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Facebook Will No Longer Allow Third-Party Data For Targeting Ads (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a surprise change, Facebook will give up one major data source that the company uses to help advertisers target relevant users on the platform. The company just announced that it will end a feature called Partner Categories, launched back in 2013 out of a partnership between Facebook and major data brokers. Third party data helps Facebook further atomize its user base into meaningful segments for advertisers.
Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the change is permanent, not a temporary precaution. In order to leverage the deep pool of data Facebook collects on users, the company mixes information that it obtains from users themselves (Pages a user liked, for instance) with information from advertisers (membership status in a loyalty program, for example) and with data obtained from third party providers. While Facebook feels comfortable with the integrity of its data sourcing within the first two categories, it feels less settled about dipping into these aggregate pools of third party data. The decision was issued in light of the company's recent privacy concerns over third-party data mishandling.
Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the change is permanent, not a temporary precaution. In order to leverage the deep pool of data Facebook collects on users, the company mixes information that it obtains from users themselves (Pages a user liked, for instance) with information from advertisers (membership status in a loyalty program, for example) and with data obtained from third party providers. While Facebook feels comfortable with the integrity of its data sourcing within the first two categories, it feels less settled about dipping into these aggregate pools of third party data. The decision was issued in light of the company's recent privacy concerns over third-party data mishandling.
Too little, too late. Get your ass over to Capitol Hill Zuck, and try to stuff the sausage back into the casing. This goose is fully cooked. People are wising up to FB shenanigans and its days are numbered. I wouldn't buy stock in this company at half its current level, it's going to be a media circus.
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
I've already uninstalled it from my phone, recommended my real friends do likewise and politely asked them to stop tagging me in photos if they don't. Does anyone have any recommendations for other things I can do to distance myself from FB?
Notice that they said they would ONLY stop the sharing of data with 3rd party data brokers for advertisers involved in ONE single program. That is so specific that it had to be intentional. They did NOT say they would stop collecting data or other programs that involve tracking user. They did not put anything in the TOS to make it have meaning. It's only "permanent" until they decide they can do it without anyone noticing and make more money.
When they have available a list of everyone who they sold/shared your data with, and exactly what was sahred with them. Then a long with a system in place, (maybe paid membership)? that explicitly says what the penalty is for Facebook for collecting or sharing your data for any purposes would be (say $1000 paid to the user)... then that has meaning.
Only that from Republicans and Democrats
they're affraid of getting data from illegal sources. e.g. that hack of the DNC for instance.
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This isn't going to change anything. Facebook has already earned its reputation as a giant sucking machine that takes all of your personal data and sells it to the highest bidder. Actually they sell it to *all* bidders. Smart people are already part of the #DeleteFacebook movement. Smarter people did it a long time ago.
And don't think for a minute that Facebook data won't be used in elections again. But this time Zuckerbertler will make sure it only gets used for campaigns that align with his own political preferences.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
If you know anything about Facebook, you will know that they will say stuff with zero intention of actually following through or giving users a real way to verify. Opt out of something and you'll be 'opted in' when Facebook rearranges their privacy settings with wording that seems benign. Facebook started as a platform where you could see information people selectively shared with groups of friends through connections you control. They marketed themselves on sharing things like cell phone numbers privately with just your circle of friends. Then they threw all that out the window once everyone started putting their information on Facebook. Now your 'private' information is shared with whoever the hell Facebook decides to share it with.
Facebook is going to have huge real issues to deal with once the kids of the original Facebook users start growing up. Some parents on Facebook have been ridiculously careless with their kids in terms of posting photos or videos for damn near everything. These kids will start to want to claim their own online identities at some point.
Facebook just needs to stop fucking with people. Instead of their secret private experiments where they try to manipulate people, they really should just go back to being a platform for people to be social with who they want to be social with. Let people organize events, keep up with people they haven't talked to in a while, control their own feeds, etc..
Also, the idea that Facebook somehow helped Trump is ridiculous. Facebook seems to prioritize anything anti-Trump on peoples' feeds.
Maybe Facebook's goal is to get itself heavily regulated.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
... that was a horrible pun. FML.
This is garbage, calculated PR absolute-minimum-change-we-can-do to not loose any more stock or a user base. I love this "We give a shit now" moment by Facebook, and with Zuckerberg going 'on the record' with Congress to 'make a change'.
This stunt is like having a legitimately bad restaurant experience, and after you decide to walk out, the manager comes tripping over half the tables and chains from across the restaurant to come tell you how sorry they are just so you don't go throw a huge 0-star rant on Yelp. They really don't care, they just want to stop the damage with the one person and the handful of patrons eyes that witnessed it, and not go any farther to continue business-as-usual.
They've got the "experts" coming on the morning news shows now reassuring people that Facebook has done nothing illegal, and we all agreed to be snooped on permanently when we signed up, so we all need to calm down.
The truth of the matter is, the government wants something done about this because they're pissed off that all that wonderful data they've been able to slurp up and use to fuck with people's lives is available to other people too. And you know damn good and well nobody involved in the government wants that data collection to stop. What they really want is to lock it down as a direct pipeline for themselves and they're financiers.
