> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.
And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".
Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else.
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.
Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.
> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".
No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements (Twitter and Tear Gas), a popular TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...), a series of New York Times op-eds, and more besides.
A more productive answer to someone saying something you agree with is “I agree”, not mistakenly berating them for not agreeing sooner.
You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.
I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.
If that worked, we would have already solved car accidents (obey all the traffic laws!), suicide (don't kill yourself!), obesity (don't eat too much unhealthy food), debt (don't spend more than you make), and basically every other social ill.
Effective solutions are ones that can be enacted by humans while fully taking human fallibility into account. It's poor engineering to design a system that requires every part to function perfectly with zero tolerances.
> I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.
I think that's true of the general problem of data privacy, but I don't think it's exactly true of the particular "Facebook" instance of that problem.
Social networks have withered and died before, and there's no reason to think that Facebook can't be nudged in that direction, one user at a time, until the snowball starts. This seems like a pretty opportune time to get that ball rolling.
I don't mean to say that we shouldn't regulate Facebook, as a society; sure we should, and let's try to do it. But that will take years, if not decades.
But as individuals, there is something we can do today: not use it. Why dismiss this very simple solution?
I'm definitely not arguing that we shouldn't take individual steps that helps. But the parent comment says:
> if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.
Which basically sounds to me like, "If every fallible human on Earth can't individually decide to solve this problem, they don't deserve any solution."
I think there are two senses in which it is "impossible" to leave Facebook:
1) Even if you actively decide to deactivate or delete your account, nothing guarantees that Facebook won't retain the data. Nothing guarantees that they don't continue to build a profile of you by scanning photos your friends share. It's a Hotel California of personal data.
2) Even if you personally decide to leave, the rest of society may be using it for passing essential information that forces you to re-engate with facebook. Until you can convince your cohort to stop using FB to organize or converse, you might still be forced to use the service.
instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without.
then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me.
if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email.
i still have an account for logins. i could technically make messages happen.
i don’t have to eject all my pictures, or delude myself about the efficacy of “deleting” my fb account, but i can be sure nobody is going to benefit from selling my social graph to my “friends” or frienemies
I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.
> Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.
Was Obama 2012 restricted to collecting information of its downloaders? Or did it collect all of the downloaders' friends' information as well? Facebook certainly allowed for this (until 2014, that is).
They pulled the whole friend graph and used it to generate emails pushing supporters to reach out to specific named friends who live in specific states.
So far, no POTUS' actions (taken as a whole) support a feel-good narrative. Unpleasant compromises, manipulation, and dishonesty may be inherent to winning a national election and then running a 330-million-person organization.
It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.
This Washington Post article has details. Obama Supporters clicked OK on apps, those apps pulled their friend graph (including the state of residence of friends) to generate outreach such as emails encouraging the supporter to evangelize specifically named friends on behalf of the campaign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...
Didn't Obama's campaign hire Droga5 to do precisely the same sort of ad targeting that CA was involved in? Ultimately, it doesn't seem that CA did anything out of the norm for any marketing analytics company (from what I've read, correct me if I'm wrong).
Did you read the article? They paid several hundred thousand people via Mechanical Türk to download their poll app and then harvested 50M users data for political targeting.
Data they could have acquired directly from FB anyway? It seems like they found a way to make the data acquisition process more efficient (while also violating FB's TOS, which is the actual problem here).
But the point is, the methods CA used to influence voters weren't significantly different from Obama's 2012 campaign.
There is a giant difference here in the fact that the data acquired for CA was through a third party. Data obtained through the Obama campaign was through the Obama app.
Thanks for the video link. I am going to share that with friends and family who are sceptical that there is a problem with Internet super-companies collecting data and using it to change our behaviors to make money.
Look, my parents were interested in environmental issues like pollution in the 1960s. They demonstrated against racism.
These are not new issues.
But still, if somebody writes an essay saying that we are polluting the earth and that racism is a pervasive, structural force woven into the very fabric of our society, let's support them.
Sure, they're only now realizing what some or perhaps many people have known for literally half a century, but every person coming to that realization is another element of resistence against malevolence.
No, it's not a stunning revelation for you or I that FB is a digital cancer. But yet... Every voice saying this is a lamp, regardless of how late it came to light.
We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected.
Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions.
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Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.
"massive data centers in Utah" was absolutely a Bush Administration thing.
If Obama didn't stop it, it was due to the toxic political climate and congressional domination by TeaParty/GOP. The current Democratic Party lineup, and over the past 15 years, has also been shifted pretty far to the right, but that has been a result of the effort by the extreme right since the Clinton presidency; since Newt Gingrich, and FoxNews to slant the electorate to the right.
I doubt that most Republicans or any Democrats would have supported that kind of horrible breach of the 4th Amendment in the 1990's or 80's. And trying to hang that around Obama's neck is ridiculously dishonest.
I'm not sure I agree that it would be swept under the rug, seeing that you can mention those earlier issues without explaining them. Outrage and discussion occurred the same way they are now, and just like in those cases, not much is going to happen concerning facebook and its use of personal data. What I'm saying is that your assertion that it has anything to do with progressive/conservative narrative is false, because the result is going to be the same.
