I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious.

Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous.

When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.

I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but when - thanks to the GDPR - that hive of scum and tracking that underpins the modern internet was revealed I was really shocked.

Clicking one of those "manage your cookies" links is a truly enlightening experience.

How should Average Q User even begin to grasp the implications of this fucking datasucking hydra?

I was glad having "deleted" my Facebook account some 4 years ago.

Man, I didn't no 10% of the shit that's really going on.

Being party to conversations with C-level sociopaths is what really brings it home.

One example: One employer railed at the injustice (loss of profit) of not being able to share the millions of patient's medical records we'd accumulated with Big Pharma's marketing machine. This employer spent considerable effort trying to figure out how to work around the law (eg plausibly deniable anonymization).

FB may have started out as an invite only thing for technically savvy(ish) college kids, but those days were completely over the minute they got their app so tightly integrated with iOS and Android. So ... circa 2010 maybe?

FBs target audience now is literally the same as or even wider than television. We don't expect granny to understand the economics of her cable box.

She's used to paying the cable bill, seeing a few ads and feeling free to use whatever is on offer. Because she paid for it.

For instance the guide channel is not "free" from her perspective, and she has no expectation that she should need to be suspicious that for insance, the guide channel is tracking her viewing habits and customizing the programming on offer so as to massively sway public opinion and elections.

Average US consumers are used to this model, whether or not the fine print spells out something else. They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.

> They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.

Your example switches from "I pay <somebody> that enables access to <somebody else>" and you don't even have to go that far.

The guide channel is not tracking her viewing habits, but her cable box certainly is. The industry term is Addressable Media[1], and if she has any modern cable box from any major provider then she's being tracked and targeted for targeted ads just as highly as Facebook would be, despite her paying her cable company for the privilege of watching it. And while it's not customizing the programming itself that she watches, it is customizing the ads she's seeing. It's effectively the same as Facebook, where the she's using whatever is on offer and being subtly influenced by highly targeted excerpts being interspersed into it.

Ever experience weird glitches for commercials that start and end almost immediately, or randomly lack sound or any number of weird quirks that would make you think "man, someone just spent a lot of money for a messed up commercial spot, how did that get passed QA/QC?!"... chances are that was just a hiccup for you specifically as your cable box dynamically inserted an ad, and not hardcoded as part of the wider broadcast.

Cell phones are the same. Even though you're paying the cell company for network access, they're also double dipping by selling targeted audience capabilities based on their data of you based on ads that are seen while using their network.

[1] https://martechtoday.com/addressable-tv-state-cross-device-a...

In fact, so much so that it's been hard to get people to realize that the recent issues haven't been related to ads at all. Facebook itself stills seems to be trying to blur the lines between data collection and advertisement.

To me there's nothing wrong with ads. Even content-targeted ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves). But the push towards creating profiles that follow you around to target ads to you on multiple platforms based on your previous behavior is just creepy and dangerous (when political ads and control over the data comes into play).

That’s what genuinely baffles me. If I were a manager of a gardening company and I wanted to do targeted advertising I would just buy space in gardening themed publications. The idea of showing people my ads while they’re on other websites and not in a gardening mood anyway makes literally no sense. All this tracking and profiling ads zero value for the ad buyers, so why are they paying for it?

You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.

Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.

And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike).

If people are likely to be consumers of those things then they'll probably digest media related to those things or other media in the same demographic. This is classic marketing and it doesn't require the level of privacy abuse that Facebook has been trying to justify.

Perhaps someone was also mining the AIM data, but that would never have occurred to me to do. I doubt the tools to analyze and monetize it existed yet in any case. I'm not even sure the tools existed to monetize a social network when Facebook started.

It's a kind of weird conceptual leap to be honest, when compared to thinking about just selling ad space or perhaps targeting it based on people's interests.

Realistically, I think we have three choices:

- We can't have nice things.

- Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information.

- Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies.

But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).

But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials.

This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.

a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far

Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

In the case of legal documents -

1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.

2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.

Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.

