"""
Zuckerberg reluctantly acknowledged that Facebook gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for what he said were "security purposes."
"""
That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from people with multiple accounts to do the most basic of bad-actor tracking against the most basic of attack scenarios.
This isn't just basic cookie tracking. They have an actual profile on you, without your consent, with the people who have you in their address book and even potentially your purchasing habits, from the data they purchase from data brokers like Datalogix. They maintain this profile on you separately from other users, and they make immediate use of it if you create an account.
That's not what the question was. The man asking the question wasn't technically sophisticated enough to ask about using cookies, and if he were, he would not have asked that question anyway.
The question was, does Facebook collect data on non-users?
What that means is, if I have not signed up for facebook, are you tracking my behavior anyway through the like button and other methods?
Though it seems like it would be ok to say "ONE of the reasons we do this is security" because it really does seem like they can get some decent security stuff out of doing some of the things they do. It's probably not the primary purpose though, more like a happy accident?
Though I'd guess for people who don't follow any of this close (like the vast majority of people) hearing "this will make you safe" probably works quite well, and that's why he's told to say these things.
Zuckerberg is the one being disingenuous. By acknowledging cookie tracking or scraper tracking, he answers the question that indeed FB tracks offline usage, but only mentions the innocuous cases and fails to acknowledge the Shadow Profiles[1] they clearly have
Is that so surprising? You're asking him to talk about the one thing that makes Facebook a viable revenue generator. I also feel like the use of "admit" in the headline is disingenuous.
I have zero expertise in this field but my intuition is that Facebook runs on an incredibly sensitive business model. Like an animal specialised to a specific biome. Adjust the conditions a bit and it might perish in a few generations. Meaningful legislative change to data collection or advertising laws might out them at risk.
> I also feel like the use of "admit" in the headline is disingenuous.
Yet you seem to be saying that Zuckerberg is trying to hide his business model to protect it from legislators. Doesn't that make the word "admit" appropriate? What other word would you use for something someone doesn't want to say during a hearing?
Well, yes that is surprising. I can't think of any other CEO who would have even the slightest problem talking about their revenue generation capabilities.
Exactly. What real time advertising network markets have done, is effectively incentivized Facebook, and anybody else selling internet ad space to create a Big Brother database in order to maximise revenue from any source that's prepared to pay.
Whilst I suspect this probably wasn't exactly what Marx meant when he said that Capitalism inevitably sews the seeds of its own destruction... combine it with a political system funded predominantly by private money, and I guess the only thing saving the US at the moment is that the oil price is so low.
"My reality was post-apocalyptic and it wasn't this fucked up" Penny Adiyodi, The Magicians.
I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing.
I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous.
If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. That's why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy / tracking settings.
And what's worse is that privacy controls explicitly don't control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status and only ended the status a year later. Immediately after changing a status marked "only me" in privacy settings I got bombarded with dating ads.
I complained that this was a huge privacy violation and they said "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status"
>"hat's why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy / tracking settings."
Indeed and if Congress had bothered to bring in some subject matter experts they would have been able to him out on these disingenuous answers and deceitful statements.
I'm sure Zuckerberg believes he may have won here but I think he lost in the court of public opinion. I think his testimony did him a lot of damage as it shows just how disingenuous and dishonest he really is.
I hope a lot of FB employees were able to tune in to these hearing so they could see their leader for who and what he really is. His scripted and willfully misleading testimony was fundamentally no different than the big banking or big pharmaceutical CEOs that get called to Washington during a crisis.
Actually "average people" in my experience very likely wildly over estimate how much information Facebook has about them. The default assumption I've seen non-technical people make is "they know everything". They understand at an intuitive level that when a company provides services for free and is worth so much, it probably uses a lot of their data. When these "average people" are business managers, this leads them to expect miracles out of Facebook ad targeting:-)
Technical people on the other hand who get into details and try to work out what and how FB is collecting data consistently under estimate FB and so get outraged.
Yeah, this. I mean, "technical debt" doesn't begin to cover it.
As the overlap in the Venn diagram of "people who give a crap" and "people who understand what FB actually is" inevitably gets larger I have no doubt that we'll reach a pitchforks-and-torches tipping point.
By getting up in front of Congress and stonewalling (or outright lying) he's jammed his public perception over towards the "Martin Shkreli" zone.
