Facebook's plain English data policy: WE'LL SELL YOU LIKE A PIG at a fair

I get that some people refuse to use Google because their bots scan your emails for keywords, but what puzzles me is why those same people continue to use Facebook, which is actually worse.

You're not joking: the Privacy Basics site IS insulting.

There's like ten words per page, which means that you need to click through about 100 pages to see all options.

Umm

Who the hell still uses Facebook and doesn't understand their modus operandi by now?

Just this:

Fuck

Off

Zuck

I can hear Ed Reardon reading this plain English TOS now, complaining about "those bloody twelve-year-olds at Facebook" under his breath!

Before we start the tired old trope of "if you're not paying for it then you're the product", perhaps the advertisers might like to think about where they get their money from. It might sound obvious, but it comes from the people who buy what the advertisers are selling. This can be a high risk game: a poor advertising campaign can kill the product or even the company.

Hoover found that offering free flights was very expensive. New Coke and Dasani quickly disappeared after bad publicity. Susan Boyle's record company could really have chosen a better hashtag than #susanalbumparty. More>Than Insurance were fined for flyposting with their first "Where's Lucky?" Campaign. Overuse of pop up adverts means that almost every browser has a built in pop up blocker.

Using data mining techniques to make adverts more "relevant" means that people who see them are more likely to be better informed about the product, but also more critical. It's not surprising that El Reg doesn't allow comments on sponsored articles because you know people who use the item will just list its shortcomings. If a company's only profits come from displaying adverts, they get a bit stuck if people don't buy from them.

You need to go back to the 30's

According to this:

http://tropicsofmeta.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/feuer-narrative-form.pdf

As early as the 30's radio manufacturers in the US saw TV as a way of selling families to advertisers. They sold the concept of Public Benefit to legislators who were then convinced that broadcast TV with programs interrupting the advertising stream would be a good thing. Well as least they paid for and created the content from the advertising income.

. . . but advertisers DON'T want Facebook users, Mr Zuck

Advertising works like this:

You are a producer. You have a product. You want people to buy it. You haven't a clue how to go about it so you advertise yourself for an advertisement agency. Half a dozen agencies make a pitch for your -- let's say -- $5 million-advertising-spend-a-year business. The agencies want that account because they know they can buy air-time or print media space a damn sight cheaper than ever you can, but you'll be billed at Rate Card anyway so won't know that 25% of the cost of that ad you paid for in last Sunday's paper or peak time TV commercial actually went straight into the agency's back pocket.

So now you, Mr Producer, discover from your son and daughter that there's something called Facebook. It looks like total shite to you because that's exactly what it is but seeing as how someone somewhere was bright enough to dress it up with the pretentious -- and daft -- description of "Social Media" then maybe you'd better think about putting some money into it.

You call in your ad agency. It tells you that the whole point of advertising is to ensure that if you are determined to open a butcher's shop, you don't do so in a village of vegetarians. Before you do anything else, you must define the nature of the audience which you as a producer would like to access.

It tells you that, by way of example, the audience for a $multi-million ocean-going yacht ain't the same as the audience for a pay-by-installments course of Instant Weight Loss Diet Pills. Thus, the yacht will be advertised in the guest magazines of hotel groups like Mandarin Oriental and Regency |International. The diet pills will be advertised in the Daily Star (UK) or National Enquirer (US.)

Only an idiot would buy Instant Lose Weight Diet Pills. Only an idiot would buy the Daily Star or National Enquirer. The audience of potential customers has been defined; the audience of potential customers has been located. Job done.

You, as the producer of the product, do not wish to access an audience of idiots because it is an established fact that the disposable income levels of idiots are considerably lower than those of individuals of greater education and greater discernment. (Politicians excluded.)

You ask your ad agency to characterize the Facebook audience. Your agency says it is largely composed of idiots unable to protect themselves from being exploited -- which means that yes, they'll see your ads, but can't afford to buy what you're selling -- and a significantly smaller number of non-idiots who, being bright enough to protect their own best interests, won't see your ads even though they can afford to buy what you're selling.

On which basis: your agency advises that Facebook ain't worth a cent of your money. And thus does General Motors cancel its FB advertising spend, and thus do hundreds of other majors and their ad agencies fall about laughing every time an increasingly desperate FB sales team makes contact to talk about likes and hits but never, ever, about sales conversions. Just: put your ad spend with us and your client will soon be liked by 1 million idiots. Oh my yes.

Mr Zuck can dumb down his T & C spiel for his already dumbed-down audience all he wants. But going from dumb to dumber still doesn't make his business model any the more appealing, nor assure Facebook of a life that much longer than that of a hula hoop: there is, after all, only so much money to be made out of the purveyors of Instant Weight Loss Diet Pills.

Legalese kinda like program code

Yup. So I diff'd the old terms and the proposed update.

The proposed update includes a new condition for users to follow the Promotions Guidelines and applicable laws; a few examples of the trademarks you are not permitted to use outside Guidelines [1]; a big chunk of new terms which apply if you are a developer or operator of a Platform application or website on Facebook; an expanded set of "Special Provisions Applicable to Advertisers"; a derogation in some circumstances from the commitment to give 7 days notice of changes to T&C; and the bland statement giving FB permission to use content and information is replaced by a reference to a Data Use Policy.

Apart from that it's largely tidying up spelling and grammar.

[1] "Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Book and Wall"

Bah!

Dear me, I would have expected a journalist to understand that there is no requirement that "plain English" be in any way ambiguous.

In fact, it has been my experience that High Legalese is pretty much designed to obfuscate and phrase ambiguity upon ambiguity with the utmost ease.

Or haven't you read a software EULA?

The fact that lawyers, when assured of an audience, lose the capacity to phrase anything in unambiguous language (or even grammatical English) does not make dense polysyllabic gibberish a requirement of the process of drawing up a legal document.

Only the need for weasel clauses requires that sort of nonsense. Otherwise, all software vendors would have to write "although you paid a lot of money for the privilege of using our product, we do not promise that it can do what we say it can in any way, shape or form and you, by buying it, have agreed that you will not hold our feet to the fire if it doesn't". Much better to drone on about parties of the first part and non-transferable n-seat license privileges until the reader's eyeballs have shriveled up.

Optional solution.

My solution is "don't use Facebook". So far that's worked for me. The original solution was "just give them fake info". Which also worked, but I was spending too much time on it, so I went with the new solution.

But in practice it's more amusing than you'd think.

I don't like the idea at all, but in practice social marketing often has amusing results.

https://www.facebook.com/1and1