Apropos of little (with apologies), it's remarkable how much less I loathe people since I nuked my Facebook account. I hadn't even been a regular user for years, but walking away--which involved changing my password to something I didn't save and an expiring email address rather than deleting my account--has just generally improved my attitude about both individuals I know and people in general.
I remember abandoning it about a decade ago when I was still in college. It was making me miserable constantly comparing myself to the highlights of other peoples lives. Unfortunately, it seems like the human mind has a tendency towards comparing oneself to others, and I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm took advantage of that. I stopped using it and instead focused on myself, I felt much happier afterwards.
It's fascinating seeing social media impact my friends and family. I deleted Facebook when it was being opened up to more than college students. HN is the only social media I use, if you want to define it that way.
My friends went through a phase in their 20's where they were comparing themselves to social media people. They all struggled with feeling inadequate.
I waited until my mid life crisis to do that. They're getting to do it again.
I still log on from time to time, about once a month, because my family uploads pics in a group after family events, and fb is the only place eveyone is on.
Everytime I open FB, and scroll a little, I feel like an outsider looking into a crazy circus of clown people. I don't get why others don't see what I see.
"I just graduated" - someone whose sibling I met 15 years ago, but whose name I wouldn't recognize without a picture attached
"So proud of my daughter" - a mother who attended a piano concert, couldn't wait to even get home before posting on fb, and will tell her family at dinner how many of her adult friends commented on it, whom none if her family care about.
<vacation selfie> - middle school classmate, or former colleague, who posts swiss climbing and bali surfing images every week, as if they had no life no work just money to burn.
"<long story>, so anyway, that's where I found this purse, please share and repost. You have to prove ownership by reciting the washing machine instructions on the label." - individual who has nothing happening in their life, so they make a blockbuster adventure out of someone's misfortune, rather than handing the purse to the reception in the restaurant where they found it.
Oh, and I always see ten new invitations from people, who would never contact me individually, to events those people know I would never attend, for the nth time despite me never having reacting before.l
Most of your examples are just people sharing things about their lives. If you don't know them or care about those things, isn't that on you to remove them from your Facebook, or just... ignore them? Where's the crazy clown circus exactly?
i thought you were gonna say something about boomers sharing the most detatched from reality posts about politics you've ever seen in your lifetime, but instead you appear to just be anti-social
My Facebook is mostly baby pictures and updates of my large extended family. I enjoy seeing my cousin's husband's dad post proudly that his son got a promotion. Why wouldn't you?
It allows me to look at individual posts which lets me search and view specific answers, but blocks the lists of posts. I get the benefit of Reddit without getting sucked into the time wasting feed.
New job (or browser), first look into Stack Overflow, glance through "Hot Network Questions", install uBO, new custom rule (via the Block Element tool), edit it to apply to their millions of subdomains...
I am curious why you chose that route to abandon your Facebook account rather than deactivate or delete it.
My concern in doing this would be that there is an authentic profile out there under my real name, now entirely (and effectively forever) beyond my control.
My mom probably has 5 imitator accounts (using her picture and name) and I have two (despite only getting on Facebook once or twice a year). Asking Facebook to delete them does not result in them being deleted.
(They don’t seem to do anything beyond gather some followers from her… maybe they’re DMing those followers through)
Their safeguards are all over the place. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
I once tried to create a new account with my real name in order to maintain Facebook Business Manager without using my private account. The new account was immediately locked until I added a phone number. I added my business number, which was immediately rejected. I added my personal number which immediately resulted in my private account being locked instead.
So I gave up and don’t use Facebook for my business.
I have an alternate profile that’s also under my real name which is 10+ years old, previously used to keep a distinction between friends and family, and it works just fine.
I have no idea… the accounts are obviously dupes… my mom is very active and they are not… I still get messages back from Facebook saying they’ve investigated and decided they are legit accounts.
(I have the same experience with my dupes, except I’m not active, though I am more active than my dupes)
Facebooks AI policing of content is a failure.
when I report totally unhinged blatant Nazi content, the response a few days later is always "we didn't find a violation, we realize this is disappointing."
