Signal Tried To Use Instagram Ads To Display the Data Facebook Collects and Sells. Facebook Banned Signal's Account. (mashable.com) 55
Privacy-oriented messaging app Signal tried to run a very candid ad campaign on Facebook-owned Instagram, but it wasn't meant to be. From a report: Signal explained how it went down in a blog post Tuesday. The idea was to post ads on Instagram which use the data an online advertiser may have collected about users, and basically show the user what that data might be for them. "You got this ad because you're a teacher, but more importantly you're a Leo (and single). This ad used your location to see you're in Moscow. You like to support sketch comedy, and this ad thinks you do drag," one of the ads said. According to Signal, the ad "would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses."
The fact that Facebook and similar companies collect your data isn't a secret. According to Signal, however "the full picture is hazy to most -- dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past." In other words, you may have consented to this because you weren't bothered to investigate the details, but you may feel differently if you knew exactly what online advertisers know about you. However, Facebook wasn't having it, and shut down both the campaign and Signal's ad account.
The fact that Facebook and similar companies collect your data isn't a secret. According to Signal, however "the full picture is hazy to most -- dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past." In other words, you may have consented to this because you weren't bothered to investigate the details, but you may feel differently if you knew exactly what online advertisers know about you. However, Facebook wasn't having it, and shut down both the campaign and Signal's ad account.
Sniff... sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
Smells a bit like an anti-trust violation. Facebook has a social media monopoly. They shouldn't be able to make these sorts of protectionist decisions against its customers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Sniff... sniff... (Score:2)
It's the batshit libertarian mindset, where "freedom" means the freedom to *everything*, especially taking away your freedom.
(The Romans actually had two different words for this and for the freedom from other people's freedoms.)
So corporations, in their mind, are being oppressed, if they can's sell your freshly born firstborn, deep-fired, with a fentanyl coating, for eating.
Re: Sniff... sniff... (Score:2)
Social media companies are damned if they do and damned if they donâ(TM)t. So, if they leave something up that is âoffensiveâ(TM), then they are doing wrong, but if they take it down because the person is famous, then that is offensive.
Best way to the loony house is trying to get the balance right.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you might have libertarian a bit wrong. The libertarian mindset would be that the company can do whatever they like, and people should sue them if they don't like what they are doing.
Re: (Score:1)
this is less about free speech and more about monopoly and anti trust laws..
a first year semester law student would have picked up on that.
Re: (Score:2)
They control 59% of all social media.
Re: (Score:2)
this is less about free speech and more about monopoly and anti trust laws..
a first year semester law student would have picked up on that.
To me it seems like a pretty simple violation of their ad policies: https://www.facebook.com/polic... [facebook.com]
You are simply not allowed to show these things in your ads. And since Facebook is a private company they are of course free to enforce their ad policies.
I do dislike Facebook and use Signal whenever possible. But the problem is really not that Facebook removes this ad. It is that it is allowed to collect that amount of personal information in the first place.
Re: Sniff... sniff... (Score:2)
If the president were kicked off for competing with Facebook, then more people might have defended his "right" to be there.
Haven't you heard? He made his own Facebook. (Score:2, Troll)
But without blackjack. Or hookers. Or anyone but him on the site.
Cause he can't afford any of that anymore, now that he's just another two-bit-huckster off the government tit, with both legs hanging over a grave.
Much like he can't afford actual developers. So he bought a blog. [yahoo.com]
Re: (Score:2)
In what way was he ever on the government tit? He donated his salary every year he was in office. He lost money in his companies while he was in office, so it wasn't there either.
Re: (Score:3)
His golfing trips alone cost taxpayers hundreds of millions [huffpost.com] - while moving money to those failing water catchers he calls golf courses, which he owns.
He made 298 golfing trips [trumpgolfcount.com] - basically every 4th-5th day of his occupation of the White House he went on a full escort golfing trip to one of his properties all around the US.
That's not counting stuff like the cost of diverting military flights to an airport "near" another one of his failing golf holes, [businessinsider.com] so he could then force the crew of those flights to sleep
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Sniff... sniff... (Score:2)
Sure. And neither was Microsoft.
