> Facebook wants to announce in the future some privacy enhancing ideas
The post does point out that by next year one such privacy-enhancing tech would be made broadly available.
> ...they still want to track you enough to tailor ads to users (their words).
Yes, but using MPC (multi-party computation) and other (zero-knowledge) techniques gathering steam as of late: "These technologies will help us minimize the amount of personal information we process, while still allowing us to show people relevant ads and measure ad effectiveness for advertisers."
I dislike Facebook's data handling practices as much as the next guy, but: Whats proposed is better than what we have today, though it isn't absolutely the best they could do. That's the price to pay for free, I guess. After all, advertisers are their paying customers.
"Tailor ads to users" is such a newspeak. Only two industries call their consumers users: advertisers and drug dealers. So it's fair to compare FB with a broker between drug dealers (advertisers) and drug users (or just users). The users don't really want drugs, but they've become addicts and can't stop themselves. The broker's caring about its users privacy is cute. Apple's and Google's recent stance on privacy is basically protecting the territory from a competing broker (FB).
> Without personalized advertising, businesses would be harder to start and grow, new products and services would be harder to discover and would cost more, and people would see less relevant, less timely and less interesting ads.
The years prior to 2010 or whenever they jumped into advertising would argue "You're wrong, Facebook."
> We are optimistic that new privacy-enhancing technologies will prove that personalization remains possible and effective as our industry evolves to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
"Evolves"? Or "Was shoved off the cliff when people actually found out what you were doing and were given the option to push?"
> We’re also exploring applications for on-device learning, a technology that could improve a person’s ad experience by processing data locally on their device rather than sending individual data to a remote server or cloud.
And back around to the PC era (local computation) from the mainframe era (most recently cloud datacenters)... and the cycle continues...
> As we work with the industry to answer these questions, we know businesses — especially small businesses — are counting on us to help them navigate through these changes. Many of them don’t have large marketing budgets — or even marketing teams — so they use our tools to deliver and measure their ad campaigns efficiently.
Would these be the small businesses that, during the pandemic, figured out that "paying to get someone to your site when they search for your company name is more expensive than people simply finding your site as the first hit when they search for your company name"?
The whole "Facebook, we care about small businesses!" shtick is getting pretty old and transparent. Facebook in advertising trouble? "Oh, but this will hurt small businesses!" Bravo Sierra.
> New technologies take time to develop, but we’re confident that through our ongoing work and engagement with the broader industry, we can build solutions that will support a free and open internet.
Uh huh. Long as you sit in the middle, profit, and make sure that people think "free and open internet" means "Load Facebook."
I admit I was hoping that the article was just a redirect to the "Delete your account" page. :(
> The years prior to 2010 or whenever they jumped into advertising would argue "You're wrong, Facebook."
For better and for worse, we've seen pretty significant shifts in advertising over the last decade that has led to the collapse of brand names' domination over certain categories.
There are over 1 million tiny ecommerce businesses on Shopify that could never afford or rationalize a mass-market TV, print, or radio commercial but they can still be generate meaningful profits with only $100 worth of digital ads that are delivered to the right people.
It's undeniable that small businesses are benefiting from these types of ads, though you're welcome to question the macro-economic implications of that.
> With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
Nothing in there about the users at all. Just “we’ve been forced to do this by others.” Facebook truly believes privacy is just an obstacle to their revenue, not something good for the people who use their product.
If there were any signal that Facebook is really, truly a net negative for humanity it’s that opening paragraph. Christ.
I would have settled for an acknowledgement that users are demanding this change. No need to fake believing it’s a good thing for users or Facebook’s business, even. Simply: “Users are becoming increasingly concerned with how their data is processed. To meet this concern, and maintain personalization that benefits them, we…”
Well, because they were. Apple poked them with a stick, Facebook responds in the most blithe, un-entertaining fashion possible. No surprise there, since everyone in the privacy community knew this was a pissing contest from the start. If we want real change, we should be holding people accountable and forcing transparency everywhere possible. Until then, it looks like the corporate interests-that-be are more concerned with slowly destroying one another using their liquid assets than improving the "user experience".
I mean, they published an op-ed arguing against Apple's changes so I'm a little surprised that them admitting they've lost this battle is what has really done it for you.
