Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning Emails released today reveal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing how to squeeze more cash from companies hoping to tap into the platform's goldmine of personal data on a billion-plus people. And the memos show staff deliberately hid the amount of data the Facebook Android app was slurping, and Zuck personally giving the OK …
It's worth remembering that FB in 2012 was a very different beast to FB in 2018 (i.e. check the revenue graphs here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/)
I have no doubt FB provided access to a lot of this data as they were actively trying to work out a way of getting revenue from their users over this time period and were a little lax with who they gave access too because it looked like they were going to be the next MySpace.
By the time FB started to work out how to make money from their user base (around 2013-2014), access to a lot of the API's being discussed had been heavily restricted/rate limited or removed entirely. And FB's advertising model is effectively the same model used by YouTube - they rely on users to provide content and sell advertising around that versus the targetted advertising model that they originally favored. A lot of the content is owned by other parties and the value varies significantly with time (i.e. sporting events).
I'm not trying to defend FB's practices - just suggesting they weren't always as healthy as they are now and in that time desperation lead to either making bad decisions or working with third parties that were even less scrupulous.
The API issue is not my major beef with Facebook, so them limiting that doesn't really affect my opinion of them.
My beef with Facebook is primarily around two things: first, the straight-up deceptive and unfair manipulation of its users in order to keep them using the platform, and second, the fact that they compile data on me even though I don't use Facebook.
"effectively the same model used by YouTube"
Comparing them to anything Google does isn't doing them any favors.
Facebook is evil and can fuck right off.
This is from the BBC's excerpts of the emails:
[...] from an email sent by Mark Zuckerberg to several of his executives in which he explains why he does not think making users pay for Facebook would be a good idea [...] dated 19 November 2012:
"[...] My sense is there may be some price we could charge that wouldn't interfere with ubiquity, but this price wouldn't be enough to make us real money[...] "
I take this to mean they could probably run the business without all the unpleasantness of ads and slurping and stalking if they just charged a price low enough that it wouldn't significantly impact the users, but if they did that then they wouldn't make anything like as much money.
So much for the core mission simply being to 'connect people'.
Anyway, whenever I suggest that if users actually paid for these services it might be a solution to a lot of problems I just get told that no one will pay ever and whatever the cost would be it will be too much anyway and that I do not understand how the internet works and that I am an idiot.
It is interesting to learn that the chief executive of Facebook appears to actually agree with me, it's just that he doesn't want to charge the users because he won't make as much money that way (of course, we may simply both be idiots).
You're assuming that FB would charge users and *not* then indulge in data slurping? How likely is that? If the primary intent is to make as much money as possible - an organisation will do that whatever the social cost unless reined in by legislation and regulation (i.e. whatever they can get away with). Some organisations might actually care about their brand image, but my confidence in that has been undermined by the Co-Op's example of CEO misdemeanours
I take this to mean they could probably run the business without all the unpleasantness of ads and slurping and stalking if they just charged a price low enough that it wouldn't significantly impact the users, but if they did that then they wouldn't make anything like as much money.
Maybe I'm a hair more pessimistic than you, but I took it too mean charge users as well as sell them and everyone they know to all insundry.
@Skwosh
I firmly believe there is no price low enough that it won't put huge sections of the plebs who are their bread and butter off.
If they ask for payment there will be a (shitty but improving weekly) alternative thrown up (see gab popping up when "the right" were first being banned on twitter). It was bloody awful on launch, and initially marketed directly at absolute scum. It still took off though, and is growing rapidly.
That's what would happen, even at something like a dollar a month. It's only practically ubiquitous because it was and is "free".
That is why, around 6 years after Zuck mentioned it, it still hasn't happened.
@rmason
I firmly believe there is no price low enough that it won't put huge sections of the plebs who are their bread and butter off.
Maybe. However, I think that is less convincing than it was a few years ago because Spotify, Netflix etc. have proved fairly conclusively that if the price is right a lot of people will pay for convenience, and to an extent not having ads is a 'convenience' (apparently ads are the number one thing FB users complain about). In general an add free version of any given service is going to be a better 'experience'.
Also, I think how this goes will depend hugely on legislation. At least we now know that Zuck thinks they probably could still run the thing off the back of a low subscription - so if waves of new legislation progressively make the ads-with-slurp funding/business model more and more costly/arduous/toxic then any claim by FB that such changes would completely force them out of business won't fly anymore.
