Except that FB and google are ahead in this game. 89% of FB revenue comes from their app on smartphones and the app is devoid of ad blocker. Google owns the android platform where they basically control all they want. The ad model where one would see blinking images on a visited web site is indeed disappearing, but is replaced by a complete ecosystem where one would see FB posts explaining that their best friend just bought the car they considered buying themselves.
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I’m only of financial interest to people running miniature based kickstarters 
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That was my one big takeaway from the show Mad Men. Don Draper was only sorta kinda selling cars or cigarettes or hotel stays to consumers. What he was really doing, was selling smoke and mirrors to business owners. The actual return on investment to the business, is almost unrelated to the bottom line at the ad agency.
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All that personal data is a low yield resource if used ethically. It becomes a higher yield resource in inverse proportion to one’s ethical commitment. Some of that information could be extremely profitable, if just the right people with just the right motivations are in possession.
All these scenarios about hacks and break ins and oily rags kind of miss the point, I think. The crisis of '08 taught us all that crime pays very well, and the only difference between a successful businessman and a crook is what kind of pull our peep has in government. This has only gotten worse in the last ten years.
It’s absurd for Europeans to have so much better protections on their personal data than north Americans. It’s a global resource, there should be one single (good) standard for this stuff worldwide.
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Well said. Perhaps the best summary of Facebook’s politics I’ve seen.
One of the more upsetting things about Brexit, Trump’s attack on the Eu, and the general success of Russia in destabilizing Europe is that the EU, unlike the US, seems to finally have a fairly clear handle on what FB is up to and is starting the process of regulating FB in ways that make sense. Sadly, there’s none of that in the US and, in fact, if anything, Trumpism is only making FB worse in the US. It’s unclear to me, given all of the undermining going on, if the EU is going to be successful but at least they are trying to reduce FB’s power.
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Why absurd? The US has historically (last fifty years or so) put companies and their profits over citizens, whereas most European nations have gone the other way, or at least stayed static.
America calling itself the ‘land of the free’ was somewhat justifiable two hundred years ago, but much like Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, these days it’s just an ironic joke.
That I had to register for BB to post and cookies are used when I read this is a matter of degrees. Where do you draw the line of both collecting metrics and displaying advertisements on a website like this versus the much larger scale and deeper scope of what Facebook has been doing?
I once got flyers for 25% off a lawnmower every day for a week. I live on the 13th floor of a tower block in the middle of a city that dates back to the Romans. There hasn’t been a lawn here for a really long time…
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and in the cookie jar
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A thing that’s really infuriating is that (1) Facebook keeps dossiers on people who are not Facebook “members,” and (2) Facebook won’t tell those people what data they have unless those people join Facebook.
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(I’ve said this before, but…) That is why I deactivated, but did not delete, my account. I’m waiting for the promised functionality where I can go in and delete my history. (I’d also like to be able to delete my photos en masse – along with tags of myself in other people’s photos/posts). For all I know they continue to datamine via my deactivated account – it just isn’t visible to other Facebook members – and continue to do whatever they’d normally do with an active account. They (and the news articles I could find about it) are opaque on that one (surprise, surprise).
If I can dump everything to the point where I have a blank FB profile then I might just keep it.
Two other (possibly) sanity-preserving measures I’ve previously mentioned:
- Use the Social Fixer for Facebook extension in Firefox, and
- Unfollow each of your FB friends who you don’t want to show up in your news feed (but don’t otherwise want to unfriend).
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Pretty sure FB has compiled dossiers on people who’ve never been members.
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I’m sure they do (i.e. “shadow profiles”), but presumably these are supplanted by user accounts. Whether I deactivate the account I created, or delete it and let the shadow profile take its place, I figure I’m on FB either way. If having an account provides a modicum of control, and not having an account doesn’t, then I’ll keep what I have, and deactivate until better controls are in place.
I do miss being on there to the degree that I was linked to people I had not had contact with in a long time, and probably would not otherwise. (In a few cases I had never met the individual, in person.) I fully realize it’s no substitute for meeting in person, or picking up the phone, or sending an email, but there I am/was.
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Also, if a co-owner of this website has such (much deserved) contempt for Facebook, why is the FB “share” button still on this site? It’s presence weirds me out a little (I’m not on FB, but am I still being tracked?)
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Let’s turn that smile upside down.
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It can be even worse than that, since the ad agency is often selling services to the CMO, who in turn is “selling” what they’ve bought to the owner/board of the company… Cynically, the CMO’s job is to justify their own existence, and since there’s very little in the way of concrete metrics for their services, they use the same techniques that Don Draper does, only internal to their own company. It becomes like a rain dance for the company- there’s no way of telling if any of it is working, but they sure as hell can’t stop lest it all comes crashing down… That said, basic advertising can be effective, but on some level it becomes akin to an act of faith.
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Already exists: Anti-Adblock Killer (“AAK”) does exactly this, and works rather well, to boot. I haven’t seen ONE “please turn of your adblocker” nag since installation!. It works for most browsers, although you’ll have to install a userscript plugin, such as Greasemonkey (for Mozilla browsers).
https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/
(Full step-by-step installation instructions at that page.)
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