Facebook knows what pretty much everyone in the Valley knows; 90%+ of the politicians in this country (and likely most other countries) don't have the technical education to understand just how little Facebook is actually doing to fix the problem.
If its just helping them target ads then they should explain why Experian is allowed to continue, but I am more concerned with Experian being "creative" with Facebook's tools and incorporating some of that into their credit scoring models.
Pulling data from more sources doesn't change the underlying problem of faceless businesses assigning people scores based on vague unknown requirements.
People will just create fake accounts that "like" things like "saving money" and "paying off debt."
Sure, I think most people who use FB would. Zuckerberg has been talking a big game lately about regaining user's trust and how "we have a lot of work to do." If he were at all serious about those sentiments FB would begin providing meaningful disclosure about what data they were collecting and sharing with which third parties.
They would also update their privacy settings and give user's the ability grant or deny access to the sharing of that data with third parties. Similar to how users now have to grant apps permissions to access contacts, the camera etc.
FB's desire to continue operating in total secrecy and simultaneously court public trust seems to be the very height of cognitive dissonance.
> FB's desire to continue operating in total secrecy and simultaneously court public trust seems to be the very height of cognitive dissonance.
Is it cognitive dissonance if they're self-consciously lying?
My take is nothing's fundamentally changed for them, and "the work they have to do" is distracting people until the spotlight's off, making only marginal changes in the process.
Take this change, for instance, it may have nothing to do with user privacy and everything to do with pushing advertisers to FB's own targeting platform more heavily.
I don't think it would be no, at least not clinically. And that actually makes the rhetorics even more insidious.
I don't have a specific use case because its not my industry, but Facebook's approach seems to be to give people tools they know can be misused in creative ways but then frown sternly if they get misused, so it wouldn't be out of character.
From [1]:
"Partner categories are, importantly, only available in specific areas. Acxiom provides data from Australia, France, Germany, the US, the UK, and Japan. CCC Marketing provides data from Japan. Epsilon provides data from the US. Experian provides data from Australia, Brazil, the UK, and the US. Oracle provides data from the UK and the US, and Quantium provides data from Australia."
[1] https://boostlikes.com/blog/2017/08/target-facebook-users-in...
>"Facebook clarified that it will still work with companies like Experian and Acxiom in order to measure ad performance and provide metrics, although it will also be conducting a review of those ongoing relationships."
These FB announcements the last couple of days seem little more than grooming for possible upcoming appearances in front of legislators. They can point to this and the surface-level app redesign and say they've "already" taken efforts to shore up concerns.
I think most people have no idea that FB and Experian - a consumer credit reporting agency have been sharing data at all. Where was that explained in the app redesign that was trotted out yesterday?
It's worth reading how Acxion who facing similar pressures recently handled their own superficial offering of "transparency":
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/technology/acxiom-lets-co...