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So I’ll weigh in what my thoughts are on this. It’s actually very well explained here: https://theatlantic.com/notes/2018/...
To paraphrase and add to it, the way Facebook use information is more sinister than imagined. Google and most others leave a sense of anonymity to it between you and the third party that wants you. Granted there is room for them to fuck around but the cover is still there. Facebook just made a profile of you, slapped your name on it and gave it to everyone who wanted it. This meant that without any research companies had access to you as a person, and make judgements - like if you can work in a company, if you’re sick and hence need higher future premiums etc.
I’m not defending groups like amazon and google but they seem to show better regard for the individual that FB had. This is what annoys people most, that your information was used against you, not just typical ads. -
As for the “if you don’t like it then quit” yeah that fits most people. But some “myself included” are in groups that only advertise events and such on FB, making it hard to quit without missing valuable info. So kinda forcibly tied to it.
But yeah I do agree on one thing, people thought they were getting a free lunch, but if you’re not paying (and nowadays even if you do pay) for it then you are the product. Many people miss that and feel cheated that the company that has to make money somehow is making off someone, who themselves are not physically handing over money. I’d be more pissed if I was paying like $5-10 a month and then heard this news. -
The whole Cambridge analytica thing.
Yes, some people consented to their data being used but a lot of people didn't and their data still got used. That's actually illegal.
"if you don't like it don't fucking use it" - i don't use it but those like buttons on websites still track me if I don't protect myself against that, that's fucking bullshit.
@Root and @FrodoSwaggins, help me out here please -
@linuxxx theres an app to visualize it I think it's called lightbeam.
@everyone keep in mind I'm just ranting, I don't approve of what Facebook does either, but when I signed up for facebook, I expected some of my info to be sold.
Users like pages so they get information about those pages for the sake of convenience.
If it's convenient for users, it's even more convenient for the sake marketing.
Heck, if you like cookies, trust me, Amazon will back you up with plenty of cookie jars. -
@Null-Device there's probably a clause in the terms and agreements that nobody read when they sign up that gives Facebook the right to own your soul.
@Floydian so you think it's funny that I think collecting data on customer is basically the most important aspect of marketing, and Facebook having about 2.2 billion potential (pretty sure a lot of those are inactive) customers would eventually have ended up in them selling customer information sooner or later.
Explain yourself instead of just posting a pointless, demeaning comment. -
@Floydian I appreciate you taking the time to explain what you meant.
While I agree with most of what you've said, I still disagree with the idea that other humans are reading you chat logs.
Given the amount of users and the amount of millions of messages being sent every hour on Facebook, it seems nearly impossible for Facebook employees to be manually reading them all.
That leaves us with the most obvious, plausible replacement for humans: machines.
I don't think Facebook would be immoral enough to directly sell chat logs, however, it seems much more likely that Facebook would process the chat logs of a user and extract data from it, which would most likely include sports, politic, locations, (and the list goes on and on).
While all the information they gather on one individual is scary, I don't believe that they have a system so advanced that they can make cross-references between chat logs from two different persons(ex. Your friend talking about what you did to someone else) -
@Floydian but as I mentionned earlier, I don't approve of Facebook either, don't misunderstand me!
I was mainly ranting about how the medias have blown this out of proportion NOW when this whole thing is NOT NEW.
Facebook has been doing this for a long time, and this is, to me, obvious! So why are they blowing this out of proportion now when this is old news?
Even without access to chat logs, any programmers could easily make a crawler that would process a profile on Facebook based on what pages he likes, his friends, his past posts on his timeline, etc.
And this has been the case for a long time! -
@TwiN I would look at https://devrant.com/rants/1323347/... (a bit of me humble jerking myself but whatever). It’s news because it’s the first time this really hit mainstream news. Before it was just “look what big corporations are capable of” deep inside the tech section that no normal person would read and all of the tech world knew it would and did happen, while the layman only cares about the “did” rather than the hypothetical. It made news because now it wasn’t a simple advertising ploy like Google currently does it, but had way more sinister underpinnings.
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@nikmanG had to Google layman, and I see your point. We as developers know it, but mere peasants had no idea up until now.
Makes sense -
@TwiN wouldn’t call them peasants, just people who don’t care for the ins and outs of tech. Kinda an arrogant way to look at it.
If we talk to some people interested in finance who would mention stuff like everyone knowing about the pending financial shit show of 2008 and etc. then we’ll lol like fools since we only caught wind of this when it hit us, very similar to this. -
@nikmanG I'm just fooling around about the peasant thing.
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@TwiN When I refer to Facebook reading chats, I don't mean humans, I mean algorithms.
The thing is that an algorithm can interpret data in a wrong way (according to human logic/laws).
Because that chance is too big imo (may it be now or in 10 years), I'd rather stay out of that next to the fact that the us government (nsa) reads every message (with code of course) -
@musician With the Cambridge analytica thing, users data was sold/given to that company by users who used their app and explicitly gave their consent, only, also all data of their friends of of which some did not give any permission/consent was also collected.
That's literally unlawful and that's pretty much Facebook's fault (zuck admitted that also).
I don't mind if a social network exists and I can choose not to be integrated within its databases by not using their services but in case of fb and Google, analytics and like buttons make that I have to take measures to keep them from getting my data, something that's very wrong/shouldn't be imo.
Also, welcome! -
@AlexDeLarge This also, thank you!
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@AlexDeLarge a small text could have explained it all, but a small text isn't as effective as a long rant to me
@nikmanG @Null-Device @linuxxx @Floydian @FrodoSwaggins
Thanks for clearing it up. I had assumed that while not all of Facebook users knew, at least half would be aware that it was a given their information would be sold and used, and that they didn't care.
What was annoying to me was the fact that this fact, which I had thought many were aware of already, blew up with such intensity now rather than years ago.
However, since I severely overestimated how much people knew about it, it now makes sense that the medias would blow it up of proportion.
Thank you everyone for your explanation, we could make a great book with this <3 -
@FrodoSwaggins probably would say it isn’t people thinking data is meaningless as much but that they think there is no pattern to their behaviour that can be traced. Like companies like Facebook can almost tell with certainty when a person is sick, on their period or anything really just by looking at activity changes and typing style. What amazes me is that people think technology is capable of magical things (the good old buzz words machine learning and AI can do x, y, and z) and yet feel that this magic will never be used on them because it isn’t trained to their behaviour.
People believe what they want to believe, is included. This means that they think a website offering them a “free” community must also adhere to not looking at what you say even though you use their services and agree to their policies.
Don't we all love a sophisticated chat bot?
This is just sad
Life when you didn't know about browsers developer tools
I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.
It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.
So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?
This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.
People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.
However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.
If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.
Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.
Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.
Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.
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I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.
Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.
rant
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