I think the questions were also horrible. Watching two days of testimony it seemed only Congresswoman Dingell from Michigan had any grasp of how tracking technology works.
My big takeaway is that we need more engineers in congress.
One of my biggest issues with the current political system is that - with few exceptions - only lawyers go into politics.
This means that you have people who have never taken Econ 101 setting fiscal policy, who don't understand technology trying to regulate tech companies, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution here is, but I think we're asking for trouble when our elected representatives lack a basic comprehension of the domains in which they legislate.
I don't think we have reason to believe the CEO is deeply familiar with all the strategies FB uses for session unification and user tracking. It's a fast-moving field with a lot of technical detail that a CEO doesn't actually need to keep day-to-day tabs on.
3) Run down the 4 minute clock each representative had to ask questions by talking as much as possible so as to avoid a meaningful exchange.
Representative Marsha Blackburn was the only one that actually called him out on this BS:
BLACKBURN: And where does privacy rank as a corporate value for Facebook?
ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, giving people control of their information and how they want to set their privacy is foundational to the whole service. It's not just a — kind of an add-on feature, something we have to...
BLACKBURN: Okay.
ZUCKERBERG: ... comply with.
BLACKBURN: Well...
ZUCKERBERG: The reality is, if you have a photo — if you just think about this in your day-to-day life...
BLACKBURN: No, I can't let you filibuster right now.
It would seem pretty nigh-on inconceivable that someone could build a business as successful as Facebook in hoovering up ad budgets, but to have no idea how they did it.
>Make the most of every campaign with these four strategies. Unlike display ads which target people based on cookies, Facebook lets you define and reach the exact target audience you want. You'll get the right eyes on your ads, while maximizing your time, budget and growth potential.
Zuckerberg is going to lose his shit when he sees what his Digital Ads team has done behind his back. Facebook is brazen about being a grossly invasive advertising company, just not when they're talking to their users. [1]
If I was a senator, I would have asked these two questions:
When I look at a product in an onlineshop like Amazon, afterwards I see adverts for this product on Facebook. How does this work?
When I visit a physical store, afterwards I see adverts for this store on Facebook. Even on my desktop computer. Even though I don't have any facebook apps on my phone. How does this work?
If he lies and says he don't know, from then on he would be at the mercy of many employees at FB whith whom he has talked about this type of data collection and sharing.
1. Since Amazon uses Facebook for advertising, they can feed their data to both Google and Facebook ads. It's easy to do with cookies.
2. If you don't have Facebook app on your phone or if you did not open your Facebook app when you are in store, you won't see ads for that store. Unless you have a loyalty program with the store or the store decides to target advertise you based on your payment info, etc. In any case, it is the physical store that shares those information.
Even Zuckerberg doesn't seem to know, he appears to have lost control of what's going on. Unfortunately, the hearing didn't dive into details to better demonstrate that he can't tell why somebody sees what they see, and who uses the data (inside and outside of Facebook). Also, the whole collecting data "for security purposes" is pretty unbelievable. Does that mean they share information with governments around the world? This can be interpreted as anything.
Zuckerburg is in the unenviable position of having to defend the entire ad-tech industry.
If he describes in granular detail how user profiling and ad serving works on Facebook, then Facebook is going to take the hit on practices that are basically industry standards. If he obfuscates, and focuses on FB controls then he seems like a liar.
If he explained how ad-tech works across the internet then it would look like whataboutism and him invoking the bandwagon fallacy.
At the end of the day it seems like someone/some company is eventually going to take the fall for the whole ad-tech industry and cause major reform - is Facebook the one who's going to take the arrow?
Facebook has to infer intent, unlike, say Google Search, which can get it directly from your keywords. FB has built a data halo around its users to try and infer that intent. Hard to imagine them ever giving you control over that additional data they collect around you, since it's their competitive advantage. But also proving to be a double edged sword because it's creeping out their users and other actors are starting to exploit it for political ends.
Given how things are taken out of context in today's media, giving a resounding Yes to an answer which requires a detailed answer is a bade idea. Congress/Senate hearings are not exactly CS101 class. So, it is better to be keeping answers short and maybe it comes off vague.
Politician clue-ness on the issue also doesn't help.
> (Zuckerberg reluctantly acknowledged that Facebook gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for what he said were "security purposes.")
This sort of information gathering is necessary for DDoS/Spam/Fraud prevention and so on. I'm not saying I trust Zuckerberg wasn't hiding something else, but also I understand why he didn't want to publicly comment on the heuristics they use to combat attackers.