Re: Sniff... sniff... (Score:1)
Anywhere we can actually see this running? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anywhere we can actually see this running? (Score:4, Informative)
The ad campaign isn’t running any longer, but you can see some examples in Signal’s original blog post: https://signal.org/blog/the-in... [signal.org]
Was there a disclaimer (Score:2)
Did Signal claim that the character portrayed was entirely fictional, or did they really out somebody intentionally, using misdirection ("Oh, look, Facebook bad")
Re: Was there a disclaimer (Score:5, Insightful)
Read TFS. They showed you and only you your private information. As in: What you could already see by looking at your entire profile. Just with the added crucial detail that it went through the cables of the advertiser that should not be able to access it.
Re: (Score:2)
that it went through the cables of the advertiser that should not be able to access it.
At no point is a claim made in TFS or TFA that Signal has access to this data. Facebook has access to the data. Signal was able to target key words and send ads, they do not get an associated link between this data and the person.
I.e. I could send an advert targeted to people with reading comprehension issues with the text. You would receive the ad with the text "You're getting this advert because you have ${target_variable}". But I wouldn't know that you specifically have the reading comprehension issues.
Re: (Score:2)
Incorrect.
As an advertiser on Facebook, I have seen how they segment their sheeple. There are segmentations available that are not directly tied to information that the sheep have submitted directly.
In other words, I might search for gay people on Facebook and find people that are likely to be gay, even if they didn't tick "tell everyone I'm gay" on FB. And furthermore, if ML is working as expected, I might even find people that don't even know they are gay yet.
Compromising people in power (Score:5, Interesting)
Has it occurred to anyone that Facebook also holds some very personal, private, & potentially compromising information about people in positions of power & influence? For example, it's trivially easy to use someone's phone location data to see who they're having an affair with & that they may be having meetings & doing deals with people they shouldn't. Waaay more than this is possible with social network analysis tools. You think important people wouldn't be so stupid as to use insecure data practices? They think they've above those paranoid, nerdy IT types.
What Facebook has is not unlike the way J Edgar Hoover had his FBI agents spy & collect 'profiles' on certain people in order to have some leverage over them. So, who do you think Zuckerberg is 'helping' these days? Additionally, Facebook's data security practices are so poor that they're an easy mark for state intelligence agencies in Russia & China.
Re: (Score:3)
So, who do you think Zuckerberg is 'helping' these days?
The CIA and the Mossad. And not necessarily in that order. And anyone else who wants to pay up for the data. That they get for almost nothing.
Re: Compromising people in power (Score:3)
Uum, the NSA and CIA already use the information they got themselves ond keep themselves in power and well-financed.
If you disagree, you get e.g. a shot in the head with a scapegoat to blame, or the modern putting child porn and terrorist stuff on your computer amd swatting you to death, which is far easier to get the livestock to swallow.
Facebook is merely helping to fill in some blanks in XKeyScore and such.
Re: (Score:2)
they're an easy mark for state intelligence agencies in Russia & China.
I like how everyone pretends that only the officially designated "bad guys" in the Russian and Chinese governments would ever do such a naughty thing. Of course the US and England and Brasil and India and Australia and ... would never do such a thing. Just unthinkable! And criminals could never think of hacking a database for blackmail material on government officials, oh, no, that could just never happen. I'm sure no corporate executive **ever** would consider strong-arming regulators, they're much too
Re: (Score:2)
The US on the other hand gives combat ribbons and medals to the crews that shoot down civilian airliners.
Re: Compromising people in power (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Compromising people in power (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect it'd work the opposite way. Facebook could potentially reveal the identities of CIA agents by singling them out & NOT collecting their data. The idea of a spy is to blend in with & be like everyone else so as not to be conspicuous. My guess is that the CIA don't share the identities of their agents with Facebook. The espionage act or some other national security law could possibly be invoked in the case that Facebook passed on location data of agents to hostile parties. However, I assume t
Re: (Score:2)
Fun trick you can try at home to find potentially compromising information about people at your company.
Basically Exchange server passes through IP addresses through your email when you work at home.
https://twitter.com/fulldecent... [twitter.com]
In 15 years, we'll wonder why we let them exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple have a stranglehold on the market. Not only is this a general drag on progress, it's becoming increasingly clear from their brazen violations of law and ethics that they feel too big to fail and don't fear repercussions. We'll look back on these companies like we look back on Standard Oil and the old AT&T monopoly. They have to go.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
The IQ of the average American is 98. They may as well be a different species from those in the cognitive elite. They let people abuse them and they don’t care so long as beer and football and tig ole’ bitties on cable. They don’t understand why you make such a big deal out of everything. ‘That’s just the way things are”, they shrug, why can’t you girlie nerds just accept it?