Statcounter counts traffic from their web analytics service installed on ~2m site. And more generic question: all those traffic analytics services rely on javascript modules and if majority of firefox users block them, all this data is heavily biased in favor of “plain” chrome and safari.
"World-renowned arsonist announces new squirt guns for personal fire safety"
Really Facebook sees the writing on the wall that Apple and Google are about to cut off the firehose of data Facebook collects via mobile devices, and is scrambling to find a way around this by pretending to give a damn about your privacy.
I was aware of Apple's recent moves to "cut off the firehose" for FB but I hand't heard of a similar move by Google. Is there an Android update coming will have the same effect? I feel like I may have missed this.
Googs being Googs, even if they did make more hay about this, my outlook would be that they are devising ways to keep FB from gathering that data while the Googs continues to hoover up all they data they do. It's a win-win for Googs: they get to pretend to be good guys protecting mobile users privacy while at the same time putting pressure on a competitor so their product is more attractive.
Sure, but I don't think it's a 1:1 correlation though. FB is constantly getting berated about privacy. This is just part of their on going campaign to make themselves look less vile.
> Without personalized advertising, businesses would be harder to start and grow, new products and services would be harder to discover and would cost more, and people would see less relevant, less timely and less interesting ads.
What about having control over our own minds? What about spending our moments in the present? When did life become about discovering "new products" and not just living in the world?
Are we seriously going to claim that the citizens are deprived now that those ads like barnacles are not covering these historical buildings? Think of the products they could be discovering! It's time to realize that ads are a net negative for society.
They make it seem like personalized advertising is the only way to make products and services cost less. What if those products and services were made by a company that didn't make quite as much money, but still made enough to stay in business?
Agreed, I am strongly for a VAT on all digital advertising revenue. Let's make ads more expensive so people have a real choice to pay or not. Plus, we can use the money to fund something that helps people.
This would probably have the opposite effect of what you're looking for. You'd penalize non-targeted ads, which require a larger spend to be effective.
Personalized ads are ultimately cheaper than non-targeted ads because you don't need to buy as many impressions to hit the audience that you're looking for.
Ads are fine in a certain, very limited scope. For example, the newspaper, back when it held a prominent role in society, had an "ads" section. You could go directly to it to "discover new products"
Whether or not we want to admit it or not, we've all had a a product we have bought as a result of advertising that has provided us a good amount of value/joy/utility. There is clearly some utility for society in companies, especially newer ones, being able to reach new audiences, especially if they are making good products/trying to do it in a more sustainable way/changing the status quo in some net positive way. You can't rely on just word of mouth alone.
Sao Paulo was really the first to ban public advertising, back in 2007[1].
It makes think of G.K. Chesterton's quip "What a glorious garden of wonders the lights [of Broadway] would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."[2]
Does every post about Facebook have to result in a massive circle jerking of comments? These get tiring to read every time. Almost none of the comments right now offer any substance at all, just mindless sound bites and jokes.
And yet we can invert that question as well. Does nearly every post by Facebook lately have to be an attempt for them to convince us that pervasive surveillance and personal add targeting is actually in our best interests? Further, do these same posts also require them to cast themselves as some great champion of personal privacy? I think one could argue that the constant gas-lighting by FB is tiresome.
Because the union of people who use and enjoy Facebook and people who read HN is very small.
But the union of people who read HN and people who would hit a button to erase Facebook and all of its employees off the face of the planet is probably larger than one might expect.
> With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
Wow, facebook kinda admits that it hates the privacy measures, but are helpless and will have to abide.
I've been digging through this in an effort to understand exactly how it preserves user privacy. I'm at a bit of a loss, probably because I lack domain expertise. From digging through their docs[1]:
> This adds a new privacy concern, however. Revealing that a person is in a treatment or control group is just a random value, but revealing the fact that they had an opportunity could reveal much more information, such as demographics used for targeting of the advertising campaign. (Note: revealing a person’s treatment/control group assignment isn’t entirely private, as it could reveal membership in a group, which we often want to avoid in general. Opportunity logging, though, can reveal much more information.)
I understand that if I were to see that Johnny Individual was served ad campaign X, and X was targeted towards 35 year old male identifying individuals in Colorado, I would know that Johnny Individual fit the bill according to the ad network.
