The senate hearings are just theater. Important questions like this should probably be async - compel the companies to provide specific answers on the record.

Especially Feinstein grilling him about privacy, when she votes for and often even sponsors every privacy invading bill and three letter agency out there.

It's not necessarily inconsistent to hold the position that government should be able to invade privacy in ways private corporations should not. As a concrete example, search warrants for crimes.

That said, I'm of the opinion Feinstein is largely senile at this point, and wish she'd retire.

She has supported NSA collection of information on all citizens of the US. There is no reasonable argument for this and it's not even in the same universe as search warrants.

Again, though, "the NSA should be allowed to do this" and "Facebook should not be allowed to do this" are not inherently contradictory.

I share your opinion that the NSA's surveilance is bad, and I'd assert it's unconstitutional, but the hypocrisy/contradiction you're trying to highlight still isn't necessarily there.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I can't square the logic that it's unconstitutional for the NSA to do this and legal for Facebook and yet somehow it makes sense to argue that it's ok for the NSA but not Facebook.

I'm a bit baffled as to why not.

The government can kill me; Facebook cannot. The government can imprison me; Facebook cannot. The government can require I pay taxes; Facebook can not.

It shouldn't be surprising when similar disparities exist on surveillance. The NSA's program has yet to be deemed unconstitutional by the courts, which is what matters.

Ok I get you on that front, the government has a monopoly on violence, might makes right, yes. I mistakenly thought you were trying to argue that somehow it legally or moralistically made sense.

Would you rather have all of your activity information utilized against you for national security or for the private profit of one corporation?

Except for the time she called the out the CIA for reading her email.

Oh yeah she's all for spying on everyone but herself.

Yeah that's the thing when an everyday American--and especially a political insider--thinks of espionage, they seem to think of it from the protagonical perspective, like they're going to be James Bond and they're going to have legal privileges ("license to kill") and they're going to have the technological upper hand always. They think spying will benefit them, that they're destined to win because that's how it has always been. Despite identifying much more with the underdog in most contests, Americans don't identify with underdogs in espionage. With exceptions, like in movies about guys beating the system because of a branch of the government "went rogue."

Absolutely. Zuck is the ideal subject, as of you asked him if the sun came up this morning the answer would sound evasive.

Being tracked when logged off/on other sites is a bit different than shadow profiles.

Users are absolutely tracked when logged off or on other sites through 3rd party cookies, aka the Facebook Pixel. If you go on a news site that has the Facebook Pixel, it will record that you went on their site. When you go back on FB, they will check that FB Pixel cookie and see what other sites with that same cookie you've visited. Through that, they can compile a profile of what interests to use to advertise to you.

Shadow profiles are a bit of a different story, since that would essentially be FB compiling a profile of someone that has gone to all these sites with FB Pixel, but doesn't have a FB account. That's entirely possible, and would make it so that if you do eventually make an account with a FB-owned product, they've already got all of that info on you to start targeting ads.

The most low hanging fruit and directly impactful way to prevent this as a user:

1. Use a browser or browser extension that blocks 3rd party cookies

2. Use an email alias service like Firefox relay. This allows you to generate a random email address for every site you make an account on, and all those email addresses forward emails to your actual email.

Using the same email everywhere is essentially the same as what FB Pixel does, it allows all these sites to share with data brokers that [email protected] has made accounts at these other websites.

3. This is a bit harder/not as cheap to do, but the same applies for using the same phone number when signing up to sites, it allows data brokers/ad networks to connect accounts across dif sites to the same person. If it's not required, don't provide a phone number.

If it is required and the number will be used to send important info, try to use a disposable phone number service that forwards to your personal phone number. If it's required but the number won't be used for important communication, use a fake number like 123-456-7890

100% agree with strategy #3, except I'm finding it harder to implement:

1. Everybody wants your phone number these days, especially those you don't want to give it to. From whatsapp and signal that use it as your main identify, whether you want to or not; to social sites like Facebook or Twitter that MAY let you sign up without phone, but "flag" you for security on first login and require phone; to other sites whether gmail or otherwise that require phone to sign in

2. More and more of them these days send a text to phone to verify it belongs to you

I'm therefore finding it harder and harder to not give my phone to everybody (of course, "not using the product" is always a possibility, so I still don't have a twitter account and by all accounts my life is better for it :)

For sure, though at the very least the examples you gave are mostly other social networks. So at worst, it allows them to know what other social networks you use.

What you want to avoid is using your phone number when doing things like online shopping, since that's when more personal details about you can be connected to your number, and therefore to the other social networks you used that number with.

> Being tracked when logged off/on other sites is a bit different than shadow profiles.

It all tastes like chicken. The tracking mechanisms are identical. You are probably given some "Ad ID". And that Ad ID correlates with your facebook ID if you have a facebook account.