@Skwosh
The reason the World Wide Web exists at all is that Berners-Lee made it available at no cost. Who now remembers the contemporary whatever-it-was (I've forgotten the name) that died after they tried to charge for it. There was an interface to it in Windows NT3.
Facebook, Google, and others are well aware of that history.
Edit: from another comment, I see that I was talking about Gopher.
@Primus Secundus Tertius
The World Wide Web is not available at no cost (sure, use of the IP is at no cost).
People have to pay for hardware (phones, tablets, PCs) to access the WWW. We have to pay for broadband every month and/or for mobile data services. The network infrastructure has to be paid for. The servers have to be paid for. The electricity to run the infrastructure and the servers has to be paid for. All the money to pay for all of those things has to come from somewhere. If someone somewhere wasn't coughing up the money on a regular basis then we couldn't have a WWW.
FB pays for all this stuff too. It pays in order to provide its service over the WWW. If FB didn't pay for servers and all that shit there would be no FB service. At the moment this is paid for by advertisers off the back of huge amounts of personal data extracted from FB users. That model appears to be generating increasingly negative 'externalities' (undermining democracy etc...)
There is, however, an alternative.
Life is sometimes about making the least worst choice.
"The World Wide Web is not available at no cost "
In an absolute sense, sure. However, there is plenty of stuff on the web that really is available at no cost (either in data or money) to users. The people running the services have to pay for it, of course, but not the users.
@Skwosh
Thank you for replying to my comment.
My career in the software industry showed me that people are generally willing to pay for hardware, but sorely begrudge paying for software. Your reply shows that FB will pay for hardware, but does not disprove my point about paying for software.
PS I do not use Facebook. Ghastly nonsense for American extroverts.
You clearly have no idea what you are on about.
Gopher was a protocol, it even has an RFC if I recall correctly. The only 'charge for it' was for some specific implementations of the server software, just like many HTTP server implementations are charged for. It was completely free to use, just like WWW.
What killed Gopher was that it had no provision for slapping a big animated GIF advert in the middle of the page and earning money from views and clickthroughs, hence it got trampled underfoot in the stampede to cash in on the web 1.0 bubble.
"Who now remembers the contemporary whatever-it-was (I've forgotten the name) that died after they tried to charge for it."
There were probably several walled gardens eg AOL.
There was also U/usenet which was a global news group service enabled by most ISPs. Think of El Reg comments for any subject under the sun - but with better client control of personal thread content.
It was probably the origin of the idea that once something has been posted on the internet - then it will always exist somewhere in the global distributed storage.
In the late 1990s many ISP's became very patchy in storing and propagating the ever expanding number of daily posts. Some people constantly attempted to get ISPs to block groups with content that offended their narrow view of the world.
To ensure you saw all the posts in your selected news groups you usually had to pay a subscription to a dedicated supplier.
Eventually most UK ISPs dropped support for the service.
It surprises me to find that in 2018 there are still such specialist suppliers. Don't know whether it is predominantly used for moderated group discussions, ALT group discussions, or ALT.BIN downloads.
One of the reasons I was an early adopter and vocal supporter of whatsapp was the business model. Free for a year and then a $1 dollar a year after. I've always refused to have accounts with Facebook Twitter and the rest, as I saw them for what they were form the start.
Then Facebook saw their success and ate them. I know I'm going to have to dump it soon, even though I deny them anything with each new update (they make finding the final fuck off button a nightmare). I would have happily paid for a secure way to talk to individual contacts ( I leave any group the moment somebody adds me). But I have no option but to drop it; because my personal information is worth way more to me than one fucking dollar a year (or $0.10 in Fucks universe)
PS you may have guessed I have nothing but contempt for these thieves.
This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but since someone else mentioned whatsapp I'll point out again that it is an interesting example of something that was intended to be a very low cost pay-for service (until it was eaten by FB - perhaps because its success was setting a dangerous precedent).
The original 'manifesto' of the whatsapp creators from 2012 is still up, and I think it makes interesting reading:
https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered the alternative?"
"no one will pay ever and whatever the cost would be it will be too much anyway"
That sounds to me like Zuckerberg actually agreeing with them, not with you who seems to think there would be a reasonable business case charging the users for access. Zuckerberg very explicitly does not think so, at any level the users would consider not to "be too much anyway".