What I can't understand is: Who are we trying to keep this info from? The ad network needs to know this to properly run the campaign. In the example they provide, I believe the ad network is running the lift test and reporting aggregate results.
... If I had dug just a bit deeper before posting :)
> Today, this type of reporting requires at least one party to learn which specific people made a purchase after seeing a specific ad. With MPC, say one party has the information about who saw an ad and another party has information on who makes a purchase. MPC and encryption make it possible for both parties to learn insights about how an ad is performing, without the need to entrust a single party with both data sets.
Facebook's entire business model is completely dependent on mining your personal data for the benefit of advertisers. There is no other major component to their business.
From that perspective alone, it would be utter lunacy to believe that they have your "privacy" in mind. If so, then the definition of privacy has become so perverted as to not mean what it actually is meant to mean: keeping things to one's self that are not meant to be shared with anyone.
Then again, people freely share on Facebook that which should remain private in any case. We've devolved to the point that we're now worrying about privacy on a platform that depends on sharing things that shouldn't be shared and we're worried that it will get shared beyond what we want. Social media is such a rats nest.
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadBut don’t worry, they still want to track you enough to tailor ads to users (their words).
The post does point out that by next year one such privacy-enhancing tech would be made broadly available.
> ...they still want to track you enough to tailor ads to users (their words).
Yes, but using MPC (multi-party computation) and other (zero-knowledge) techniques gathering steam as of late: "These technologies will help us minimize the amount of personal information we process, while still allowing us to show people relevant ads and measure ad effectiveness for advertisers."
I dislike Facebook's data handling practices as much as the next guy, but: Whats proposed is better than what we have today, though it isn't absolutely the best they could do. That's the price to pay for free, I guess. After all, advertisers are their paying customers.
What Are Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and How Will They Apply to Ads?
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/privacy-enhancing-technolo...
The years prior to 2010 or whenever they jumped into advertising would argue "You're wrong, Facebook."
> We are optimistic that new privacy-enhancing technologies will prove that personalization remains possible and effective as our industry evolves to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
"Evolves"? Or "Was shoved off the cliff when people actually found out what you were doing and were given the option to push?"
> We’re also exploring applications for on-device learning, a technology that could improve a person’s ad experience by processing data locally on their device rather than sending individual data to a remote server or cloud.
And back around to the PC era (local computation) from the mainframe era (most recently cloud datacenters)... and the cycle continues...
> As we work with the industry to answer these questions, we know businesses — especially small businesses — are counting on us to help them navigate through these changes. Many of them don’t have large marketing budgets — or even marketing teams — so they use our tools to deliver and measure their ad campaigns efficiently.
Would these be the small businesses that, during the pandemic, figured out that "paying to get someone to your site when they search for your company name is more expensive than people simply finding your site as the first hit when they search for your company name"?
The whole "Facebook, we care about small businesses!" shtick is getting pretty old and transparent. Facebook in advertising trouble? "Oh, but this will hurt small businesses!" Bravo Sierra.
> New technologies take time to develop, but we’re confident that through our ongoing work and engagement with the broader industry, we can build solutions that will support a free and open internet.
Uh huh. Long as you sit in the middle, profit, and make sure that people think "free and open internet" means "Load Facebook."
I admit I was hoping that the article was just a redirect to the "Delete your account" page. :(
For better and for worse, we've seen pretty significant shifts in advertising over the last decade that has led to the collapse of brand names' domination over certain categories.
There are over 1 million tiny ecommerce businesses on Shopify that could never afford or rationalize a mass-market TV, print, or radio commercial but they can still be generate meaningful profits with only $100 worth of digital ads that are delivered to the right people.
It's undeniable that small businesses are benefiting from these types of ads, though you're welcome to question the macro-economic implications of that.
Nothing in there about the users at all. Just “we’ve been forced to do this by others.” Facebook truly believes privacy is just an obstacle to their revenue, not something good for the people who use their product.
If there were any signal that Facebook is really, truly a net negative for humanity it’s that opening paragraph. Christ.
Trying to spin their amoral business setup in any other way is just an exercise in (self)lying.
But they couldn’t muster that.