Calling it a "shadow profile" sounds sinister. But its just commonplace tactics that any ad network is going to deploy. Facebook just happens to have more information on you than others.

Ha, that is so funny Mr. Zucker! "the ad experiences are the most effective" -- Yes, effective for whom? Surely not the users, because their "ad experience" (even that expression in itself already makes me gag, omg, must be out of some marketing horror movie or something) is surely most effective, when ads do not show up at all. Ads are annoying, manipulating, and getting in the way of productivity. Surely Zucky did not mean to track users to get rid of those pesky ads, which are shown without actual consent.

It's such a broad cop out. Very much like the "we use (horribly intrusive surveillance technology that is complete overkill for any imaginable purpose today, is almost certainly illegal to collect without explicit consent, but we may find useful in 5 years when we trawl all the logs and mine it for a tiny modicum of profitable edge) to improve our products and services, and some other random long sentences that sound innocuous and something else, look at the fluffy bunny, (huge) *CONTINUE* button, pre-selected (tiny) not right now, doesn't even look like a button".

Improving the ad experience could mean they stick a probe up your rectum and see if your bowels move better or not, for all they care.

I've seen several ads in my life that directed me to things I was legitimately interested in. Certainly a hell of a lot more online than on TV.

That is not a good tradeoff for a massive surveillance state that pesters and obsesses over users, profiling them to a degree literally unimaginable in the time of Orwell.

I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's acceptable.

There are already several companies that build a credit history out of every major transaction I do. There's at least two companies that have parts of a full credit card transaction history on me. Almost every store I walk into has security cameras monitoring me. The level of surveillance I'm already living under is so high that if I had anxiety about that sort of thing I'd have run for the hills when I turned 21.

The ad surveillance networks are impressive in scope, but about on-par with their peers in finance.

> I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's acceptable.

Interesting opinion for somebody with nick called 'shadowgovt'. I get your point, but even as that its shouldn't be OK in any meaningful way. It can easily end up as a slippery slope that is extremely hard if not impossible to come back from, and the intrusion to ones privacy goes deeper and deeper till you have absolutely 0.

Nobody alive in this world has absolutely nothing to hide. Maybe ass warts or shape of sub-par penis, some rather unusual preferences or opinions on XYZ, body odor when sweating or locations of body hair, whatever.

We shouldn't have OK categories for intrusions to our most private parts of our lives, period. Terrorists, ad optimization, blahblah whatever, just nope. At least disabled by default and if one is brave enough just go ahead and enable it to get that 5$ discount. I feel very strongly that I don't want my children to live in a world like that, how can we fuckup with such a basic and important item.

I don't think we disagree on anything other than whether "the sites we read on a global telecommunications network" count as "most private parts of our lives." Every page accessed is a two-way conversation between you and a stranger's property. That's pretty shifting philosophical sand to ground an argument on the privacy of those conversations in.

Why does the stranger not have the right to let a third-party know you talked to them?

Yes, people tend to have different experiences in life. Ads to me are extremely disruptive, I cannot focus and read text when there are moving images and flashing colors surrounding it. I consider it an affront to accessibility for the attention-challenged, they are designed to distract and derail my train of thought, shouting "forget what you came here for and look this way"

As an accessibility issue, I'd recommend modifying your user-agent with ad-blockers, etc. A11y is something every site should support, but expecting the world to bend everyone's experience around particular accessibility needs is likely to leave one disappointed.

Of course I do what I can to adapt things on my end, but I will also publically complain that the "ad experience" is not a benevolent one.

When you consider that Zuckerberg lies all the time about everything, it makes sense

I think he doesn't lie, he just has a severely warped view of reality, and an incredibly inflated sense of his own capabilities. He won a lottery and thinks it was intentional.

His public blabber on ai and automation are a great peek inside his mind.

The mindset is "That problem isn't solved because I haven't worked on it yet." There's no self awareness or humility involved, and he can afford the apparatus to maintain that for the rest of his life.

He's not even close to this naive. He's a sociopath, as evidenced by even his earliest statements calling his users idiots for trusting him. I worked closely with Facebook around 2011 and everyone I encountered knew exactly what they were doing and that it was fucked up.

It's very difficult for those with ethical and moral standards to grasp that there are truly nasty people out there.

Both things can be true. He can be a sociopath who knows what he is doing and naive true believer of his own abilities in alternating time slices. Most crazy people are several contradictory varieties of insane all at once.

What reason to you have to believe that he is anything but a selfish liar only out for himself?

This is solid reasoning here. On the “lottery” side, imagine if he went to college (where he scraped student profiles) a couple of years before or after, his timing would be completely off and there would be no Facebook.

He won a lottery from stealing other people's ideas