Facebook has a lot more data about us than it lets on—and its tools for providing ‘complete control’ don’t do enough
When you request and download your data from Facebook—a feature Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly referred to in answers to questions about control—this stored browsing history isn’t there.
That is reasonable, says Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook ad-targeting product manager and current Facebook gadfly. Facebook targets ads based on an abstraction derived from your browsing history——an abstraction such as your interest in golf. When you download your data, Facebook tells you what it thinks your interests are but doesn’t provide the specific evidence for why it thinks that.
“If you downloaded this file [of sites Facebook knows you visited], it would look like a quarter to half your browsing history,” Mr. Garcia-Martinez adds.
Another reason Facebook doesn’t give you this data: The company claims recovering it from its databases is difficult. In one case, it took Facebook 106 days to deliver to a Belgian mathematician, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, all the data the company had gathered on him through its most common tracking system. Facebook doesn’t say how long it stores this information.
When you opt out of interest-based ads, the system that uses your browsing history to target you, Facebook continues tracking you anyway. It just no longer uses the data to show you ads.
There is more data Facebook collects that it doesn’t explain. It encourages users to upload their phone contacts, including names, phone numbers and email addresses. Facebook never discloses if such personal information about you has been uploaded by other users from their contact lists, how many times that might have happened or who might have uploaded it.
.. There’s also a form of location data you can’t control unless you delete your whole account. This isn’t the app’s easy-to-turn-off GPS tracking. It’s the string of IP addresses, a form of device identification on the internet, that can show where your computer or phone is each time it connects to Facebook.
Location is a powerful signal for Facebook, allowing it to infer how you are connected to other people, even if you don’t identify them as family members, co-workers or lovers.
.. All this data, plus the elements Facebook lets you control, can potentially reveal everything from your wealth to whether you are depressed.
Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and a host of smaller companies that compete with and support the giants in the digital ad space have become addicted to the kind of information that helps microtarget ads.
Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It.
what we most need now is a new generation of social media platforms that are fundamentally different in their incentives and dedication to protecting user data. Barring a total overhaul of leadership and business model, Facebook will never be that platform.
.. In Facebook’s case, we are not speaking of a few missteps here and there, the misbehavior of a few aberrant employees. The problems are central and structural, the predicted consequences of its business model. From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal, maximizing the harvest of data and human attention. Its promises to investors have demanded an ever-improving ability to spy on and manipulate large populations of people. Facebook, at its core, is a surveillance machine, and to expect that to change is misplaced optimism.
.. If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. The conflicts are too formidable, the pressure to amass data and promise everything to advertisers is too strong for even the well-intentioned to resist.
.. the real challenge is gaining a critical mass of users.
.. Facebook, with its 2.2 billion users, will not disappear, and it has a track record of buying or diminishing its rivals (see Instagram and Foursquare).
.. Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and it manages nearly as much traffic as Facebook, on a much smaller budget. An “alt-Facebook” could be started by Wikimedia, or by former Facebook employees, many of whom have congregated at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit for those looking to change Silicon Valley’s culture.
.. If today’s privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media.
Why the Outrage?
William Davies on Cambridge Analytica
If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.
.. It’s true that Cambridge Analytica was recruited to work on the Trump campaign, though not necessarily because of its Machiavellian brilliance. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, was on the board of the company at the time, and probably tossed it a contract for some data analysis so as to keep things between friends.
.. First, there is no firm evidence that Cambridge Analytica provided consultancy services to any of the major players in the EU referendum of 2016. Nix initially bragged in an article that it had, but confessed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in February this year that the article had been drafted by a ‘slightly overzealous PR consultant’.
.. Second, there is not – and cannot be – any evidence that it swung the election for Trump (by the same token, it isn’t strictly provable that it didn’t), though unsurprisingly the company claims otherwise. This still appears painful for Clinton herself to accept. Interviewed for one of the Channel 4 reports, she speaks of Cambridge Analytica’s ‘massive propaganda effort [which] affected the thought processes of voters’. And yet data analysis is at the heart of modern political campaigning. Clinton, after all, preferred to study data on Michigan from the comfort of her Brooklyn campaign office than actually to visit the state, even as panicking Michigan Democrats pleaded with her to spend time there in the final weeks. If things had turned out differently, there would no doubt have been star-struck puff pieces on the bleeding edge data analytics that were behind the election of America’s first female president.
.. no one, surely, will be surprised to discover that data collected in one arena is put to work in another. Using data in novel (and secretive) ways is virtually the governing principle of the digital economy – what Shoshana Zuboff has termed ‘surveillance capitalism’, and Nick Srnicek calls ‘platform capitalism’.
.. It’s worth remembering that throughout the 1990s, the internet was viewed as a threat to capitalism as much as an opportunity. Napster was the iconic example. It wasn’t clear where the profits lay, once information was abundant and individual anonymity was the norm. What changed, as Zuboff and Srnicek both explore in different ways, was that the internet began to be treated as a surveillance device of potentially global proportions: cheaper, better or free services were provided on condition that the ‘user’ would be tracked in everything they did and anchored in their offline identity. The fact that most tech giants made – and in Uber’s case still make – vast losses for the first few years of their existence is integral to this strategy. People must be lured into using a service and then kept using it by whatever means necessary; only later is this power converted into revenue.
.. The second aspect of the recent scandal is grubbier but ultimately less significant. If its own sales pitch is to be believed (an ‘if’ that grows larger by the day), Cambridge Analytica likes to play dirty.
.. Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically different from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics.
.. a displacement of horror that really stems from something deeper. Part of that must lie with Trump and Trumpism. A terrible event must surely have been delivered by equally terrible means.
.. Cambridge Analytica looks conveniently like a smoking gun, primarily because it has repeatedly bragged that it is one. Nix and Turnbull do for the events of 2016 what ‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre, former Goldman Sachs banker, and Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, former boss of RBS, did for the banking crisis of 2008, providing grotesque personalities on which to focus anger and alarm.
.. But as with the financial crisis, the circus risks distracting from the real institutional and political questions, in this case concerning companies such as Facebook and the model of capitalism that tolerates, facilitates and even celebrates their extensive and sophisticated forms of data harvesting and analysis.
.. Just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to be levelled at Silicon Valley should be ‘leave it in our heads.’ The real villain here is an expansionary economic logic that insists on inspecting ever more of our thoughts, feelings and relationships. The best way to thwart this is the one Silicon Valley fears the most: anti-trust laws. Broken into smaller pieces, these companies would still be able to monitor us, but from disparate perspectives that couldn’t easily (or secretly) be joined up
Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance
Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
.. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.
.. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?
.. the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.
.. To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities
.. There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.
.. Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.
They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project... MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve.
.. the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley.
.. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.
.. The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online.
.. Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?
.. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone.
.. Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing
.. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.
The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
.. The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.
NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin.
.. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.
Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.
.. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
.. most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.
.. in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google.
.. the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.
.. In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.