Well, because they were. Apple poked them with a stick, Facebook responds in the most blithe, un-entertaining fashion possible. No surprise there, since everyone in the privacy community knew this was a pissing contest from the start. If we want real change, we should be holding people accountable and forcing transparency everywhere possible. Until then, it looks like the corporate interests-that-be are more concerned with slowly destroying one another using their liquid assets than improving the "user experience".
How soon before we declare a war on it? We need to spend trillions to fix it like we did WMD, terrorism, drugs and communism.
Since we're on HackerNews, I also can't wait for millions to be poured into dozens of blockchain_crypto_privacy_big_data_new_company.
We care about lisp, and discussing how great pg truly is, if that can even be quantified!
Firefox not even mentioned
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Really Facebook sees the writing on the wall that Apple and Google are about to cut off the firehose of data Facebook collects via mobile devices, and is scrambling to find a way around this by pretending to give a damn about your privacy.
See: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/Secur...
What about having control over our own minds? What about spending our moments in the present? When did life become about discovering "new products" and not just living in the world?
Here's a city that banned advertising: https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/04/london-be...
Are we seriously going to claim that the citizens are deprived now that those ads like barnacles are not covering these historical buildings? Think of the products they could be discovering! It's time to realize that ads are a net negative for society.
However, the pic is a bad example: if you look just a little to the left there is currently a HUGE screen[1],
Piccadilly Circus in London has been known for it's adverts in lights, then later screens for decades.
[1] See pic on google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5097908,-0.1348659,3a,75y,30...
More info
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-41751310
Personalized ads are ultimately cheaper than non-targeted ads because you don't need to buy as many impressions to hit the audience that you're looking for.
As a rationale, consider the targeted tax difference the price of collecting, storing, and using radioactive personal data.
If Facebook had to pay a higher tax rate for targeted ad revenue, their priorities would start to shift.
Whether or not we want to admit it or not, we've all had a a product we have bought as a result of advertising that has provided us a good amount of value/joy/utility. There is clearly some utility for society in companies, especially newer ones, being able to reach new audiences, especially if they are making good products/trying to do it in a more sustainable way/changing the status quo in some net positive way. You can't rely on just word of mouth alone.
Banning them is such a no-brainer, and it only takes visiting a country which allows them vs. a country who don't to see why.
Could probably make millions before ad networks become compliant.
This policy alone would make me consider moving to parts of the country I've never wanted to even visit.
It makes think of G.K. Chesterton's quip "What a glorious garden of wonders the lights [of Broadway] would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."[2]
1: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
2: https://www.chesterton.org/lecture-37/
But the union of people who read HN and people who would hit a button to erase Facebook and all of its employees off the face of the planet is probably larger than one might expect.
Wow, facebook kinda admits that it hates the privacy measures, but are helpless and will have to abide.
> This adds a new privacy concern, however. Revealing that a person is in a treatment or control group is just a random value, but revealing the fact that they had an opportunity could reveal much more information, such as demographics used for targeting of the advertising campaign. (Note: revealing a person’s treatment/control group assignment isn’t entirely private, as it could reveal membership in a group, which we often want to avoid in general. Opportunity logging, though, can reveal much more information.)
I understand that if I were to see that Johnny Individual was served ad campaign X, and X was targeted towards 35 year old male identifying individuals in Colorado, I would know that Johnny Individual fit the bill according to the ad network.
What I can't understand is: Who are we trying to keep this info from? The ad network needs to know this to properly run the campaign. In the example they provide, I believe the ad network is running the lift test and reporting aggregate results.
Could someone please point out what I'm missing?
[1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/fbpcf/blob/master/docs/P...
> Today, this type of reporting requires at least one party to learn which specific people made a purchase after seeing a specific ad. With MPC, say one party has the information about who saw an ad and another party has information on who makes a purchase. MPC and encryption make it possible for both parties to learn insights about how an ad is performing, without the need to entrust a single party with both data sets.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/privacy-enhancing-technolo...
From that perspective alone, it would be utter lunacy to believe that they have your "privacy" in mind. If so, then the definition of privacy has become so perverted as to not mean what it actually is meant to mean: keeping things to one's self that are not meant to be shared with anyone.
Then again, people freely share on Facebook that which should remain private in any case. We've devolved to the point that we're now worrying about privacy on a platform that depends on sharing things that shouldn't be shared and we're worried that it will get shared beyond what we want. Social media is such a rats nest.