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Mozilla Pulls Advertising from Facebook (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Mozilla is not happy with Facebook. Not happy at all. Having already started a petition to try to force the social network to do more about user privacy, the company has now decided to withdraw its advertising from the platform. The organization is voting with its money following the misuse of user data by Cambridge Analytica, as it tries to force Facebook into taking privacy more seriously. Mozilla says that it is not happy to financially support a platform that does not do enough to protect user privacy. But the company is not severing ties completely. It says that advertising is being "paused" and that if the right steps are taken by Facebook "we'll consider returning."
From everything I've read, the value of advertising on Facebook is pretty questionable.
Facebook is so noisy normally, I'm not sure how people would even see ads apart from those annoying product adds embedded in the timeline view.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and remove Firefox.
Truly Private Browsing with Tracking Protection
That's what it says on the Firefox download page.
I guess Mozilla don't want that for Facebook users? I mean, it's not like Facebook needs Firefox.
This means nothing. Firefox collects your info, too.
Facebook earnings will suffer a whole .0000001%
Mozilla, which is controlled by Google, has punished Facebook for having offered a Republican Party campaign a fraction of the same services that Facebook and Google offer to Democrats, dozens of commercial marketers, and foreign powers.
There was no similar outrage when Facebook was found to be censoring people who oppose ISIS. How's that for aid to a campaign.
I advertise the XUL trio instead. Waterfox, Basilisk and Pale Moon. When Mo$illa (spelled with a dollar sign) stops messing with cookie management, stop sending personal data to cloudflare and restores XUL support in non-ESR builds then we can talk.
This is not surprising. They did the same thing, loudly protesting and pulling advertising when Obama campaign used private data from Facebook graph to help win elections. Oh. Right. They didn't. They cheered the innovative use of online and targeted advertisement and big data by a woke campaign they liked. But i'm sure it's all about privacy.
So let me get this straight, a hundred thousand people using an app is enough for Cambridge Analytics to query the data for 50 million *unique* Facebook accounts?
Each one of those who did the survey 'approved' the collection of data from 500 other people?
And Facebook implemented this, exactly so it could sell as much data as possible to any Tom Dick or Putin who wanted it? For any kind of spying of candidates, election rigging, chemical weapons attack or other innocent purpose any Tom Dick or Putin might want to do?
The same company that removed the blank tab so they could pimp advertisements wants Facebork to be better. Huh.
Well I suppose not being on Facebook and running an ad blocker works, though as a user of Firefox, I wouldn't be a target anyway.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
vit there. Bring Needs OS. Now BSDI
about mining Facebook data now by the populist-right and didn't in the past by the liberal-left should be kept in perspective.
https://townhall.com/political...
--- Mercutio was right.
Depends on the ad. A lot of ads are crafted to look like normal FB posts with only a small "Suggested App" or "Sponsored" identifier at the top to indicate that it's advertising.
Right, but then it looks like a post - where the normal action is to scan quickly and move on. If an ad is not going to get you to click through, it's not very impactful as people's memories are terrible.
I've seen the exact ads you mention, while they are probably more useful than other kinds of ads I still doubt they have a large impact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everyone should stop using Fakebook immediately. Isn't Fakebook really just a platform for sharing live murder videos.
I'm sure Facebook is quaking in its boots over that.
Can a browser with only 5.5% market share really make that much of a difference? It sounds like they need advertizing more than Facebook needs them. http://gs.statcounter.com/
guess that means they have a hit/recognition factor of 0. save your money.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There is no other way to describe your comment.
Take your meds, kid! That's what they're there for!
Directive to Media: Attack FB.. NOW.
Don't let your anti-Trump angst sidetrack you from the bigger picture; don't be surprised that Facebook, which makes it's money selling your personal data and relationships, sold to or allowed 3rd parties to collect/mine "big data".
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
E.g., a 2012 article in Technology Review:
How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters.
by Sasha Issenberg December 19, 2012
"After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
"But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him.
From Time Magazine:
"In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters: half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.
"For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.
"That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”
"The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 6
to its laid-back SLING y>ou can
If Mozilla cares about Facebook's data mining, why do they have a Facebook page and links to their Facebook page on the Firefox page (and presumably other pages, I couldn't be bothered to check)? If they care about data mining in general, then why are they making it difficult to get the Android version of Firefox via any mechanism other than the Google Play store, why don't they just provide an F-Droid repository that users can subscribe to?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Mozilla Foundation will rely on illegally leaked IRS records for their decision-making. None of this Facebook stuff -- because privacy.
Facebook's business model is analyzing and selling user data. They're not going to change it at all. User privacy goes against their core values, they only really support the illusion of it.
I did! You can, too!
Isn't that why people use it? To put yourself out there to the public?
Or to put it another way, those that want privacy don't use facebook.
Facebook ads are of negligible ROI. Affiliate marketing is what works best.