It's not really 5D chess. Republicans have been saying "starve the lion" (e.g. taking huge deficits and then proposing budget cuts) since Reagan. I wouldn't be surprised if Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (which I never read, I just know the blurb) proposes this meta-strategy en passant somewhere.
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.
Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it.
Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.
There is a certain amount of second hand smoke in the room, though.
1) I can quit my social media, but people are still creating a lot of content with me in it that is being used. I don't need to take a poll about which potato I am if all the posts my friends tag me in are mined for data.
2) While social media is in itself great for cloistering my own community, it's still the case that vast numbers of my compatriots are involved with it and it will continue to be affected by it.
"Just leaving" isn't going to solve either of those problems.
I wholly agree, by the way, that leaving it is a personally good thing. I still use, but I heavily filter it and I have several 0-tolerance policies for unfollowing / blocking / etc. I probably ought to quit, but the crushing loneliness and disconnection of being a 40-year-old, divorced, atheistic remote worker who is quitting drinking make it about my only social interaction short of buying groceries.
This is OT, but perhaps you could join a structured exercise or sports group, like an ultimate Frisbee team or CrossFit. Having a regular group you can meet up with is usually pretty feasible without Facebook. It's good for you (don't go overboard and hurt yourself) and good for making friends.
Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day.
I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.
Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches.
Quitting Facebook isn't as easy as it might seem. The same way as it's not easy to escape from the effects of smoking. Not because you can't, but there is always a chance of passive smoking.
So, as long as we have some relation with some society of which some one is connected, we will have some passive effects due to that.
Say like, if some one need to stop your car, they don't need to stop yours, but someone ahead of you.
Your life might be better, but mine wouldn't be. I use FB to keep up with loved ones and discover local events. That's it. It's not toxic or upsetting to me. All news is filtered out of my timeline.
The privacy issues are my only motivation to quit, and between Google, LinkedIn/Microsoft, and FB, my privacy is irreparably fucked anyway, so it feels futile to try to fix it now.
I’m have to disagree strongly with the blanket statement “companies are evil”. Companies don’t “sell something that is usually bad for you”. That’s ludicrously naive. Most companies are able to exist because of the net positive they have on individuals and society. I can’t build my own house, produce my own food, make the clothes I wear, or create the medicine I need when I’m sick. Companies publish and distribute the books I read, the entertainment I enjoy, and can can fly me anywhere on the planet if I want to expand my horizons. And yes, they make money off of all of those things, but there is nothing evil about that.
Perhaps the smallest part of some of those things would be possible in a world without companies, but the vast majority of it would not be. Facebook is an exception, is a net negative in my opinion, and we would be better off without it, but that doesn’t mean we have to go back and reinvent the last several hundred years of human history and progress by labeling all companies as evil entities.
"an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model"
And as long as FB is making billions out of this model, it will not change. The only think one can do is remove themselves from being the means to FB's profitability and leave the FB employees sharing their own data.
In a similar spirit, anyone who has my name & phone number in their contacts, when they decide to use any application that 'wants access to contacts' inherently performs the same violation of my private information.
That is not the only thing one can do. Our governing bodies could be disentangled from private interests and put to task protecting the vulnerable members of our society for the better of the whole. This idea anything but new. Have you not thought of it before? If not, what do you think has prevented your awareness?
You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.
If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest?
If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 15 lowest GDPs or something like that. Making Facebook change just isn’t realistic. When you quit Facebook, you join a protest against for-profit social media, and as long as Facebook is a blind money machine it will always be part of the problem.
This is debatable. A completely ethical social media service still has the ability to control perceptions and thus decisions on a large scale. I think the problem is that everyone can know this and still use Facebook multiple times daily. To know that they contributed to the election of Donald Trump simply by using Facebook, and then go on Facebook to complain about Donald Trump. Surely that must be the problem, whatever makes people knowingly contribute to their own destruction, somehow without ever thinking about it.
One viable alternative is legislation, such as the EU has been doing to some effect. Of course the laws lag the technology by some years and we have a wide range of political views on things like "the right to be forgotten" but more consumer protections seem to be needed, perhaps also factoring in "dumb" consumer behaviour e.g. not reading Terms & Conditions.
Some things are impossible to solve by independant actors. Imagine trying to boycott cars in the 1940s because they were manifestly unsafe, or in the 1950s because they polluted the world with lead.
Only legislation changed these things... albeit not enough. Same for workplace safety, child labour, and so on.
Some systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.
How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.
You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See:
The media piling on top of facebook is payback for how much facebook has screwed them over with the changes to the news feed. If anyone is interested I'll look for the original sources but in 2012-2016 something like 50%+ of all views on some news sites came from facebook. Then facebook tweaked their front page and now all that traffic is gone.
Someone should have read Machiavelli more: if you are hated, the second you show weakness everyone will try and put you down.
And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".
Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else.
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.
Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.