@DropBear
What you're quoting there is what I say people (like you I guess) say to me when I talk about the idea that people should pay for the service.
As a reminder, this is what Zuck said:
"[...] there may be some price we could charge that wouldn't interfere with ubiquity, but this price wouldn't be enough to make us real money"
I take "some price we could charge that wouldn't interfere with ubiquity..." to mean there is a price we (FB) could charge that would be low enough to not put people off using the service - as in, we would still be ubiquitous...
But... "this price wouldn't be enough to make us real money" which I take to mean that if we (FB) did this we would still make some money, but just not lots and lots and lots of it.
Yes?
This has the feel of an end run around the feral courts and their venality. If you have a couple of functioning braincells you have long suspect Suckerberg and merchants of sleaze had ethics that would make a mafioso puke in disgust. Thanks to the end run we know the suspicion is actually fact.
“The idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the developers relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents.”
@Badoo: ‘The friends data we receive from users is integral to our product (and indeed a key reason for building Facebook verification into our apps).’
@Konstantinos Papamiltidas: ‘As promised, please find attached the docs for Hashed Friends API .. we will need to sign an agreement that would allow you access to this API.’
@Sachin Monga: ‘Without the ability to access non-app friends, the Messages API becomes drastically less useful. It will also be impossible to build P2P payments within the RBC app, which would have dire consequences for our partnership with them.’
@Konstantinos Papamiltidas: ‘Removing access to all friends lists seems more like an indirect way to drive NEKO adoption.’
@Mark Zuckerberg: ‘It seems like we need some way to fast app switch to the FB app to show a dialog on our side that lets you select which of your friends you want to invite to an app .. I want to make sure this is explicitly tied to pulling non-app friends out of friends.get (friends information)’.
@Justin Osofksy: “Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video... Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We've prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.”
@Mark Zuckerberg: “Yup, go for it.”
@Michael LeBeau: ‘As you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the 'read call log' permission .. [The danger is] .. journalists dig into what exactly the new update is requesting, then write stories about "Facebook uses new Android update to pry into your private life in ever more terrifying ways".’
@Mark Zuckerberg: “It's not at all clear to me here that we have a model that will actually make us the revenue we want at scale .. I think we leak info to developers but I just can't think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”
For your (and colleagues) actions on this matter including seizure and publication. Well done.
Now, if you would just be so kind as to arrange for absolutely FULL and TOTAL* disclosure of all matters relating to UK parliamentary expenses, house "flipping" and such like, everyone, not just those successfully prosecuted for it, so that you and colleagues can also be reviewed by various externalities, then i would be ever so obliged. Thank you in advance.
What's that? You couldn't possibly do that? Why ever not?
* with one exception. I don't really wish to know the actual title of the pornographic material claimed on expenses, in the full performance of her parliamentary duties, made by a former Home Secretary.
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some, so bring some out here
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Yours sincerely,
DCMS COMMITTEE
The claimed reason for collecting users' personal data is targeted advertising. But has ANYONE ever received a truly targeted advert? In my experience, they seem to fall into one of two camps; "people who bought this, bought that", and those bloody things that haunt you after a purchase based on the principle that since you bought a tap washer yesterday you'll be in the buying zone for more for the next two weeks.
So no, it ain't for targeted advertising. What then...?
In my experience, they seem to fall into one of two camps; "people who bought this, bought that", and those bloody things that haunt you after a purchase based on the principle that since you bought a tap washer yesterday you'll be in the buying zone for more for the next two weeks.
Yes, and because of this I've decided the real suckers in this is the companies convinced that it's effective (or at least more effective than traditional advertising strategies) and forking out money to Facebook for little return value.
I'm probably deluding myself, but it does make me feel better and less of a chump (not that I ever use Facebook).
A friend of mine who used to be in advertising summed it up as such - I think he was paraphrasing somebody else though -
"We know that 50% of the money we spend is wasted, but we don't know WHICH 50%"
Its probably more than 50% now, but that is the way the ad industry works.
The claimed reason for collecting users' personal data is targeted advertising. But has ANYONE ever received a truly targeted advert?
The point about targeted advertising isn't that the advertisers will actually show you only advertisements that are relevant to your future purchasing needs -- that would truly be a neat trick!