But I also question this decision by Mozilla. First, it's not as if Mozilla ads are a MAJOR revenue source for Facebook. Second, people who are giving Zuckerberg all their data on Facebook should be, ostensibly, people Mozilla wants to use its products. This seems more like grandstanding.
I guess this raise the question, can Facebook survive this Tide of bad press?
is to hoover up as much data as they can and make a profit from it all while pretending to be nothing more than an innocent Social Media platform where friends and family can keep in touch.
I'm curious what " privacy " can reasonably be expected or even demanded from such an entity whose sole purpose is information brokerage ?
...
you think any average internet dope even understands what that means?
Guaranteed response 99% of the time: "What's Mozilla?"
This is a move worthy of applause!
There was no ethical difference to users when Facebook slurped up data and sold it to Democrats versus when Cambridge Analytics slurped up data and sold it to Republicans.
Sure there was a difference to Facebook, but to the rest of us it's the same thing.
I find it funny that just a few versions ago Mozilla was doing privacy-invading shit, now they're calling upon Facebook to be more responsible with user privacy.
Give me a break.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
and too late.
Busted another big CIA/NSA/Mossad op
https://www.rt.com/news/422030...
On March 9, the leading Russia-based cybersecurity company reported their research on a program it called Slingshot, which used a highly sophisticated approach to infect computers with malware through infected routers. The operation had targeted computers throughout the Middle East and some parts of Africa since at least 2012, and required a lot of money and expertise from its creators. A report by an industry news publication, CyberScoop, claims Slingshot was run by the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The people behind Slingshot also took serious measures to protect their malware from being detected. For example, it can shut down its own components before being exposed by anti-viral software. It also runs its own file system to remain hidden from the computer-operating system, and blocks disc defragmentation to avoid being damaged by the process.
Kaspersky Lab said it has found around 100 victims of Slingshot and its related modules in Kenya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Tanzania. Kenya and Yemen accounted for the majority of the cases. Most of the victims were individuals rather than organizations.
The company said they could not attribute the threat to a particular actor, but believed the people behind it to be âoehighly organized and professional and probably state-sponsored.â Text clues in the code suggested they were âoeEnglish-speakingâ.
The news report quotes unnamed former and current US intelligence officials, who said that Slingshot was an operation of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a component of SOCOM. Kaspersky Lab âoeburnedâ the program, which is believed to have been an anti-terrorist operation, leaving the American military without a valuable tool and potentially putting American lives at risk, the officials claimed.
âoeSOP [standard operating procedure] is to kill it all with fire once you get caught,â CyberScoop quoted a former intelligence official as saying. âoeIt happens sometimes and weâ(TM)re accustomed to dealing with it. But it still sucks⦠I can tell you this didnâ(TM)t help anyone.â
CyberScoop says that Cahnadr and GollumApp are associated with hacker groups widely believed to be the NSA and the CIA respectively in the cybersecurity community. The report implies that Kaspersky Lab should have expected Slingshot to be a US operation.
The same "misuse" occurred in 2012, when it was hailed as Obama's genius and "mastery of Big Data". I don't understand, why anyone would use Facebook — and allow them to sell one's data — but to be suddenly scandalized by Cambridge Analytica's use of it is just blatant hypocrisy.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Kill yourself you stupid shill. Are you russian? Pushing debunked nonsense makes it likely. Get back in line for your potato.
Hello comrade, here is your 50 kopeyka!
I'd delete my FB account over this, but... I never made one in the first place. Selling our private data has always been their business model and I've been using various extensions to prevent them from siphoning the info from me since the beginning because it was so damned obvious.
The real problem, though, is how they siphon your data from your friends & relatives and you can't do much about that because you never gave it to FB to begin with. So it's about 10 years too late to be scandalized by all this, but hey, maybe we'll at least get some privacy out of it? Though I really doubt that. Politicians have a way of exempting themselves from any impact.
Mozilla Pulls Advertising from Facebook
Mozilla has yet to pull Slashvertising from Slashdot.
Is the glass half full or half empty?
It's completely empty.
Oh, yes, he did:
The only difference is in the spin — one's "community organizing" is another's "psychological warfare". From the same source:
In other words, having the misfortune of being a "friend" with an Obama-fan, allowed this "geek squad" to "steal" your data — and subjected you to the same "psychological warfare".
No, it was not particularly wrong back then. And it is not wrong now either.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Oh, well, if Snopes finds a fault in Republicans, while white-washing Democrats, that's a real shocker... Every word must be true.
Bullshit — every campaign involves a multitude of "parties", who share the information. Each of those qualifies as "a third" party...
And he did. And then offered results of his research to a political campaign — is it really so unheard of, that results of an academic research are shared with others?
This may speak to Obama campaign not using the data at their disposal to its full potential. But they certainly had full access to it.
Most....
That contradicts the Time's article I cited — and I'm inclined to believe Time on this, because it was written in 2012, before the topic became contentious and various partisans started making spins...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.