There is also a ton of precedent for 'passive' tracking. Security cameras, dash cams, etc. all record stuff that is in plain view. The issue is that browsers send identifiable fingerprints on purpose to websites you visit. Facebook isn't collecting anything you aren't legally sending it.
The issue is >90% of the internet uses this business model so there is no incentive or point to make a mechanism that actually just blocks websites that have this business model since it would be unusable for 99% of people.
Many countries have laws against companies harvesting phone numbers just because someone called them, your browser information isn't really different to that.
>90% of the internet DON'T use that business model. It's actually quite a small proportion. They're just all over the place as they make profit from creeping into other businesses and using them as a collection platform. Ad networks need to be reigned in (and yes, that's what FB is).
Is this actually true? Are Private Investigators breaking the law and doing their job hoping they won't get caught and charged with a crime?
Do all people scanned by Facebook have a Facebook or Instagram or whatever account?.
Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms.
No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.
The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.
Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.
Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
> AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless. Human culture has long held traditions around basic mores that really don't change over time and culture. For example, most instances of homicide are bad and are codified as such.
Yes, there is some wiggle room for rhetoric, but words have durable meaning, and when people take the time to think critically about their usage, they can spot dishonesty, weasel wording, and hyperbole.
> something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime
> modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale"
You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person. These are not the same thing. You're using that equivocation to draw your analogy of tracking and retargeting as being nearly indistinguishable from real world stalking, which is absolutely hyperbolic and disingenuous. People who are being stalked are in actual, mortal danger. It is incredibly difficult for them to terminate the observation and following of their real, physical person. They experience intense (and very rational) psychological and emotional distress as a result.
I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
Either way, it's tracking what someone's doing. That the visibility isn't absolute in either case—though, thanks to phones and connected surveillance cameras and such, the line between "internet behavior" and "all behavior" is getting really blurry, no?—doesn't change that.
There is a lot more to this than "which links I clicked on the Google Search results", right? Where was I last Saturday, when did I arrive and leave, who was at that party with me, what was playing on the TV in the background, where'd I move my mouse while visiting that web page, what porn do I watch down to when exactly I stopped that video, what did I buy at the corner store last week, which vacation destinations have I been looking at, am I having an affair, is my spouse having an affair, how many kids do I have and where do they go to school, and far, far more than that. Is the creepy stalker somehow less creepy if they fail to capture as much information as they'd like? I do not see the equivocation you wrote of, in this case, at all, because I don't see the qualitative difference in the activities that you seem to. Both observe activity, much of which is commonly regarded as or expected to be private. Neither captures the "actual person", as you write, in any sense. It's the same sort of thing, yes? How is it not? How is one thing merely "behavior" and the other is the "actual person"? Both are about behavior.
If anything the Web giants see more, and more intimate, information than all but the most successful stalker or window-peeper, and also do it to far more people, and also store it forever, and also use that information to manipulate you (they don't even hide this part! It's explicitly their whole thing!).
If I were trying to unfairly or deceptively stretch definitions, as you accuse me, I'd be pushing for a lot more than equating the two. The web giants are much worse. My initial comparison is pretty mundane and probably more fair than is deserved, and I hope people would take the next step of considering how much they're repulsed by creepy stalking when an individual does it and realizing that the web giants are doing, just... so much of that. So very much. So how ought they feel about that? Like those whole companies the main business of which is being huge fucking creeps, protected only because... shit, I dunno. I guess it's not stalking if you do it impersonally and for pay? I have a hard time grasping what I suppose you're taking as the "accepted" or (surely, as you're fighting even gentle attempts to re-frame?) "correct" POV on this. It's like glimpsing bizarro-world, where all the colors are reversed and up is down and cats and dogs live in harmony.
> I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
A database of who was with whom, where, all their preferences for a variety of things, what they've bought since the tracking started (years ago), et c., is per se harmful. I'm not going to wait for someone to fall in the huge pit in the sidewalk before claiming having a giant pit in the sidewalk is dangerous. Obviously, it's dangerous. If someone proposes wrapping playground equipment in barbed wire, I'm not going to wait for someone to get hurt before saying "that's a really stupid, dangerous idea". Besides, identity theft (bank fraud, if you prefer) is a real consequence of all of our data being in so many places now, and automated, targeted recommendations, ads, promoted content, et c., have well-covered effects, which I would absolutely consider harmful—perhaps you do not, but there's been enough coverage of this for years that you can understand why someone might, at least.
> > > redefining terms and norms.
> > AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
> I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless.
Hardly. Shifting people's perspective—redefining terms and norms, and convincing people that yours make more sense than the ones they had before—is core to persuasive communication, among other forms of communication. You might as well have written "you're trying to convince people of things, and to communicate your point of view". Well... yes.
Besides, I covered the "meaningless" angle in my post. It's not that they're meaningless, it's that one must question definitions and norms to spot when one is being fooled, or has been misled. Say, "tracking what users do on their own computer isn't grossly unethical, it's 'telemetry'", or "sending your real name to a stranger on the Internet isn't batshit crazy, it's ordinary, provided that stranger owns a .com", or "sure, personalized ads are creepy [luckily, that sentiment hasn't been stamped out yet, and remains nigh-universal], but they're also normal and part of a legitimate business model", or "companies that deliberately promote some content over other content aren't in any way responsible for that content or liable for harm it may cause, in any legal sense, provided they take it down if a lawyer asks very nicely" or "it's not dangerously irresponsible social science, it's A/B testing on our social 'algorithm'". It's not a matter of meaninglessness, it's that a given set of definitions and norms is not necessarily the most correct, or most useful for a given purpose or context.
These things are shifting all the time, and some of those shifts are deliberately created by people who are trying to pull a fast one. If we have to accept their terms and norms, well, what, we just throw up our hands and declare ourselves prisoners to their language? I don't see what alternative you're proposing to using language as I've done, which, again, isn't deceptive or unusual. If the tamest and most transparent sort of analogy and comparison were off limits, then... what do we use instead? Those are central to how we communicate.
Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.
But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.
It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning, so that interpretation isn't necessary for my use to be correct (and isn't what I intended).
From Webster's 1913 for "Crime (n)":
2. Gross violation of human law, in distinction from a misdemeanor or trespass, or other slight offense. Hence, also, any aggravated offense against morality or the public welfare; any outrage or great wrong. "To part error from crime." Tennyson. [emphasis mine]
3. Any great wickedness or sin; iniquity.
Crime has a very specific meaning when we're talking about a legislative body conducting a hearing. It's not open to interpretation. A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period.
What are you trying to communicate here? You're really stretching to defend your poor reading.
[EDIT] rather, you're really digging in—"my poor reading is the only correct reading, because I say it is, therefore the post is what's wrong, not my reading".
Um, no it's not?
But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.
Another recent example from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747699
That doesn’t make it ok
What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.
As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.
Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.
[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."
When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.
This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.
this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).
both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.
He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).
Fatalism is how Bad Things survive in a committee-government such as ours. :-\
Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.
Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.
Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.