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.