So that point may need to be re-thought.

It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people.

Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as actively as they used to.

Granted, that could just be a normal fall-off since the 2016 Presidential Election season was a "special" time. But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp. Sure, that is also a Facebook joint, but it sends a real signal to Facebook as to what the market values in a social media platform, and it seems it's not the Facebook model.

I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).

(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)

The big impediment left has been Facebook's function as a social space to share photos with all and sundry. If not for it being the place to post photos of kids, weddings, vacations, etc. I don't think people would be spending much time on it. Seeing pictures of their nephews, nieces, kids, and grandkids on there is definitely what keeps the old people plugged in.

There really isn't another service that fills the niche either. Instagram is geared towards individual photos rather than albums or chronicles of events. Flickr kind of did, but it's basically dead now and its narrow focus on photography alone wound up gearing it towards pro or hobbyist photographers and didn't get much buy in from everyday users.

Facebook also seems to be something of a default space to host a bulletin board or community forum. Next-door has been trying to muscle in on that territory but it's been plagued by problems with racist usage patterns. Those would probably go away if it was more common, but it's created some real issues with optics. Also, I have no idea what their security practices are like so who knows if it's an improvement.

This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be.

Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.)

The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard."

The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.

By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.

The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.”

I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it.

But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now.

Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario.

The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.

The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.

And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then.

I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook.

DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.

Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what?

>DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.

Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one.

But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days.

Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."

It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you.

I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do?

This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem.

Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact.

I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one.

All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news.

Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.

This has happened.

The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.

Google has the same model, but takes data privacy more seriously than Facebook does. It's disingenuous to conflate any data harvesting with the most unscrupulous and casino-inspired iterations of it.

Arguably, the micro-targeting model of advertising Facebook goes after is more faddish than effective anyway. Google uses the data analytics as much to build more salable products as it does to serve advertising, so the volume of collection serves some kind of function. But facebook's actual business need for most of its data is dubious at best.

>Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.

It's not really the use of personal information that's the harm though. It's the addiction mechanisms they leverage to make you keep giving them personal information and the lack of protections or responsibility they put around it. It's not at all "obvious" that it's going to be harmful to anyone, and arguably it's not even harmful to anyone individually so much as harmful to society and the body politic generally. You can't have those problems at "smaller scales" because those problems don't exist at small scales, they're an emergent property of scale itself.

Further google does far too much as it is. I don’t want my emails parsed to figure out what ads to present, or my uploaded files.

The addiction mechanisms are a separate class of harm, and I recognize them from when games, far more than social media. They came much later, and were not part of business models back when Facebook etc. were created.

The misuse of personal data to harm people and privacy is a known idea. For example, they were warned about back in the day by people such as Huxley or Orwell.

Either way, this is an odd conversation.

These harms were clear and known.

If you are saying You didn’t see it, then that’s fine many others didn’t see it or believe it.

If you are saying I couldn’t see it, well I have long ago acted on what I saw and believed and oppose Facebook and other similarly privacy invading systems. I’m not happy with the old British surveillance state from the 90s - and I’m neither British nor American.

If you are saying the specific detailed break down of the harm to be caused was not known- sure. I cannot tell you which incident will finally trigger X event but I can predict that you won’t have autonomous cars, (since I see people driving in the wrong lane in the opposite direction of traffic very often where I live)

And a final point - the addiction mechanisms are just being cross pollinated from other systems, just like AB testing and other research helps ensure people stay on web pages.

Your deeper problem is that advertising, once a tool, has now become and end in and of itself.

If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.

The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.

Those ads are targetable by categories determined from private data, but Facebook doesn't give anyone else the data, that's literally why people would purchase ads through their exchange and not through another exchange.

Google has the same model, they don't sell your data, they use your data to match you with advertisers through a fairly opaque interface that lets advertisers reach the categories of people they want to reach, without revealing the data to allowed them to put someone in that category.

Kind of like how your Mom will set you up on a blind date based on what she knows about what both parties want, but doesn't disclose all your information because she doesn't want anyone to be upset with her.