Although at this point I don't know why Zuckerberg would be obfuscating if they really have detailed advertising profiles on logged-out users. (What would said advertising profiles be used for? Selling them to other advertisers?)
This particular article from Bloomberg loads (for me this time, it likely varies from one pageload to another) javascript files from these (and more, I stopped after reaching m, alphabetically) domains, many of whom are likely tracking users across sites and Bloomberg is doing so despite having no affirmative consent from me whatsoever:
It's important to blame the right party here - pubmatic doesn't have a relationship with you and taboola doesn't have a relationship with you - it's Bloomberg that is sending your usage data to them. The same is true when Facebook or Google pixels are loaded (I'm sure they are there) - they are not tracking you directly, the publishers that are loading those pixels are sharing your browsing information with them. The media companies, that are manufacturing lots of faux outrage of how the internet works, largely because they mistakenly believe that if not for large tech companies, they'd make more money, which is unlikely to be true, are not only complicit here, but they are far worse about their blatant misuse of user data.
So however you feel about Facebook or Google or whoever happens to be on the hot seat at the moment, this is just how the internet works today and says more about the advertising ecosystem at large. The data collection also includes offline entities that are selling or at least "sharing" purchase data, gym check-in data, and so on. It's also important to realize that trying to stop this through regulations likely kills smaller publishers that cannot directly monetize their inventory with advertisers (because they are too small and cannot prove their trustworthiness) while benefiting larger entities that advertisers can reach directly. Google and Facebook don't need to load all these third-party JS because they can sell directly to advertisers. Google also happens to be an ad-tech intermediary but they don't need to be.
So be careful what you wish for here - while some of these privacy regulations are, in spirit, the right path forward but the articles currently bashing Facebook largely come from writers whose salaries are paid for by selling user data without affirmative consent to anyone who's willing to pay. It's likely that the publishing world won't be able to support the same number of writers once of some of the ad-tech data pipelines are broken. It's also likely that lots of people here and elsewhere who are currently complaining about privacy are likely complicit in many ways. Salesforce? It's a tracking tool where a lot of this sensitive data ends up. Oracle? Same (through their marketing cloud). Verizon? It's also an ad-tech vendor. Random Fortune 500? They are probably both selling/sharing whatever user data while their marketing teams are busy acquiring data for their campaigns. Small technology consulting firm? If you deal with lots of data, at least some of the data you're dealing was harvested this way.
The most fascinating thing about human behavior is that in spite of what people know, they still trust Facebook.
Hell, I've been a Facebook app developer. I'm deeply familiar with the breadth and depth of information Facebook allowed an app to harvest ca. 2008 or so.
I still use FB multiple times a day because I don't care about my privacy vis-a-vis the things I post there and that my friends post there.
There are lots of things people"should" do. But in general, the more indispensable a thing becomes, the more governments try to help people decide better or even try to decide for people, as people will do whatever is convenient to them.
Okay, I guess I'm the contrarian here, but I'm not sure why any of this is surprising, or even a problem.
Facebook users signed up for a free service that allows them to communicate with other people in an enjoyable manner. Facebook even went so far as to make it so enjoyable it's addictive. Free online crack. Facebook users, you're having your fun.
What would you expect Facebook to do to finance all this? They're selling the shit out of you. They sell you sideways to Sunday, then sell your Mom, too.
Why would you be upset, or even surprised? Facebook should be able to do whatever they want with your data if you're gullible enough to use their free service.
[+] [-] fixermark|8 years ago|reply
That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from people with multiple accounts to do the most basic of bad-actor tracking against the most basic of attack scenarios.
[+] [-] common_|8 years ago|reply
That's why it's called a shadow profile.
[+] [-] ameister14|8 years ago|reply
The question was, does Facebook collect data on non-users?
What that means is, if I have not signed up for facebook, are you tracking my behavior anyway through the like button and other methods?
[+] [-] tzahola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|8 years ago|reply
Though I'd guess for people who don't follow any of this close (like the vast majority of people) hearing "this will make you safe" probably works quite well, and that's why he's told to say these things.
[+] [-] wavesounds|8 years ago|reply
1. https://www.dailydot.com/news/facebook-shadow-profiles-priva...
[+] [-] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
Except it wasn't a response to a "to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users." It was a response to the question of:
"Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for facebook, yes or no?"