No, the point is for the data gobblers to be able to persuade the advertisers to whom they sell your data that this will enable them to target their advertising more effectively, and so to charge more for the data.
The advertising is targeted. It's just crap. The whole notion is a scheme to draw advert budgets from TV, Radio, Cinema, Print, Billboards and simple images + link on websites to Google's or Facebook's advertising platform.
Obviously Google and Facebook think it works (and Amazon to an extent), or hope that it will work better later. See also myths about Big Data, Machine Learning and AI.
-
From the start Facebook and Google's financial model is advertising. The illegal tracking and data gathering is supposed to improve it. MS thinks it's smart to copy Google and Adobe. Hence Win10 & Office 365. They are being investigated.
It's been obvious for a while that Facebook will sell not just adverts based on the data but the data also. I don't think Adobe (ePubs with DRM etc), Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are selling data to 3rd parties, however their collection whatever the usage is also wrong.
This isn't a fresh revelation, just more evidence.
"But has ANYONE ever received a truly targeted advert?"
My FB account was set up only to trawl boychoir pages in order to collate and publish their concert events.
Before I locked it down - and installed uBlock and Ghostery - I used to get side bar adverts with pictures showing me there were lots of voluptuous women in "your area" who would love to meet me. Other adverts were for more prosaic "local" businesses - which happened to be hundreds of miles away in all directions.
Many of the choirs are apparently now deserting FB - so it has now become obsolete as a source of information.
I've a friend who features the yearly naked Orthodox priest calendar on his rainbow FB page. Yet his adverts are mostly for Turkish men seeking "real" moslem wives. Go figure.
Most of the "targetted" ads aimed my way are for things ive never had need to research or buy. They're just completely random.
One would think someone would notice thIs untargetted nature of supposedly targetted adverts. Or I missing the plot?
The hype behind targeted advertising ignores context. It also ignores that individuals that are seemingly identical are not in fact identical. Plus if the ad is based on a search or previous purchase you need to know the context of the purchase. Was the dog toy a gift to friend who has a dog or do I own a dog? In my case it would be a gift. Or was the purchase or search done for someone else? Again context is key. In my case, cat food advertising is waste as my cats are very fussy eaters and will only eat certain brands and flavors. Again context is key, what is the underlying reason for the purchase decisions.
The goal of advertising is brand and product awareness. So when one is looking for that type of product one is aware of the brand when they see it. Thus at given moment most advertising buys are 'wasted' because they will not lead to an immediate sale even 'targeted' advertising.
Today's internet was built on the back of advertisers' dollars, yes? Was there another way? I am genuinely interested.
We all or most of us pay a monthly stipend for the bandwidth, not that much different in principle from the days of ftp, gopher, etc but would we have had all the graphical and multimedia content?
Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.
Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?
Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.
Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?
If you were 11-15 and male during the rise of the video cassette recorder, the main reason to hassle parents to invest in the new tech was more likely to be the fake underground Horror flicks.
Which had the almost wholesome benefit of being actually far tamer than young imaginations perceived they might be.
"the main reason to hassle parents to invest in the new tech was more likely to be the fake underground Horror flicks."
I am of that age group, and underground horror flicks (I assume you're talking about "snuff" films) were certainly not what was on anybody's mind. It was all about the porn. Sure, everyone heard rumors about snuff films, but literally nobody I knew was actually interested in seeing any. Naked ladies, though, that's a different thing entirely!
Perhaps this is a regional thing.
"Today's internet was built on the back of advertisers' dollars, yes?"
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "today's internet". You're really talking about the web, not the internet, and a certain large segment of the web is absolutely built on ad dollars. But another large segment of the web was not.
The internet itself is not primarily ad-driven and was not built on advertiser's dollars.
"[...] but would we have had all the graphical and multimedia content?"
Almost certainly yes. The usenet type news groups were a real jungle of good, bad, and nasty. By the late 1990s alt.bin groups were doing video downloads - even though the usual home dial-up connection was at best 28kbps to 56kbps. Possibly usenet still has such things - doing a quick google revealed recent blogs offering comparisons of usenet with TOR for such things.
The difference would have been that people would have had to pay a subscription to get a decent news group supplier with enough storage to hold all the postings. Even before 2000 - ordinary ISPs were not making any serious effort to keep up with the volume of daily propagation and distributed storage.
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