having one paid- and one ad-supported version of the same app, too.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with IAPs, just pay-to-play (or even pay-to-win). If a developer wants to release more levels, but wants an extra dollar for them, I’ll probably be willing to fork it over.
Sure, after spending hundreds of dollars on a device, it only seems fair that the vendor exploit your personal information so that credit companies and anyone willing and able to buy the data can compile a dossier on you.
The DK2 was the last Oculus device I owned precisely due to this. I would have absolutely purchased the CV1 were it not for the FB acquisition.
There is something subconsciously intimate about the movements of my head. The idea of FB getting off to that (obvious to everyone, except the willfully ignorant, that they eventually would) is incredibly creepy.
They won't. People buy what's in the store / is marketed and expect products to work, functionally, but also in the greater context, in their effect on society as a whole. Voting with the dollar does not generally work to steer corporate behaviour.
Yeah in the same sense your vote doesn't decide the election. It certainly has worked wiith many missteps fallen into obscurity. Marketing is a post-facto category for success. If everything is done right for a campaign but the CEO says something outrageous it is all undone like the infamous Gerald Rattner incident.
Brain-wave-scanning kind of invasive. FB (and advertising in general) will continue to become ever more invasive until it meets a limiting factor. That limiting factor will possibly be legislation (just not in the US because worshiping the Dollar overrides anything and everything else).
Do we know the first thing about how brain waves correlate to any real world properties of a person? If Facebook or anyone else can crack brain waves, ie in a sense "read your mind", it seems like serving ads is the least of our worries, but also pretty exciting in terms of the potential positive applications.
It is not exactly clear to me whether you are down playing the implications or not, but lets assume you are:
If this weren't invasive, they wouldn't be doing it. What use would random data be to Facebook? Also, it is irrelevant: if I buy a VR set I want to use it for whatever I see fit, not get hooked into some data collection machine. How is it that we have come to accept that in order to use products, that we buy even, we have to hand over lots of data?
I'm not. I believe that this kind of data in combination with machine learning makes for the perfect storm. While users may not understand the difference from before.
Sounds like machine learning in this case would lead to GIGO as essentially automated superstition. It would get what, use time, how much time is spent moving using it and maybe height data and try to map to products the advertisers want to sell?
the problem, as i see it, is not with data collection itself. because the larger public 1. does not care 2. does not seem concerned. 3. the collected data is deemed harmless to the user.
what worries me is the sampling itself. or how diverse the sample is. using VR users data to draw any conclusion is misrepresenting the larger population. now if we are all into VR or use it, this might be different...
Good news! China has solved the problem by watching everyone, finally giving us what we all want - crushing levels of omnipresent surveillance, without any diversity-harming biased sampling. Because that's the worst part about surveillance - not how it's (often legally) abused by power, but how it's not fair for diversity.
Most people do not understand how much is collected, how it can be connected, or how it is shared with random companies with no accountability. Often they are fairly shocked when specific examples are brought to light.
But there are lot of problems in the world, and none of us can be sure where to rank this one.
Do they need to own the apparatus? I search for a product on Google, I click on a search result, navigating to a retailer's site. That site knows not only what I'm looking at but what I was searching for. By way of third party cookies it knows who I am and it sends that info back to FB and the next time I'm on Instagram I'm getting ads from that category. The retailer I visited didn't have to own the FB ad network to play a role.
I don't think valve does any of that, and even if it did it has access to way less data then FB (which owns instagram and whatsapp) which basically know your location, who you talk to and when, your centers of interest, political orientation, &c. Valve, at least for now, is mostly concerned about selling games. Collecting data in itself isn't bad, imho the issue is the centralisation and what the data is used for. I'd feel much more confident giving a little data to Valve than enlarging the humongous dataset of facebook.
I think you’re saying that Google sends the search terms to the site you visit? It doesn’t do that, at least not for a bunch of years now. As a site owner you can get aggregate ideas of what queries lead people to particular pages, but you can’t tie it to individual visitors.
