Man, I try not to think about these things (how much I'm getting tracked, or worse, how much my kids are getting tracked), but it's good to be reminded of the sad truth every now and then. Thanks, jwz.
I don't really get the pointed outrage. But this isn't hugely different than anything anybody else does.
- Individual products like AdRoll and Perfect Audience let you track users and show them ads. Ever been to a site and had their ads pop up everywhere afterwards? Ever looked at a product then gotten ads for _just that product_? Yeah, that.
- Google lets you track conversions based on a ton of information. What Google ads users viewed, sure, but also referring site, region, demographic info. Hell, it'll tell you which pages you visited before buying. Everything but the search term you used ... unless the referrer was AdWords.
- Emails all send you unique links, which allow you to do conversion tracking. Hell, you can even embed retargeting pixels in emails, so when you open a company's email, they can serve you ads based on that knowledge.
Every possible way that tech can track you, companies are tracking and advertising with. I get that it's kind of scary, but it's not just Facebook, and a lot of it is the digital equivalent of reading body language on people in your store.
So, yeah, run an ad blocker. But not just for Facebook.
Maybe this is a bit off topic, but I think trjordan's point was really that the tracking/retargeting industry is productized though. Google, Facebook and others ultimately serve as platforms for ads as well as providing tracking software. Meanwhile, companies like Marketo provide pretty advanced tracking/attribution data to the companies that use them. They specifically enable tying device IDs harvested through mobile apps that use their tracking SDKs to be linked with other browsing and email behavior to build extensively customized ad campaigns targeted at specific behavior patterns.
Speaking of retargeting, something fascinating happened to me yesterday: I was using Chrome, and searched for some particular product (e.g. "buy [product] [city]" in the address bar) to see who had it locally available.
After opening a few tabs, I switched back to the address bar and started typing "[store name] " (where [store name] is a department store that sells all sorts of things.)
"[store name] [product]" was the very first suggested search result in the address-bar drop-down.
I don't think the suggested query service includes Adwords results. This would suggest, then, that Google added a retargeting feature for its own sake, to help users; or, in other words, retargeting is something that just falls out of optimizing suggestions for relevancy!
>"Well, because that guy pointed out a bug without also blowing sunshine up my ass, I'm going to just leave our product buggy."
Has this guy worked anywhere before? (Yes, it's a joke, I know who Zawinski is). I am sure there is a faction in Facebook who thinks their filter system needs an overhaul, and I'm sure this post will go on a big pile of "why" somewhere. However, if you're asking an engineer who works near (but probably not on) something to go talk to another team, you need to be somewhat polite. Because you're not asking them to do their job - you're asking them to go tell a colleague that they aren't doing theirs. You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best.
I don't think he's a hypocrite for using and hating Facebook. That's just life. I think he's forgotten that people, even Facebook employees, have ideas and agendas other than his own and you need to be diplomatic if you want them to serve yours.
A long time ago, jwz used to use Justin.tv for the DNA Lounge webcast, and I used to use his rants as evidence that someone out there cared about a given bug and we should prioritize fixing it.
If anything I think it helped that his rants were rude, since that made it clear how much he cared about the problems.
Startups are different though. What you wrote is probably a lot more true of a company the size of Facebook.
You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best.
What kind of broken ass backwards corporate culture requires expending political capital just to report a bug across teams? If someone is letting pettiness degrade the quality of the product like that, they're bad at their job.
Complaining in public and having insiders dismiss it for bad reasons probably serves his agenda better than getting it fixed. A fix from insiders in this case will probably just get this one thing through, or maybe whitelist the account for more careful attention in the future, while bad public attention has the potential for getting them to fix the whole system.
If you feel trapped inside Facebook b/c your friends keep you there, you can start a Campaign for your favorite new/open social network on https://www.iWouldDo.it/ and start having your friends migrate.
This new tool specifically offers a way to beat the "prison effect" of products that are subject to the network effect.
I still think it's futile for most people. Like a lot of other people, I begrudgingly use Facebook because it's an easy way to engage in "low priority" communication with lots of friends and family. Mass emails or texting is too demanding whereas the Facebook style of communication you can take or leave when you feel like logging in to read random posts.
The issue you touched on won't be easy to fight. I think that as long as these social platforms don't need to use any common protocol (like email), the natural state is to have a single major player with smaller ones maintaining pressure to improve and add new features.
I'm apparently one of the only people who likes Google+ for this sort of thing but no matter how hard I decided to bug and annoy people, there's no way I'd convince enough of them to migrate all of that stuff over there. Same goes for any other competitor. And unless you want to maintain redundant profiles for more effort (and more of the unavoidable marketing stuff) you can't just strike out on your own without defeating the purpose.
The fact that Facebook was the first to get your mom and your professor and your boss and your mailman to sign up means that they've got an incredible advantage. There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else, especially as resistant to change as many are.
And unlike email, I can't just switch to G+ and keep bullshitting with my friends on Facebook like I switched to Gmail and kept emailing friends at Yahoo or Hotmail. Imagine if in order to change email providers, you had to convince everyone else to switch as well. We'd still be using our AOL addresses from 1993.
> There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else
Not in one day. It's always a process. And with a system like iWouldDo.it, you "switch hypothetically" (using a pledge with a condition) and when your condition is met (i.e. "Alice, Bob and Chris are ready to switch, too"), you switch for real. Which results in other peoples' conditions being met, which makes them switch as well, etc. etc.
Instead of embedding Facebook's "Like" button, I prefer to use the fb share URL to create my own "share" button that does not have fb tracking code. If I want to show a share count next to the button, I can make a call to graph.facebook.com with the URL and then show that number.
I can't think of a reason to put a fb Like button on a web page anymore.
So we are tracked by facebook if we are logged in and see the like button on a different page. Does this mean that other sites are doing the same, if we see a button for their sites, like twitter or p interest? Or is facebook the main perpetrator here?
I don't know about Twitter or Pinterest's tracking, but I do know that most ad networks will also track you as much as they can between all the sites.
There are several products that help deal with this, but they don't get nearly enough attention. The one I'm familiar with is PrivacyFix [1], but there are several others that should also be investigated if this matters to you.
They're at least passively tracking, if not actively tracking. Your browser visits those pages and requests files from their server that contain the relevant code. And your browser sends along certain information in order to make that request. And this includes widgets like the list of a user's Pins or Tweets or whatever, not just sharing buttons.
Normally I'm in favor of the "don't use it, then" approach. But it doesn't work with Facebook, because you're on it whether you want to be or not. Even if you've studiously avoided using it, you most likely have friends who use it and have given Facebook enough knowledge to identify and track you.
True story. I created FB account in 2012 - when I needed to log in so I could access their API documentation.
And what did I find? There was a 90% complete profile waiting for me. All my friends were already lined up, my personal data was already there, my photos were already there.
> I don't like facebook either, but can't we just not use something without making a huge sensational scene about it?
We are social creatures who could never survive alone without communicating information about how to interact with our environment. Cyberspace is now our environment.
Even that crazy Luddite in a cabin in the woods learned to skin a deer from his Grandpaw.
