The suit is without merit, says Facebook.
And eleven billion people want to file amicus curiae briefs in support of them.
Facebook brags it has a massive real audience, estimated to be about 2.23bn monthly users and 1.47bn daily users after culling more than 1.27bn fake accounts. However, the social networking giant's math is being challenged in a lawsuit that claims this reach is exaggerated, thereby defrauding advertisers. In other words, it is …
No what I meant was Facebook's dodgy practices are particularly under the microscope right now, arguably more than Google at the moment... So this heavily plays into Google's hands: "This whole Facebook debacle is very good for Google,” said Ari Paparo, a former Googler who runs ad tech firm Beeswax."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-06/facebook-s-data-crackdown-has-two-winners-facebook-and-google
I've reached the same result for Jordan, while experimenting with our family business page. The figures seem to claim an estimated reach of more people in Jordan than there are people in Jordan. Funny, innit?
And I thought that it was some "error" ...
I wonder what kind of connection the graveyard users have? Getting dug up every few years would kinda suck for upgrades... No 5G for you if you died last year... depending on your will and contract with graveyard. Then you have to make sure you actually *get* the upgrades...
What a bitch. Easier not to die.
Is that Palantir Peter the same Peter as PayPal Peter?
https://www.forbes.com/profile/peter-thiel/
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/
Small world, innit. With big big money for a very lucky few.
What could possibly go wrong?
You make my point by attempting to appear definitive about what mining software does or does not do. The fact most likely is, you have no specific knowledge of precisely what "mining" software actually does when it is running on a machine. Those of us that have researched it understand what we are told it does, but unless you are intimately familiar with the source code at the deepest levels possible and constantly monitor exactly what that software is doing on a machine 8.64e+10 microseconds a day, 365 days a year, one can only spout the original bullocks of what they told you it does.
Further, do you actually think that software heavily used by criminals has no possible deceit in it?Seriously? I am not talking general Blockchain tech here. I am talking the miner software that people download from sites hosted, um, anywhere, to run to make money. The stone cold reality is you don't really know what that software does and that could include a wide variety of things of which Facebook bots are merely one. All communications in and out are encrypted, aren't they? You can't even sniff the wire to see what it is. Once it is installed, all you can see is that one or more processes are running, CPU is pegged or at the level set by the user, and memory is being used and the assumption is that software used by crooks is doing what they said on the website where it came from. The actual, full stop, hard core, in-your-face reality is only the code originators know what that "mining" software actually does. And even THAT attempt at a definitive statement has vagaries. Someone with good intentions may have written the original code and it could have been co-opted with a few add-ons to make real money scamming stocks or the ad industry or even breaking government crypto keys for fun and profit .
Just think of those millions of morons that let a complete stranger use their machines and all the scammers have to do is throw a few pennies in an electronic wallet every couple of days for the brain-frothed user that suspends all reason because they think they're going to get rich.
Manipulation on this scale must be a wet dream for the nefarious mind.
Mining software is open source so it is very easy to know what is happening in the mining, that is why no-one goes into detail telling you why your idea is ridiculous.
To see for yourself this is not what is happening, have a look through some open source miner code:
https://github.com/JayDDee/cpuminer-opt
Bravo ! My ridiculous suspicions have been assailed and destroyed. One miner repo on github represents all the possible criminal minds and activities on the planet related to the topic. You have slung your pebble and Goliath has fallen.
No one would ever think of creating an installer than includes more than just the mining software. Or, insert their own code into the mining code, or update it with other packages after it has been installed. Especially not the criminally minded from countries where they can't be found or prosecuted.
Somehow, I think the claim that valid concerns are ridiculous emanating from someone with a vested interest in the success of this environment is a little, how you say, ridiculous.
>The stone cold reality is you don't really know what that software does and that could include a wide variety of things of which Facebook bots are merely one.<
Frankly, the mining software is less of a concern to me than the actual OS itself (from certain vendors--desktop and mobile). If you're untrusting at the level of worrying about the mining code, step back and look at most of the black boxes that you have running on a given device.
There's exceptions, but I'd wager that the mining software is less of a sketchy enterprise than the OS, for the majority of users.
Didn't work. Something leaked outside the private mode, probably some server-side tracking. After I discovered deleted cookies resurrecting (complete with pre-existing data), I learned how useless any kind of privacy-based system is these days. If they want to track you, they'll track you in spite of God, Man, or the Devil, and yes they'll track you even if you're anonymous. They'll just use what they do know to de-anonymize you later (Facebook is notorious for this AND defeating ad- and tracker-blockers).
I hope the lawyer's legal skills are better than their maths skills.
Why is that?
400/100 * x = 4x
I could understand if he had of said:
...4 times (400 per cent more) higher...
as the "more" in 400 per cent would imply an addition to the original number:
400/100 * x + x = 5x
But then I guess it also depends on how you parse 4 times higher, in that do they mean:
4 * x
or
4 * x + x
Advertisers have been doing this for a very, very long time. Ever wonder why Darrin was the moral compass on Bewitched? It was part of the game of showing ad agencies as honest and was repeated in many shows from the 1950s on. I had a ad agency tell a fortune 500 company's web services department that their million dollar ad increased the hits to the web site by an insane amount but the web logs showed a much lower improvement. The million dollar ad was to put the domain name on the bottom of existing tv ads. I suspect they are still getting paid for that (likely based on their numbers) decades latter. There is an Aussie tv show called "Gruen Transfer" where two very good ad men honestly describe what goes on with real ads.
I have nothing good to say about FB but my first impression is that this suit probably won't anywhere.
The key is in the word 'reach' , in the Chicago example I bet the contract doesn't specify Chicago or environs. People living in Alaska/Mongolia etc. who are FB 'friends' of someone in Chicago are part of the advert's 'reach'.
Last year I met an old school friend. I hadn't seen her for more than 50 years.
I asked here what she'd been doing. To protect her I won't say where she had worked, but it was in sales, in a nationally very well-known organization in Great Britain.
"They pay you just to lie.", she said. So that's what she did.
Well there are a lot of things I don't like about face book but one of the good things I can say about them as a marketer that has done a lot of online advertising is that the click trough on a advert does seem to be more human, rather than "fake bot clicks" that plague the industry and cost business a lot of money that you might get on "market leading search engines", how do I know well I we use software that track real time mouse movements across a website, and well its quite obvious when its a human.
I wonder why there has never been an investigation into that.
Well I've been following the Ad Contrarian blog for several years, and he has been calling out the fraud in online advertising for all that time.
The root cause is that the only source of metrics available is from the ad brokers themselves, so nobody is independently auditing the page impressions and click-throughs. And nobody dare say that the emperor's naked, and that the funding model for half the internet is based on fraudulent counting.
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/
I stopped paid advertising with them after finding 8 of 10 shares of a boosted post were from bots - users with a single friend kinda tipped it off - and the number of people reached was over 50K, but not a single customer reported seeing the ad. Google AdWords seems to be the way to go these days.
"but not a single customer reported seeing the ad"
Ah, but that's the clever thing, you see. They don't need to remember in order to be influenced. It's a Jedi thing, I think. For example, I can't remember any of the ads I've seen at any point in the last decade, but they've all been devilishly effective in twisting my purchasing choices, so it was money well spent.