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Facebook Knows What You're Streaming (bloomberg.com)
Facebook is gathering information about the shows Roku and Apple TV owners are streaming. The company then uses the Facebook profile linked to the same IP addresses to tailor the commercials that are shown to individual users. From a report on Bloomberg: For the past few weeks, the social network says, it's been targeting ads to people streaming certain shows on their Roku or Apple TV set-top boxes. It customizes commercials based on the Facebook profiles tied to the IP addresses doing the streaming, according to a company spokesman. He says Facebook is trying out this approach with the A&E network (The Killing, Duck Dynasty) and streaming startup Tubi TV, selecting free test ads for nonprofits or its own products along with a handful of name brands. This push is part of a broader effort by social media companies to build their revenue with ads on video. Twitter is placing much of its ad-sales hopes on streaming partnerships with sports leagues and other content providers. In October, CFO Anthony Noto told analysts on an earnings call that the ads played during Twitter's NFL Thursday Night Football streaming exclusives had been especially successful, with many people watching them in their entirety with the sound turned on. The participants in these partnerships don't yet have a default answer to questions such as who should be responsible for selling the ads or who should get which slice of revenue.
Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you. As an added bonus you are paying Apple and/or Roku a monthly fee so they can do this.
Facebook (the app) can't, but Facebook (the ad network streaming commercials to set-top devices through Tubi TV) can see your IP, and then compare it to Facebook (the app) users' IP addresses. What a terrible, misleading headline - Facebook knows what you're streaming because they're serving the commercials that are streaming to you. Still, note to self: NEVER use Tubi TV.
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you.
Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.
It is a fundamental part of the design of the internet (as it exists today) that two different service providers can cross-correlate requests based on a semi-stable* identifier (IP) if they chose to share data. There's literally nothing the client application can do to remedy this, it's in the network-layer. You can try to fix this at the network layer with some multi-VPN setup (not just a VPN, one that assigns a different external IP to each outgoing request) but that's sort of not how the internet was designed to work. The internet was designed to be sort-of pseudonymous, but it was not designed with true anonymity (in the sense of having no identifiers) in mind.
If you want a meatspace analogy, this is like two different dead-tree newspapers comparing their subscribers for home addresses. You want the newspapers to end up on your driveway in the morning, so you either have to give them your home address or use a different PO Box for each newspaper (which seems expensive).
[*] Yes, IPs are not really stable identifiers. But within the timespan of a few hours/days, it's good enough to get a few extra ad views. In other words, the downside of using a stale/incorrect identifier here (multiple parties on the same IP, router rebooted and got a new DHCP) is pretty low -- they show an irrelevant ad to those folks.
Isn't this still wrong? Facebook doesn't even need anyone to share data.
1. Bob logs in and uses Facebook. (Facebook now knows things about Bob, and knows Bob's IP).
2. Bob uses his media player, which is requesting an ad from Facebook.
3. Facebook receives the ad request, recognizes Bob's IP address, and serves up a tailored ad based on what it knows about Bob (on the good chance that it's Bob on the receiving end of the ad).
This scenario involves no two companies sharing data. It's just Facebook correlating an external ad request to the last known IP address of a Facebook user.