The funny thing is, the uproar may cause some people to actually wise up and stop trading their lives away to these media giants, making it harder to track every waking (and some sleeping) moments of people's lives. Ya dun fucked up by letting this shit get public and allowing the plebes to hear some small smattering of the truth.
Now, if we could get some actual technical people on the news shows the half aware general citizens watch telling the ACTUAL truth that these big media companies are a giant info siphon, that could bring the whole thing to a much more manageable state. Though there's still rumblings from a few folks that the security trade-off is worth it for the convenience. I have yet to understand what's convenient about Facebook. For the month or so I used it to follow a couple bands it essentially annoyed me with "related" bullshit I had zero interest in and I eventually shut it down for good.
I just don't understand how people didn't know this was the end result until it beat them over the head.
"Its the others, Your Honor, I swear. We didn't do anything nasty. It's them third parties, really".
I know it won't happy, but if I had one wish with the 'Tubes Fairy, it would be that Facebook went the way of Geocities and Second Life. Oh, and Google and Twitter and...
Most companies probably have more than enough data on everybody already...
"The decision was issued in light of the company's recent privacy concerns over third-party data mishandling."
There had been no mishandling of data. The data were used in precisely the manner intended by all parties involved, except perhaps those who provided it fully understanding the implications of their decision.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This is a company that literally ONLY makes money off of selling data gathered from it's users. What are we to expect? It's not like they're going to stop making money for the good of the society.
Yeah, if you use facebook, you're literally an idiot now.
This is a meaningless and empty gesture if Facebook are still engaging in these practices themselves. The folks at Facebook are either incredibly stupid or incredibly arrogant or both. Data mining and harvesting by anyone for any reason should have been suspect from the start. Our right to privacy isn't a 'digital right', it's just a right. Facebook and their ilk are theives, plain and simple. If nothing comes from any of this scrutiny but a slap on the wrist, there will have been no point whatsoever.
Reminds me of that scene in Return of the Jedi. You know, the one where that guy tells Admiral Piett "It's too late". The rest is history as a Trump supporter flies his fighter into the bridge of the Super Star Destroyer.
The useful point isn't when the product pool is empty; it's when the product pool isn't profitable.
Facebook has a large, expensive infrastructure. If it gets to the point where it can't support that, change of some kind will come. I strongly suspect that how they approach data collection will get worse before it gets better under that kind of pressure. I base that assumption upon their already-demonstrated willingness to behave extremely badly.
--fyngyrz*
the folks in charge right now have deregulation as a central plank of the party. We'll get a little theater to make it seem like they care and then they'll do precisely squat.
If you want that to change show up to your primary and vote for people who think government can actually do good. If you don't think government can do any good don't complain when it doesn't.
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the first attempt to mitigate isn't hitting where it hurts. If this is their first suggestion, my counter would be zuck goes to federal prison for aiding and abetting and/or 2 billion counts of misdemeanor larceny, and the US enacts global "privacy policy" for companies doing business on US soil. 21st century HIPAA here we go
The problem of course is money. The shakers and movers at facebook have done this before, and they will do it again. The only way they won't, is if they don't have the product to abuse. And we all know who the product is. But you can bet if you continue to use facebook, your data will be sold to whoever they like.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Do we?
I have all my photos back to about the 1970's. I have all my electronic correspondence right back to my 6809 days in the late 1970's. I have all the music I've bought. I have all the movies I've bought. I have them. Not Facebook.
My sharing with my family and friends is not, and never has been, through Facebook. We're all fine with that.
Perhaps what we need are some hardware and applications that manage this for less capable users. Without having to hand out everything about yourself to a 3rd party who isn't anyone you care about. It's certainly much easier to do now than when I started. And it seems to me that this whole mess would be considerably less of a mess if the only people you were handing your stuff out to were people you actually trusted. Trust shifts over time, so it's not perfect (and oh man could I tell some stories about trust shifting), but I maintain that it's better than trusting companies who never had your best interests at least somewhat in mind.
At this point, there are various solutions such as ROCKET.CHAT that let you set up your own server, and viola, you can chat, DM, share media, etc. securely and without ads and invasive third parties. ROCKET.CHAT requires a recent OS, a web sever and a generally known, at least somewhat stable IP. Surely we can step it up from there. P2P solutions have been around for a while, some of them working without intervening servers despite the whole DHCP system making hosting such services ore difficult to manage.
Now that we're moving into an era of more than 4-byte IP addresses, perhaps we can make this sort of thing work better by abandoning DHCP for anything but mobile hardware. Perhaps even there — they could certainly afford to assign a single IP per device at this point, which would work in your home area, and perhaps wider if something moderately clever about porting IP addresses around were done. After all, the system can find your phone anywhere already. Doesn't seem like a huge stretch to tie DNS of an IP to that.
Anyway, it's not like this mess isn't insoluble. The issue is, and has been for some time, that not enough people care about it. Or perhaps the wrong people care about it.
--fyngyrz*
That's just the sane people peeling off from the clueless ones. You're a Trump supporter. At this point it's so obvious that you're a fool that only other fools want to talk to you.
Fuck them.
Too late they already all your based via 14 million jew moles.