See the video here:
https://mashable.com/2018/04/11/zuckerberg-testimony-shadow-...
[+] [-] sambull|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkovacev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
I have zero expertise in this field but my intuition is that Facebook runs on an incredibly sensitive business model. Like an animal specialised to a specific biome. Adjust the conditions a bit and it might perish in a few generations. Meaningful legislative change to data collection or advertising laws might out them at risk.
[+] [-] daveFNbuck|8 years ago|reply
Yet you seem to be saying that Zuckerberg is trying to hide his business model to protect it from legislators. Doesn't that make the word "admit" appropriate? What other word would you use for something someone doesn't want to say during a hearing?
[+] [-] cryptoz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neffy|8 years ago|reply
Whilst I suspect this probably wasn't exactly what Marx meant when he said that Capitalism inevitably sews the seeds of its own destruction... combine it with a political system funded predominantly by private money, and I guess the only thing saving the US at the moment is that the oil price is so low.
"My reality was post-apocalyptic and it wasn't this fucked up" Penny Adiyodi, The Magicians.
[+] [-] mfoy_|8 years ago|reply
I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous.
If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. That's why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy / tracking settings.
[+] [-] inlined|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwdpropaganda|8 years ago|reply
Interesting. That's pretty clever, which gives me confidence that's exactly what he was doing.
[+] [-] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
Indeed and if Congress had bothered to bring in some subject matter experts they would have been able to him out on these disingenuous answers and deceitful statements.
I'm sure Zuckerberg believes he may have won here but I think he lost in the court of public opinion. I think his testimony did him a lot of damage as it shows just how disingenuous and dishonest he really is.
I hope a lot of FB employees were able to tune in to these hearing so they could see their leader for who and what he really is. His scripted and willfully misleading testimony was fundamentally no different than the big banking or big pharmaceutical CEOs that get called to Washington during a crisis.
[+] [-] sfifs|8 years ago|reply
Technical people on the other hand who get into details and try to work out what and how FB is collecting data consistently under estimate FB and so get outraged.
[+] [-] carapace|8 years ago|reply
As the overlap in the Venn diagram of "people who give a crap" and "people who understand what FB actually is" inevitably gets larger I have no doubt that we'll reach a pitchforks-and-torches tipping point.
By getting up in front of Congress and stonewalling (or outright lying) he's jammed his public perception over towards the "Martin Shkreli" zone.
[+] [-] mudil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinzollars|8 years ago|reply
My big takeaway is that we need more engineers in congress.
[+] [-] gringoDan|8 years ago|reply
This means that you have people who have never taken Econ 101 setting fiscal policy, who don't understand technology trying to regulate tech companies, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution here is, but I think we're asking for trouble when our elected representatives lack a basic comprehension of the domains in which they legislate.
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] common_|8 years ago|reply
1. When he says he doesn't know, he actually knows.
2. When he says he knows, and that the answer is "more AI," he doesn't actually know.
[+] [-] fixermark|8 years ago|reply
I don't think we have reason to believe the CEO is deeply familiar with all the strategies FB uses for session unification and user tracking. It's a fast-moving field with a lot of technical detail that a CEO doesn't actually need to keep day-to-day tabs on.
[+] [-] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
3) Run down the 4 minute clock each representative had to ask questions by talking as much as possible so as to avoid a meaningful exchange.
Representative Marsha Blackburn was the only one that actually called him out on this BS:
BLACKBURN: And where does privacy rank as a corporate value for Facebook?
ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, giving people control of their information and how they want to set their privacy is foundational to the whole service. It's not just a — kind of an add-on feature, something we have to...
BLACKBURN: Okay.
ZUCKERBERG: ... comply with.
BLACKBURN: Well...
ZUCKERBERG: The reality is, if you have a photo — if you just think about this in your day-to-day life...
BLACKBURN: No, I can't let you filibuster right now.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11...
[+] [-] kurthr|8 years ago|reply
I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
-Upton Sinclair
[+] [-] kristianc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwdpropaganda|8 years ago|reply
He's covering up. He has an history of doing that.
[+] [-] kristianc|8 years ago|reply
Zuckerberg is going to lose his shit when he sees what his Digital Ads team has done behind his back. Facebook is brazen about being a grossly invasive advertising company, just not when they're talking to their users. [1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/a/performance-marketing-st...
