Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching

https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection

by turadg • 8 years ago

226 49 8 years ago

You're not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about how this was "not that easy" the real reason probably lies in this bit near the end:

"Why can’t Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely? Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook’s business depends on collecting this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream."

As long as Facebook's business model involves monetizing your data, they are going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.

fumar2• 8 years ago

Advertisers wouldn't want to hear that part of their campaign attribution (on-site conversions) were null because users have the option to remove browsing behavior. Facebook's people-based marketing is why advertisers use them.

fumar2• 8 years ago

I should add context: Facebook has ~20% of the digital advertising marketshare in the US (2018). They are #2 to Google. What both of these two titans give marketers (individual teams within a larger org) is something to brag about. How? Run a campaign for display or video ads in FB or Google and make sure you can tie it to a site action (ideally a conversion of some type). Let that run for a month and then give yourself a big pat on the back. You just drove some cost per action (conversion) number that with some tweaks can improve month over month. Your marketing org is now optimizing! yes! Drive those sales or site visits.

It is a great approach for marketing teams. They grow, look good, claim to drive revenue, try to impact consumer behavior, but it all is dependent on Facebook's (insert any ad platform partner) attribution. So yeah, Facebook will not mess with its attribution. It would make a big mess for both its business and it's client's business.

Marketers's should measure the incremental impact of their marketing buys (get their data science team to manage the study). They will be surprised to see how much display banners or video ads are impacting consumer behavior. Stay away from modeled approaches, try to grade the reporting yourself.

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

The Upton Sinclair quote has never been more relevant:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Zarath• 8 years ago

Funny thing is, clearing browsing history is a signal in itself. It can specify a certain type of person and/or a specific life event that triggered this.

EpicEng• 8 years ago

And if/when the feature launches I would not at all be surprised to seeing this headline down the road:

"Facebook Clear History doesn't fully erase user data, information later sold to a group of Zombie Nazis bent on world domination."

denzil_correa2• 8 years ago

And it is mentioned as such in the article too that "Clear History =/= Delete History"

There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.

amaccuish• 8 years ago

"Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user it belongs to"

I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.

marricks• 8 years ago

“[Stores] by date and time” doesn’t preclude having user information in there either! It’s the perfect non-answer.

stochastic_monk• 8 years ago

It’s like saying the contents of a dictionary don’t matter because they’re sorted lexicographically.

adonnjohn• 8 years ago

Imagine the legal liability if they found legitimately dangerous trends! They probably have simple ways to reference the IP address of where that data came from; they probably have a user id correlated to each data record. Their policy is one of those 'technically the truth' statements that is gravely overshadowed by other events that have transpired.

isostatic• 8 years ago

Yup, it's in a big spreadsheet. Column A is the default sort, and that's Date/Time. Column B is the user, and they don't sort by column B, that would be crazy!

dictum• 8 years ago

AUDITOR: So that's how you store these visits... wait, why are the values next to the URLs so... strange?

ALICE: Column A is the URL. Column B is just a token we use to ensure it's a valid entry, and it's the default sort. As you can see, it's gibberish. No personally identifiable information.

JANE: We deriv...

[JAKE hits JANE with his elbow, discreetly]

JAKE: We derive great pleasure from helping people connect with each other, is what Jane's saying. And that's something we truly believe in.

jlarocco• 8 years ago

You would think they'd know how to access the data by now given all of their experience using it to target ads to specific users...

aiiane• 8 years ago

Reading between the lines, what this statement actually means is likely "we have a lot of this user data in flat logs, which makes it hard to delete a single individual's data out of the logs, so we need to move from flat user-agnostic logs to per-user structured data".

jandrese2• 8 years ago

Given their business model of sifting through and selling your data this doesn't seem all that likely that they've left it in gigantic combined flatfiles.

It seems more likely to me that yes, they could do a DELETE FROM BROWSING_HISTORY WHERE USER = "%S", but that's not their business model. Instead they have to add a column to the database that flags data that will be shown to the user or not, and then go through every part of the site where the data might be visible and add a check for that flag. It's a lot more work, and worse they have to get it right the first time because people will be angry if there is a leak somewhere and their supposedly deleted data is visible.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 8 years ago

I did some parsing of their other dumpster-fire PR-speak today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714352

At this rate, I predict a John Oliver segment taking apart their abuse of the English language in about a month.

code_duck6• 8 years ago

‘Stored by’ is a bit of a trick or a joke as far as a databases. What would that even mean, to a technical person? The primary key? One could say it is ‘stored by’ any field that you could query for. Obviously they have the records associated with individuals, considering that’s the focus of their business.

chillacy6• 8 years ago

It’s probably not a database if I had to guess, given the volume of event stream data. At my current company we store event streams as time organized flat files in HDFS for analytics. Our site isn’t as big as facebooks but it measures into the low petabytes across all time.

So how you store the data is important in a post-sql world.

aimdroid• 8 years ago

'Clear History' goes against Facebook's business model. They will never release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be something false only to serve PR.

jliptzin• 8 years ago

Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don’t see what’s so hard. I’d imagine most people don’t care that much and the ones that do have an option now.

michaelt• 8 years ago

Someone on HN explained the problem to me like so:

Assume Facebook brings in $10/user/month in ad revenue.

But the distribution is uneven; $50/user/month for rich westerners, $6/user/month for poor people in poor countries who outnumber westerners 10:1.

If you offer everyone the chance to go ad-free for $10/month, your income from rich westerners drops from $50 to $10 and your total revenue drops to $6.36/user/month.

thepangolino• 8 years ago

They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 8 years ago

That would not work, because of the following (quite neat) problem:

The users that are most valuable to advertisers are those with a lot of disposable income.

If you offer an ad-free experience for the value of the average user, far more of these high-income, high-value users would subscribe, both because they have the money and because they tend to be more privacy-conscious.

Imagine (simplified) losing ad income from the top 50% of your users for the price of your average user, while being left with only the bottom 50% to show ads to.

ghostly_s• 8 years ago

Put the opt-out price on a sliding scale that's adjusted quarterly per actual loss in revenue from users who drop out of the pool.

denzil_correa2• 8 years ago

There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.

I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.

hadrien01• 8 years ago

Is that GDPR compliant?

nawgszy• 8 years ago

Surely we can't be expected to believe they don't have techniques to re-identify that data.

I suppose that's the subtext of what you wrote, though.

uptown• 8 years ago

I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples:

1. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device's clipboard and transmit this information to your servers?

2. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device, even if the user hasn't explicitly selected the image for upload?

I'm sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent these in ways I'm not familiar with but it'd amaze me if companies weren't grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.

rhegart• 8 years ago

I’m pretty sure they did multiple times. Even recently in the past year. They just lie and there seems to be no consequences for it. At least after 2012 when they lied the government can go after them but they’re still looking into it.

tareqak• 8 years ago

Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-atto...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180

javaIsGreat• 8 years ago

facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)

Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching

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