Once I had changed my soc media passwords and encrypted them in a way that it would have taken several hours to bruteforce. Thus I could stay out of them until I felt being in a better place without losing them, and in the meantime I would not give in due to some impulse because in the time I would put an effort to decrypt them the impulse would be gone. That's the only thing that worked, just blocking access somehow or whatever did not work because it was too easy/fast to circumvent.
I use an app called Clearspace on iOS - it hooks into the screen time API and prompts you with a "breathe in / breathe out" timer before it allows you to unblock the app. It also lets you unblock it for a specific configurable time period, and auto-closes the app once that period expires.
I found it gives me just enough friction that most of the time, the impulse to open the app passes while I wait for the breath timer to run out. Simply using the OS screen time limit on its own is not really enough, because it's too easy to dismiss and override the block. Having a brief timer to help you consider whether my action is intentional or driven by anxiety or thoughtless boredom really helps.
Yeah, I tried that, and then friends and neighbors show up and they’re all blitzing you with the same catch phrases and you’re sitting there flabbergasted. I hope the hole your head is buried in is comfortable.
Its a soul cancer, all 'social' networks are. More like asocial. In theory they could be a real added value for whole mankind, but corporate money and endless greed of those in power there made it what it is.
To all ya working on making these misery machines even more efficient - you never feel ashamed of yourself for what you do? Is the money really worth losing respect for oneself and others as a good human being? Or it attracts same crowd as founder - asocial high performing sociopaths who couldn't care less?
I object more to the data collection and sale that allows Facebook to target ads like that, than the actual targeting of ads (which I would block anyway) personally.
Well sure I'm not saying it should've won the case, I just wish the claim was a bit different. (Or at least, than represented by the BBC, I haven't actually read it. If it was more about the data, then I wish the article would've done a better job so that more laypeople object to the right aspect.)
I'm quite comfortable knowing what they are and pointing out the early-2010s naive absolutist approach to privacy didn't work, hence where we are.
Regardless of whether people choose to conversate by telling me what to Google, instead of coming with curiosity and/or contributions.
The same thought process that leads to commentators being confused why Apple rejected someone's app for having a privacy policy of "I don't collect data" applies here.
I'm glad a less naive, and non-absolutist, approach has gotten tangible results, even if it'll take a few years for it to be common wisdom rather than disagreeable to look back on the 2010s and say so.
The article we're discussing, and attendant court decision, is about someone with a Facebook account and the ads in their "social media news feed", not someone without an account who was being profiled.
Did I miss something?
Tangentially, I'd also like to, again, gently, push back on the idea that it's conducive to community health to use an accusatory interlocution approach, especially one that relies on mind-reading to make the accusations.
My apologies if I misinterpreted, but this sentence:
"It's hard to legislate "you cannot collect any info about people ever", when people are free to choose to have an account with them."
Implied to me that you were saying that the information they were gathering was only coming from people who have an account with them. I don't have an account with them, and I'm pretty sure they're collecting all sorts of data on me (despite having every known Meta hostname in my /etc/hosts file pointing to 127.1).
But reading your sentence again, it looks like you were saying something a little different. It seems like I might have misunderstood your point at first glance. My apologies for the snark.
I'm not entirely sure how they could provide their service without that data collection. Much of the data is things like likes, groups joined, people followed, profile, comments, etc - all features people specifically use the service for.
"If Meta disagrees with O'Carroll's claims then why settle"
Meta and most companies will settle lawsuits when they believe the rewards of continuing the lawsuit outweigh the cost of settling the lawsuit. There is no connection to whether they disagree or agree with the claim of the lawsuit.
You only got that half right, fyi. Companies will choose to settle if they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trial. If they suspect they will win, they will absolutely pursue, because they can counter-sue in many areas. Anything close to 50/50 or less, they will settle in a heartbeat. They may even have a winning case, only to realize they are up against a law firm that will rip them apart.