Every company that has your data will either sell it or else they're in enough verticals that it makes more sense for them to monetize it internally. It amounts to the same thing.
It’s Facebook’s service, what did you expect. Also, recommending products based on your past experiences is something pretty much every service provides.
When WhatsApp improved its popularity by claiming "privacy is important, no ads" etc and then did a U turn it was actually noteworthy and newsworthy.
I don't think Oculus ever made such claims. They were happy to "sell out" [1]. If anything, they seem to be proud members of the Facebook cult [2].
If you bought the Oculus, you knew exactly what you were getting.
Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.
> Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.
I was gonna upvote you, but this was unnecessary. It’s possible for someone to be positive towards something you see as a negative. People hate Trump and he has supporters. Whether you agree with them or not, not all of them are benefiting from the Trump Administration
Yeah, not to mention that you can benefit from FB without being one of their employees or close partners. Just buy some stock next time it crashes bc they get caught using data they weren’t supposed to!
I mean I don't remember him being loudly against this. It could be more of a difference of priorities. But it's still interesting. Even if they're not directly connected, two big changes in a row could mean there are more to come.
This has nothing to do with Carmack. Carmack being part of Oculus is a stain on Carmack and his reputation. Don't look to Carmack for moral guidance - he sold his soul to Facebook to develop VR and failed.
Well you have the option of not signing in with your facebook account. Good thing about this market is that there are other options out there and presumably more coming in the future.
When I bought an Oculus Quest, the fact that Oculus is owned by Facebook was slightly bothersome, but I honestly don't care a whole lot about this particular data at this particular time (basically just game playing).
It's Facebook Horizon[1] that's the worrisome thing. I'm pretty sure they're trying to build the OASIS from Ready Player One.
It's interesting that you say the only data being collected is what you play and when.
Why do you think that? They have a lot of lose and movement data from you I bet theyve been spending a lot of time trying to develop inferences you can make from it.
Sure. They know I play Beat Saber and move pretty quickly while doing so. Maybe they'll try to sell me exercise stuff (though I rarely interact with Facebook and my browser setup is kind of aggressive when it comes to them).
They also know I'm shorter than Darth Vader. They know the size of a couple of our rooms.
I acknowledge there is data they can attempt to extract value from, but that data just doesn't concern me. As VR expands, particularly with Horizon, I will be a lot more wary.
Let me put it another way: there are many things we choose to do which generate data and provide that data to various entities. We have to decide which data we're willing to share with whom and for what benefits.
I know some people who, at least as of a couple of years ago, had dumbphones from which they'd remove the batteries when not in use so that their location couldn't be tracked.
I have an iPhone. I've got Comcast internet at home and don't use a VPN. I have a Facebook account (which I access in Firefox only using the facebook container). I don't use gmail, and my primary browser isn't logged into Google and has various bits of tracking protection.
So it's a pretty conscious choice. Maybe it's misguided, but I just think the data Facebook is getting from my Oculus Quest is pretty low value. Lower value than Likes, for example.
Every time I read these threads, I'm 1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago) 2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.)
Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn't provide marketing scale and is extremely expensive. The goal is to have the biggest possible audience, while still applying one or two critical filters. You could hit all 1000 people in a pool for $100 each, or you can hit 1000 people in a pool of 1 million for 50 cents each.
The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting. This means that people selling VR-adjacent services, products, and content can reliably advertise to their core market without wasting money on non-users. Or maybe they can filter out that segment to show different ads to non-users that convince them to buy their first device. I know most on HN hate any level of targeting, but this has a massive benefit to the VR ecosystem because it allows VR companies to reach their customers much more effectively and sell more products.
FB is actually stripping away features from our targeting system and removing inputs because we spend too much compute power ($$) driving optimizations that don't have any material impact on delivery value. Basic is better. There's no meaningful business value to capturing biometrics or pictures of things in your home. Also, ethics. We do actually think about that a lot these days - it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.