I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc.

So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to? I despise Facebook and expect this is the sort of thing they'd do, but does anyone know more?

I stopped using Facebook several years ago; I wasn't much a user anyway so never worried about it.

Then, last year, I installed whatsapp. Then I started getting emails about an old colleague's activity on facebook. I don't have any contact details for this person anywhere, especially on my phone. I'd forgotten he even existed.

OK, you can connect the dots since my email hasn't changed and that connects me to facebook, and so on.

Nonetheless, it just made me realise how hard you have to work to protect your privacy these days.

When I deleted my facebook account I couldn't know that one day I'd use another service and facebook would not only acquire that service but then start using it to hook me back in?

It actually doesn’t matter how much effort they put in or how effective their techniques are. Doing that at all for people who have expressed a wish not to be is stepping over the line. That is why GDPR is going to hammer them.

And the funny thing is, with both Facebook and Google, this is completely obvious to anyone outside the very narrow demographic they hire from. So much for (their fake) diversity.

Of course I wish people would leave Facebook instead. I'm doing my part by not posting there.

Has anyone actually done a sample of Facebook users (or humans) to check those stats? I do not believe them, based on my personal experience and the very large number of businesses and bots on facebook.

Given the massive incentive for Facebook to lie, we’d be naive to take their numbers for granted.

If they provided really fine-grained data, we could easily verify their claims. We pick cities, they give numbers, we survey to confirm, then extrapolate.

Anyone got any data?

http://www.theloop.ca/dead-facebook-users-will-soon-outnumbe...

EDIT:

Well they do measure active daily users but I still think the article above is interesting.

Even my non technical friends often have 2-4 accounts. For work, for friends, for forgotten passwords, etc...

And then of course bots and bots and bots.

Of course it depends on how they define a user and an account. If I logon only 1 of my accounts in a given month or 10. Do they count as 1 or 10 in either case?

Facebook estimates than 10% of the accounts are duplicates [0], so that wouldn't match with most people (~50%?) having 2 to 4 accounts.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/02/facebook-ad...

There's no way this is true

Not sure why that's so unbelievable.

Nobody thinks they are all bullshit but, if half of them are, it's still a lot of people.

And what will kill them is the increasing regulatory pressure (GDPR especially) that will end this soon, for a significant percentage of their most valuable users.

Once GDPR lands Facebook will need every user to explicitly opt-in to tracking their non-FB browsing actions, plus separate opt-in for tracking various elements of their Facebook data itself, and will face very tight constraints of how this can be shared with advertisers even once they have that consent. Sharing WhatsApp/Instagram's data with Facebook would be another separate opt-in there, etc etc. Access to these sites cannot be contingent on you agreeing to give them your data (that's not considered legitimate consent). Effectively the EU is going to forcibly stop them tracking EU users, or using any of their data for advertising, for anybody doesn't explicitly ask them to.

This is going to hurt. They're going to have to persuade every EU Facebook user that they _want_ to have their data tracked for advertising. Right now I can't see them making a convincing case for any significant percentage of their EU user base (though I'm sure they've put a lot of thought into this, so there may well be developments here in the coming months).

The EU is nearly 20% of Facebook's user base (~50% larger than the US), and as a relatively affluent part of the world, it's a particularly valuable segment for advertisers. Before the end of this year they're going to lose their unique advertising advantage for a very large proportion of that group, and I'd expect over the next decade other countries and regions to follow suit.

The model of advertising on the Internet is going to change pretty drastically over the next few years, and Facebook's success fundamentally depends on the current model. The 'crucial moat' you point out is about to disappear overnight, and they're not in a good place to deal with it.

They have pretty strong lawyers. I fear the GDPR is already backdoored and only faintly hope this is not the case.

Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.

Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine. No doubt they've already linked Instagram and FB identities wherever possible.

So all that remains is to see if ads work as profitably on that platform. If they don't there will no doubt be an Instagram redesign for that.

There aren’t many “like/share this in Instagram” buttons around the web.

Instagram is just data provider.

So Google has everything in his pocket, but if FB really has something to put against?

Facebook nearly generated as much profit in 2017 as Tencent and Alibaba combined, to put it into perspective.

The flip side of China's behavior, is that their domestic tech giants have been unable to go global like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Netflix have (Amazon is still trying to push its model fully global with mixed results). Baidu was supposed to challenge Google globally, it has completely failed at that. The US is the world's most lucrative advertising market, Alibaba and Tencent can't access it because they're wildly incompetent at operating outside of their protected kingdom (as witnessed by Alibaba's embarrassing failure with 11 Main). China is an extremely unique market, the approaches and protections that have given Tencent and Alibaba their dominance there, will not translate well to most of the rest of the world.

Increasingly, this is not the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-belgium/facebook...

How well does that moat work in practice? What was the rate of decline in other networks (such as Friendster and MySpace)? I've always gotten the impression that these shifts happen quite quickly.

It matters if those "2 billion people" can abandon it in a hearbeat for some other platform.