On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook finally appears before Congress. Franklin Foer, who has extensively chronicled the relationship between social-media companies and democracy, had a report yesterday on the phase-change in national power that his appearance might indicate. (And you can take an advance look at Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony, highly underwhelming in my view.)
Last week I ran a long dispatch by my friend Michael Jones, one of the inventors of Google Earth and former “Chief Technology Advocate” at Google, arguing the difference (as he had seen it) between the Google and the Facebook approach to customer data. In short: Both companies based their business on achieving a more and more precise understanding of who their users were. But, Jones said, there was a big difference in how they protected the information, Google being more intent on making sure the “Personally Identifiable Information,” PII, never left its own control.
His argument attracted a lot of discussion on Twitter, from some past and present employees of Facebook and some other figures. I’ve also heard many dissenting (and supporting) views.
The purpose of this post is to quote a few of the dissents, and a reply from Michael Jones.
First, from someone within the Facebook world:
[A relative who works for Facebook] told me: "The article is mostly false in regards to what advertisers get. It makes it seem like the advertiser knows your every move—as well as your kids. Obviously FB and Google have tons of PII, but it really only gets shared with advertisers in aggregate, not one by one. Unless the user volunteers it [i.e. fills out a form to provide their information to the advertiser]".
I agree with this. There are two cases to consider here: Facebook Advertisers and Facebook Applications.
Facebook Advertisers: When an advertiser uses FB (or Google) to post ads, very granular micro-targeting can be done in order to deliver the ads/content to a very specific audience. The advertiser doesn't know who the ads are getting delivered to; all of that information is held by FB (or Google). In this area, Google and FB are identical.
Facebook Applications: Facebook provides a mechanism to allow Facebook users to use their FB identify (i.e. username/pwd) to access other applications. This way, the user just has to remember their one identity. When the user first sets this up for a specific application, they are told that when doing this, their FB information is going to be provided to the application (and it lists the type of information that is going to be accessible by the app). Several years ago, the application could receive not just the user's information, but the information for the user's FB Friends as well. This type of access (friends) was discontinued.
from Technology | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2v0Wtdx
