[irregular-john]

Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?

These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"

[MVf4l]

    Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!

I don't know about others, but that naive reaction is definitely not the reaction I have. Selling me ads is acceptable. But using my data without telling me how are you going to use it is considered hostile to me. And, I believe, using aggregate data to research on crowd is dangerous and harmful to the society, even it's anonymous. My personal data is probably only worth a few dimes to them, but aggregate data is not that cheap. Those companies use PII and non-PII to do researches without telling people that they are being researched or how they are being researched or why they are doing it. It's like poeple are lab rats.

No one should have such power without testee's consent. But opt-out empowered them. And the ability to gain insights (with such procedure) on different crowds witch leads to the ability to manipulate the general public makes me nervous.

I don't expect stuff on the internet to be free of charge, but people don't want to pay with money doesn't justify the current business model. You know what is worse? People paid, yet their data is still being collected and used, only less ads.

If what I said is unreasonable or non-sense, please feel free to downvote me, but also please share your thoughts to me. I'd love to change my mind since it's getting really hard to surf the internet these days with my current mindset. It's not the internet I love any more.

[JepZ]

Just one example: Imagine a group of people where you are one of the few people without a Facebook account. Then there is some group pressure to push you into becoming a Facebook user and since they don't offer a paid service, you either have to convince a lot of people to use some other medium, sell your personal information or accept missing a lot of communication.

[hk__2]

> Just one example: Imagine a group of people where you are one of the few people without a Facebook account. Then there is some group pressure to push you into becoming a Facebook user and since they don't offer a paid service, you either have to convince a lot of people to use some other medium, sell your personal information or accept missing a lot of communication.

This is peer pressure and has nothing to do with the way Facebook monetize its product.

[JepZ]

I think it does. Otherwise it would be simple to just skip Facebook. But if skipping is no option (and no alternative payment method is available), the whole 'analyze my behavior, values and believes' until you learnt how to influence me effectively becomes a problem (at least for those who don't want that Facebook or one of their partners can effectively influence their mind).

[kelnos]

> This is peer pressure and has nothing to do with the way Facebook monetize its product.

Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product. They know that human connections aren't fungible, so they can gain adoption through local monopolies.

[hk__2]

> Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product.

Every single social network relies on this concept; the way it’s monetized is independant of that.

[intended]

Sorry I kind of missed the independence part - in the main, no social network has value unless it has most of the target audience on the network.

So monetization results are entirely dependent on having those people subscribed.

Thus all the emphasis on techniques to get people hooked/attracted/addicted etc.

That’s sort of an operating cost/basic imperative to the social network.

So when you say it’s independent , what do you mean?

[hk__2]

> So when you say it’s independent , what do you mean?

We agree that "monetization results are entirely dependent on having those people subscribed". What I’m saying is the _way_ Facebook does that monetization (with ads) is independent of that. If Facebook were a subscription-based service, it’d still rely on those "techniques to get people hooked/attracted/addicted etc". So you can’t complain about Facebook’s ad-based model by saying it encourages peer pressure because the latter would still exist even if there weren’t ads.

[bestnameever]

I think you either misread the above question, or responded to the wrong parent.

[_gfrc]

You are assuming that I am using Facebook. I am not. They have a shadow profile on me anyway, together with my cellphone number and lots of private information, because my friends uploaded it to get access to Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp.

[cJ0th]

Not just your friends. I recently found out that two companies I've bought something from shared my data with facebook.

[maym86]

It's an issue of transparency. I don't mind if I know what it will be used for but "sell me some ads" isn't the only thing it's being used for as we have discovered recently. If Facebook et Al. were more transparent about exactly how it is used then users could decide if the cost is worth it.

[craigsmansion]

> what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?

Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

Others might have their own reasons

> These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want.

Want, but might not want at all cost. If enough users do not want to pay the asking price, some of these companies might revisit their race to the bottom approach. Some of them existed and were profitable before tracking become big and pervasive.

> Providing those services is not free

No, but being profitable is not a concern that overrides everything else. Maybe for the company it is, but a society has every right to say, "You can be as profitable as you want within these confines."

[komali2]

>Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

But what does this mean functionally?

I don't mean to disparage your argument, but I've never been able to get a clear answer on actual pain points from Facebook data mongering, answers are always some variation of above, which I take to mean "it's icky, I dunno, it's just icky."

[intended]

The idea of the market itself is based on things like that: there’s no reason to value a shiny yellow metal, but we do.

Practically, this is centralization of information and it’s sale which is enabling people to target and herd ideas and behaviors in ways we do not have responses to.

Not that this is very new as a phenomenon! But the tools available today allow this to be mechanized.

So where artisanal bakers would have to make campaigns and do all of the data gathering and follow up work on their own, we’ve now made factories to do this.

Since essentially we are talking about collective concepts, consent and beliefs being influenced in an automated manner, this is “different” than what has come before.

[plankers]

For me, the major pain point is in what this means for our cultural values around privacy. The less privacy we have the less important privacy becomes, and our collective values around privacy become eroded. This makes it much harder to raise a fuss about privacy violations and have people take you seriously e.g. they might interpret your objections as "it's icky, I don't like it."

If somebody can put better words to this, please do. I'm not well-versed in Sociological Things.

[bitofhope]

I'm a young adult. I've been on the internet for most of my life and all of my adult life. When the GDPR started to be a hot topic, I decided to check what Facebook knows about me.

There are lots of things in there I didn't want known and remembered. Many embarrassing, cringy, inaccurate, unfortunately accurate, depressing, stupid things. Past interests, teenage angst, bullying, fedora edgelord material, unflattering photos, mean things I've said and had said to me, controversial political opinions, things I've come to disagree with, relationships and so on.