"Companies will choose to settle if they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trial"
Companies will settle if the costs of going to trail outweigh the benefits like I said in my original comment. To clarify, the cost benefit analysis includes more than just money as things like reputation and precedent are important too. The reason for settling is sometimes because they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trail (meaning low potential benefit) but not always and this is not even the most common reason to settle. In the article being cited facebook is agreeing "to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight". This is an individual settlement and not a group settlement. Targeting ads at a single user has very low benefits for Facebook (tens to hundreds of dollars) which will not even pay for a single hour of a lawyer's time. It would be absurd for Facebook to counter sue Ms. O'Carrol and counter suits in general are quite rare.
To provide some approximate numbers:
- ~90% of cases settle
- ~1% of cases involve a counter suit
- Facebook legal cost for in house counsel appears to be in the range of $250 per hour equivalent
- Facebook average annual revenue per user in Europe is about $25
The full story here is that Ms. O'Carrol is a legal activist focused on Tech Surveillance (https://www.foxglove.org.uk/who-we-are/people/tanya-ocarroll...) and Facebook came up with a strategy to undermine her legal standing at minimal cost to themselves (if Facebook is not tracking O'Carrol personally for the purposes of serving ads then O'Carrol personally has no standing to sue). This is in effect a win for big tech but being spun by a PR machine as a win for data privacy.
- Ads is a substance, very invasive and toxic, that alters the behavior of its users. They consume ads unwillingly, when the latter is mixed into their drinks and food. Ads are often tailored to different groups of users.
- Advertisers are the manufacturers of ads. They do extensive research into how to make the ads more invasive, and pay a lot to get the ads delivered to the users.
- Content is a type of food that's designed to be highly addictive. It's mostly made of sugar, artificial colors to make it look appealing, and of certain chemicals to invoke strong emotions, usually negative. While content isn't designed to be toxic, it is. The prolonged use of content destroys the ability to focus and deregulates control of emotions. Its users become impulsive, with a very short attention span. These weaknesses make it easy to serve them ads.
- Big Tech is the international ads cartel. It creates so called social network platforms that attract users in billions, profiles and tags them, manufactures content tailored to different groups, and lets advertisers serve ads for a fee.
Because this entire industry works at the mental and emotional levels, as of 2025 its activity isn't considered a crime.
It's crept up gradually on people how harmful the "personalization" model is.
My pet peeve is that many community organizations (such as a board game club and a game development club at my Uni) use Facebook and Instagram as their only communication channels. That kind of platform opens you up to so much bullshit, bullying and cringe (all these girls who look the same who supposedly want to follow me) You might be sharing content which is really wholesome but you have no idea what is getting served right next to it. It's rare to see an organization like this one
where you won't find anything that isn't about running, where moderations can squash things that aren't relevant without cries of "censorship", etc. I wouldn't even mind if a site like that had ads for running shoes or Wegmans or local car dealerships but personalized ads and other recommendations can be so toxic and not things you want associated with your organization or your brand.
I can understand small businesses relying on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because they may not have the resources to provide a perfect solution to everyone.
My country’s consulate in NYC posts important news only to Facebook. That is a problem.
I suppose I see the appeal, but for 99% of small businesses, I want your name, address, hours, and phone number, and a list of services you provide (e.g., if you're a restaurant, have a sample menu even if yours is variable; if you're a plumber, tell me how big of a job you can handle; if you're a store, show me the kind of things you sell). A simple static web page can handle that. I don't expect Janice's Flowers to have a site that rivals a multinational corporation.
I really think we should have a EU-wide ban on targeted advertising. Targeted advertising only works if it is opt-out. Ask random people on the street wether or not they want to be tracked and have their data sold and the overwhelming majority will tell you no.
Yes please, and remove offline-public-spaces advertising too.
I don’t care if the lost revenue means worse roads and some companies bankrupted, I just want to see the tree behind the billboards. I’m tired to fight my own mind when commuting between walls of videos ads. Targeted or not, 2025 ads are a blight.
Billboards... nowadays you have billboard sized LED screens flashing animated ads... