Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook.
Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.
That grocery store cannot then tie it to not only who you are but who your friends are. They have your name and address, but they don't have your entire social graph at their fingertips. Or your entire digital (or, with the rfid, real-world) historical travel data.
If this goes tits up, it could be just the kind of surveillance needed for a 21st century locked-down police state.
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records.
The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me personally. I don't care if the world knows I buy one kind of bread instead of another, or that I buy hummus instead of butter. If there are sensitive things you are paranoid about, like personal care products, just don't use the card for those purchases.
Either way, they just wind up with spending patterns on food correlated to one individual. The horror. It's not your SSN or passport or any of that jazz. Besides, if advertising became more accurately targeted, I feel that would generally be a good thing. You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in, advertising costs would plummet (causing prices to drop as well), and there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.
There was an instance of someone being arrested because he purchased rope from a Safeway around the time that his wife disappeared. The police were able to obtain the guy's details from his Safeway card and used his purchasing habits to try and make him the prime suspect in the investigation. I think that it turned out that he wasn't guilty of anything either.
[ This is all IIRC, btw. My memory could be waaay off, but it paints a picture of something is not that far-fetched from possibly being the truth in a 'it could happen to you' sort of way. ]
I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot.
The important part:
a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his
arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases
that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was
used to buy fire starters of the same type used in
the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a
happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in
January 2005 because another person stepped forward
saying he or she set the fire and not Lyons.
So I was wrong, and it was arson, not murder, but the point remains that the police were willing to use purchasing habits/items as circumstantial evidence to go after the wrong person.
The problem is that you assume your thoughts on justice worldwide.
China may have a totally different understanding on what is allowed and what not.
The whole privacy data thing doesn't worry me very much in my country. But it's scary when i think of other countries.
The best way to put it is that large quantities of data by themselves are not evil and can do no harm. It's how people use them that matters. Once these large data stores are created it is impossible to anticipate all of the bad ways that people will use the data. It's disingenuous to claim that just because the data has never been used in a certain way that it never will be used in that way in the future.
It's the same as claiming that your privacy is safe because the company has a 'privacy policy' in place. In reality, the privacy policy say that it can change at any time and that the company has no legal obligation to notify you of these changes. These policies may change due to a change in direction at the company, or because the company is losing money and decides to sell that information to the highest bidder to stay afloat... Maybe the company is even swallowed by a larger company that then revokes all of the old privacy policies...
On the cynical side, the system cannot be fixed, so it is better to avoid the 'club card thing' so as not to give ammunition to those who would wield it against you.
I have a recollection of hearing about a "breakthrough" in the health insurance world when some company figured out that there was a substantial correlation between grocery items purchased and health issues. I'm very weak on the details (I think the context of my learning about this was a presentation of a "brilliant executive" who will now share blah blah blah-- oh, by the way, she figured out how to do this for insurance companies). My google-fu is weak, but here is a link that at least makes my fuzzy recollection a little plausible.
Frankly I don't blame insurance companies for looking at as much info about you as they can. The only way they can improve business is by more accurately predicting incidents, which is done by examining more metrics and making better models.
Nobody has a problem with this when it comes to auto insurance; you have a lot of tickets, you get high rates. You have too many tickets, they won't insure you. Why is it so different to give higher rates or refuse coverage to someone who treats their body like crap, when their body is what's being insured?
Sorry I'm so late in replying to your comment. The issue here is how the insurance companies obtain that information. I think the analogy would be if auto insurance companies determined their rates using data from your cell phone provider as to how fast and where you drive. And, especially, if they were to do so without your knowledge.
>if advertising became more accurately targeted...You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in... there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.
Counter-example: facebook.com. Supposedly that site has a lot of info on their users, yet their "targetted" ads are as useless and cruft filled as ever.
I wouldn't be worried about the grocery store having access to that data. I would be scared of who they might allow to access it. Ever wonder how collections agencies find out what your address is when you move?
It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook.
Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.
I think Google will always have better data ... Google knows what you're really searching for.
By contrast on Facebook it's just a vanity contest.
One example ... I'm sometimes searching for interesting articles in an area, but without having anything specific in mind. Delicious provides way better results than browsing Reddit ... that's because on Delicious the rating is not a conscious choice.
Google is actually just the 6th largest content network. If you want to truly extend your http://www.adroll.com campaign to the fullest, it helps to display your ads across multiple content networks - as opposed to only one.
The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy.
If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it.
If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free.
Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're definitely getting something useful out of it.
But even if this advertising-pocalypse 2.0 comes to pass, what's the tangible downside for most of these people? Beyond the obvious "don't post naked pictures of yourself hitting the crack pipe right before going into your job interview" stuff, I mean.
Almost nobody actually gives a shit or a half whether some company knows what they buy, what sites they visit, what products they might be interested in, etc., as long as this stuff is not browseable by the public at large. Certainly this information could be used in ways that might hurt them, but for the most part it is merely used to try to sell them stuff that they didn't realize they might want. I just can't get behind the "ZOMG they'll try to sell me stuff that I actually might want to buy, based on what I've already bought, the HORROR!" logic, it really doesn't seem that sinister to me, and in certain contexts (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) I find it incredibly useful.