There exist vast public, semi-public, and buyable records of my life full of things I'd rather not even remember myself, let alone have corporations remember for me and highest bidders.

[cm2012]

I don't understand this either. The big ad companies have a huge incentive to keep your data secret, so only they can serve you ads. The big privacy danger will always be the government through the ISPs.

[johndough]

Why should the government go through the ISPs if they can get the unencrypted data from facebook.

[cm2012]

Because it's a court order either way?

[beiller]

They are "hoarding" the data, IE keeping it away from their competition. If the data was free, it could be used for things like large scale medical studies, instead of blasting my eyeballs with auto-play videos about the product I just finished buying on amazon. How many work hours combined daily on planet earth are lost waiting 5 seconds for the video to play, before continuing to read information required for your job / hobby / entertainment?

[rorykoehler]

GDPR is pushing in the opposite direction though.

[matz1]

It's not. I personally think it's great that companies can make money out of it, while in turn i get the service for free.

[earenndil]

I don't want to use facebook and google's services. I'm perfectly happy to use alternatives that won't track me and that I pay for. However, when facebook and google trackers are in completely unrelated websites, when my friends' emails are owned by google, when my school forces me to use google services for my school work, then it's not my choice. I'm forced to give them my data.

[newnewpdro]

TL;DR: knowledge is power, surrendering your privacy is giving knowledge about you away, this quite literally translates into giving away power over you.

My core concern with eliminating the gap separating what corporations/governments know and the reality of people's lives is the smaller that gap becomes the less robust our democracy is on a very fundamental level.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the first major glimpse of what this enables and how it threatens our democracy.

I encourage you to watch the series The Century of the Self. It's a bit dated by now, but it illustrates a pretty clear lineage easily extrapolated to where we've arrived today.

It's important to protect the privacy of the public. There must be some uncertainty and substantial error when it comes to campaigns to influence the people.

When people say "I have nothing to hide", what they don't realize is that the fact they have nothing to hide is something to hide. The other side certainly has things to hide, and they benefit from having total visibility into what you're aware of.

[olalonde]

It's not, it's a loud minority that's especially vocal on HN. Mostly people who have read 1984 too many times or have lived in a totalitarian state and worry about the slippery slope.

[pascalxus]

yeah, i don't get it either. I really don't mind if they use all my info to target me with ads. In fact, I prefer it. I'd much rather get relevant ads that show me products I really want or need because I ONLY buy stuff I really want or really need. I've never purchased anything merely because an ad popped up and told me to buy it.

[isthatart]

Please post the list of all sites you visited in the past year and you'll get an absolutely serious answer.

[sbhn]

Facebook and google sell your attention and your clicks. They will sometimes make 100 dollars a click depending on the content of the ad and how targeted it was to your profile. For example, type car insurance into google, click the top advertisement. Ka’ching, that was 100 dollars transferred from one adwords account into Google’s. Your simple click, and the data associated with it, is someone else’s money.

[donatj]

And why is that a problem perse?

Your search query may have just saved you more than that on car insurance alone. I've gotten arguably many many thousands of dollars of value from Google in my life.

I think you're simply not considering the immense value good internet search adds to life.

[intended]

It’s not being excluded - the issues is the various secondary effects. Not to mention the honeymoon period is over and antagonists have figured out how to use this information to direct political power in ways institutions are unable to adapt to.

These two aspects are the marginal change that people are focused on now. (From my perspective).

That’s why, imo, there’s no mention of how valuable search is, same way there’s no mention of how useful browsers are.

[white-flame]

For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you.

Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience.

Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds.

Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns.

So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people.

Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.

[manigandham]

> It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching

This is very subjective. You cannot speak for everyone, and meanwhile Youtube generates petabytes of analytics every day showing what people really like, down to each individual.

[white-flame]

My specific, stated metric was pigeonholing.

You receive less information online when these systems are employed, ie more repetition in the same space. Youtube optimizes for maximizing the viewing time across the most common types of viewing associations, namely people watching for entertainment, not looking for information. If you ever look for information in a new topic, you tend to be signposted back towards your old time-sink staples from your history instead.

Certainly, one can also point to algorithmic enforcement of echo chambers, which would be a subjective value judgment as well. It feels good in immediate practice (and can increase viewing time), but many don't view it as a net positive at scale for social issues. Yet for things like small-scale hobbies, it can be beneficial.

[intended]

This is basically the obesity/fast food scenario, but just for ideas. YouTube Facebook etc being the new McDonalds.

[Haegin]

Out of interest, do you have a source for that "petabytes of analytics every day"? It sounds like the kind of thing that would come out of an interesting "How we cope at scale" kind of article.

[_csoz]

> it pigeonholes your internet experience.

it seems like your issue is more with the inefficiency of the various algorithms rather than the use of data per se. And you re right, e.g. right now my supposedly AI youtube is full of the same type of videos.

> seems unfair they don't get a cut

This may ring true on the surface, but people always make money out of other people, by definition. Compensation would not work, it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund. One issue however is that users in this case do not have a mechanism to affect the price personalized ads so in total it seems unfair.

> and Nazi Germany,

I think you mean cold war germany. in any case it is interesting how the latest EU law completely ignores that aspect of privacy.

> a federal agent followed you a

Good point, being tracked does feel like you re being followed by an annoying salesperson. This IMHO is more annoying than the gathering of private data takes place on the internet. Privacy is not the default mode of life, in fact there are few places where one goes to when he wants to be private. Most of life involves interaction with other people and nonprivacy. One could even claim that this kind of privacy is not violated with things like ad tracking, as it happens behind screens, in safety and with relative control from the user. Of course there need to be limits to when and where this information can be gathered.

[snackman]

> it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund

I'd think of it more like treating any consumer of a product as an investor at the same time