They are also the backbone of the US economy. If average IQ increased by 10 points overni
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's apparent that you have an IQ of 98 or lower. Because IQ tests are normed, the average is deliberately set at 100.
100 is the average. By definition. Literally. By definition.
Everything else is done to adjust the test itself so that it comes out that way. And, because an IQ test more closely measures cultural modernity, you'll find that your IQ scores drop over time, because the tests are increasingly normed for people younger than you on average.
Re: (Score:2)
And, because an IQ test more closely measures cultural modernity, you'll find that your IQ scores drop over time, because the tests are increasingly normed for people younger than you on average.
If your point is that it’s flawed, your absolutely right.
Strangely, they’ve been unable to come up with anything that correlates with observed outcomes better.
It’s highly unlikely that Einstein would score below average, or a mentally challenged person would score in the 140s. So, the IQ test is
Re: (Score:3)
He said the average *American* IQ. IQs exist outside America so by definition, the average American IQ is lower than the global average IQ.
Re: (Score:2)
He said the average *American* IQ. IQs exist outside America so by definition, the average American IQ is lower than the global average IQ.
Awww man, he was all excited too. I can just imagine how it went down:
“Hey Mildred, remember when you said I wasn’t very smart? Well watch me put this guy on Slashdot in his place!
Dear Ignoramus,
It is clear that your IQ is less than 98 because US IQ tests are NORMED to 100, the average is literally 100. Yeah, like literally and shit. They defined it
Re: (Score:2)
It's apparent that you have an IQ of 98 or lower.
Probably.
Because IQ tests are normed, the average is deliberately set at 100.
100 is the average. By definition. Literally. By definition.
Ummmm, right, so are you saying that all nations have an average IQ of 100?
They norm it on the fly do they?
How does that work when comparing people from different countries?
Do the actually calibrated it to Americans?
Please, my intellectual superior, teach me — when was the IQ test last calibrated to 100 against US ci
Re: (Score:1)
The current scoring method for all IQ tests is the "deviation IQ". In this method, an IQ score of 100 means that the test-taker's performance on the test is at the median level of performance in the sample of test-takers of about the same age used to norm the test. An IQ score of 115 means performance one standard deviation above the median, a score of 85 performance, one standard deviation below the median, and so on.[5]
Asmiasion of guilt of a crime. (Score:2)
That's what FB did here, to me.
It means they showed that they know people do not want it, and that they want to trick them and do it anyway. And doing something to somebody against one's will is literally the essence of doing harm. Which, unless you got the convenient excuse of calling it "punishement" that our hopelessly medeival legal system supports, is also he definition of a crime in a civilized society.
Otherwise there would be no reason to block the ads.
*ADMISSION of guilt of a crime. (Score:2)
Oh fuck, damn. Proofread the comment. Didn't proofread the subject line after editing it again.
Does anyone else have this problem of Firefox mobile failing to let you change the cursor, and always editing where your cursor was last, unless you lock the phone? It's the reason this happened.
Re:medeival legal system (Score:2)
The US legal system is ancient Roman rather than medieval. Medieval times had lots of shared properties (common grounds) and shared responsibilities. The city watch was often a job you had to do once in a while, and the guilds were made up of its members.
The notion of property as loot (it is mine, therefore not yours and I can do anything with it without any responsibility) comes from the roman era.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them! (Score:1)
There’s no way that this article is correct.
Look what I found:
Facebook Transparency Report
We're committed to making Facebook a place that's open and authentic, while safeguarding people's private data and keeping our platform safe for everyone. (snip)
Do you see that?
Do you see that, Mr. Liar McLiesalot? Can you even read? It says right there in black and white:
They are committed to SAFEGUARDING PEOPLE’S PRIVATE DATA!
They don’t just do it, they’re committed. COMMITTED!
Are you committe
Same practice (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes
Is Facebook scared of the truth? (Score:2)
That's awesome (Score:2)
'Tween this and the Cellebrite thing, Moxie Marlinspike has been up to top-notch shenanigans lately! I love it.