I don't use Facebook, but that's only because I value social privacy; as a rule, I don't want people I went to school with to be able to get in touch with me at all, especially not if it's as easy and impersonal as clicking a box next to my name on a list of former classmates. People that care enough can find me in any of a million other ways if they have anything specific to say to me.
But I could care less if Facebook gathers advertising data on me; I don't care one bit when Google does it, and I actually find a bit of value in it because if I'm going to be served ads, I'd prefer that they be targeted at me than completely irrelevant.
What happens when the insurance company sees that you've been browsing swingers sights? Maybe they raise your rates because you're into 'high risk' activities?
You browse for 'sexual' things in 'private browsing mode' you say? What about the insurance company finds out that you're on a rock-climbing mailing list or that you frequent a rock-climbing forum? Up goes your rates!
Access to these kinds of information need to come with a set of rules regarding how the information can be used. The problem is that hindsight is 20/20 on what rules will work the best (i.e. which are too strict, which are not strict enough, which don't do anything, which have loopholes, etc), too bad foresight isn't.
I personally don't think that private B2B contracts can get everything right, nor do I believe that the government can/will pass any laws that will fix this. Personally, I don't think that anyone can be trusted with the vast quantities of data that are out there.
One of the potential issues is that companies tend to leak information. To your point, while you may not want your old fellow high school students finding you, a quick bit of data mining on your profile could probably guess fairly quickly and present your profile to those individuals without your consent. (Obviously, mileage will vary depending on how much information you've elected to share, but it's fairly disturbing how easy it can be to isolate individuals in a fairly large group off of only a few small traits.) Just look at how the Netflix Challenge data was matched to individuals based off of very meager information.
The bigger issue at hand is that when you start adding up all the various public bits of information, things can get rather scary. Did you know that in Canada, a credit card company could determine potential credit risk based off whether or not an individual bought a drink in a particular bar in a particular city with fairly impressive accuracy?
http://consumerist.com/2009/05/your-credit-card-company-is-b...
I could easily imagine that an insurance company may want to determine risk profile for customers based off of browsing history and age, or possibly an online retailer may alter prices slightly because they know you have more income to spend and a history of not checking prices that aggressively.
The larger a presence you have, the easier it is to do that sort of thing.
This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it.
Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
This is called "New Incognito Window" in chrome/chromium, or a separate profile in Firefox. What would be really nice, though, is the ability to have a bookmark open in an incognito window. The separate profile in Firefox is better because it'll keep cookies between sessions so you don't need to keep logging into facebook.
In Firefox, the session isn't destroyed, instead it is saved until you choose "Tools" -> "Stop Private Browsing". But, the chromium implementation might be more convenient.
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority).
What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?
In order to create this 'targeted advertising,' they create huge databases of information on people. People called this creepy when the FBI was doing it, but it's ok when a private corporation does it? It's not like the FBI/CIA/MI6/etc doesn't just send a request to the company and get your data anyways... So I'm not really seeing the difference between any company having access to this information and the government having access to it.
In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law.
In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.
To your point is the Beverly Dennis v. Metromail case. A company had a bad idea for outsourcing some of the tasks they performed with the data they had.
RFID tags "implanted" in conference badges? The OP jumps on to this slippery slope argument and lands in big-brother-knows-my-physical-location land. Nowhere at f8 did Facebook announce any plans for stepping into the location-based services market, least of all with any specialized hardware the OP is so afraid of.
"Given pre-condition #2 (traffic), Facebook Like buttons are going to be everywhere. All of the top sites will have them, and most of the medium-sized sites will too."
Wrong. All the medium-sized sites will have it, and all the >= 2nd place large sites (bing, retailers that aren't amazon) will have it. All the top large site will have their own systems to push.
Like most monocultures operating on 20th century logic, FB will fail. I'm not saying they won't make a ton of money in the process (ala MS) but in the end, the system will innovate around and past them (as it is already doing).
The 21st century is all about UX, i.e. power to the people. Entities who do not recognize this will not thrive in the long-term.
I think if Facebook seriously wants to gain trust, they must offer the ability to curate your personal data. Not just FUTURE data -- All of your data. Of course, they would be giving up some serious leverage that they have right now in taking control of the internet.
I have been seriously questioning my presence on Facebook for some time now, the only thing holding me back is that a large portion of my distant friends and relatives are on Facebook, and they use it as a primary method of contact. I was an early adopter of Facebook, the amount of data they have on me over the years -- especially during my stupid years at University, scares me. When will this be used against me? Furthermore, HOW it can be used against me scares me most.
The likes also feed into the advertising system, which may be obvious but I didn't read that connection. With the likes being so ubiquitous it's quite possible, given their broad reach, that Facebook will be able build a better model of your propensities than Google.
There are three countervailing forces: the residual desire for privacy, the availability of cloud resources, and the ubiquity of personal mobile computing.
There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks.
The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.
What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward.
I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.
I'm thinking they would need to get quite complex - eg. what happens if someone posts to your 'wall' - who controls the visibility of that? Simply moving to a different site might be a more convenient solution for most people. Especially if these 'all-in-one' programs become more popular.
Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.