[+] [-] tzahola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlandis|8 years ago|reply
Did he really claim outright to not know what they are? Anyone have that quote from the testimony?
[+] [-] TekMol|8 years ago|reply
If I was a senator, I would have asked these two questions:
When I look at a product in an onlineshop like Amazon, afterwards I see adverts for this product on Facebook. How does this work?
When I visit a physical store, afterwards I see adverts for this store on Facebook. Even on my desktop computer. Even though I don't have any facebook apps on my phone. How does this work?
If he lies and says he don't know, from then on he would be at the mercy of many employees at FB whith whom he has talked about this type of data collection and sharing.
[+] [-] gringoDan|8 years ago|reply
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-will-not-be-u...
More info on "under oath": https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lying-to...
[+] [-] thaladred|8 years ago|reply
2. If you don't have Facebook app on your phone or if you did not open your Facebook app when you are in store, you won't see ads for that store. Unless you have a loyalty program with the store or the store decides to target advertise you based on your payment info, etc. In any case, it is the physical store that shares those information.
[+] [-] kerng|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|8 years ago|reply
If he describes in granular detail how user profiling and ad serving works on Facebook, then Facebook is going to take the hit on practices that are basically industry standards. If he obfuscates, and focuses on FB controls then he seems like a liar.
If he explained how ad-tech works across the internet then it would look like whataboutism and him invoking the bandwagon fallacy.
At the end of the day it seems like someone/some company is eventually going to take the fall for the whole ad-tech industry and cause major reform - is Facebook the one who's going to take the arrow?
[+] [-] tzahola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subdane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_young|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
Politician clue-ness on the issue also doesn't help.
[+] [-] lukeschlather|8 years ago|reply
This sort of information gathering is necessary for DDoS/Spam/Fraud prevention and so on. I'm not saying I trust Zuckerberg wasn't hiding something else, but also I understand why he didn't want to publicly comment on the heuristics they use to combat attackers.
Although at this point I don't know why Zuckerberg would be obfuscating if they really have detailed advertising profiles on logged-out users. (What would said advertising profiles be used for? Selling them to other advertisers?)
[+] [-] Mc_Big_G|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candybar|8 years ago|reply
So however you feel about Facebook or Google or whoever happens to be on the hot seat at the moment, this is just how the internet works today and says more about the advertising ecosystem at large. The data collection also includes offline entities that are selling or at least "sharing" purchase data, gym check-in data, and so on. It's also important to realize that trying to stop this through regulations likely kills smaller publishers that cannot directly monetize their inventory with advertisers (because they are too small and cannot prove their trustworthiness) while benefiting larger entities that advertisers can reach directly. Google and Facebook don't need to load all these third-party JS because they can sell directly to advertisers. Google also happens to be an ad-tech intermediary but they don't need to be.
So be careful what you wish for here - while some of these privacy regulations are, in spirit, the right path forward but the articles currently bashing Facebook largely come from writers whose salaries are paid for by selling user data without affirmative consent to anyone who's willing to pay. It's likely that the publishing world won't be able to support the same number of writers once of some of the ad-tech data pipelines are broken. It's also likely that lots of people here and elsewhere who are currently complaining about privacy are likely complicit in many ways. Salesforce? It's a tracking tool where a lot of this sensitive data ends up. Oracle? Same (through their marketing cloud). Verizon? It's also an ad-tech vendor. Random Fortune 500? They are probably both selling/sharing whatever user data while their marketing teams are busy acquiring data for their campaigns. Small technology consulting firm? If you deal with lots of data, at least some of the data you're dealing was harvested this way.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixermark|8 years ago|reply
Hell, I've been a Facebook app developer. I'm deeply familiar with the breadth and depth of information Facebook allowed an app to harvest ca. 2008 or so.
I still use FB multiple times a day because I don't care about my privacy vis-a-vis the things I post there and that my friends post there.
[+] [-] enitihas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|8 years ago|reply
Facebook users signed up for a free service that allows them to communicate with other people in an enjoyable manner. Facebook even went so far as to make it so enjoyable it's addictive. Free online crack. Facebook users, you're having your fun.
What would you expect Facebook to do to finance all this? They're selling the shit out of you. They sell you sideways to Sunday, then sell your Mom, too.
Why would you be upset, or even surprised? Facebook should be able to do whatever they want with your data if you're gullible enough to use their free service.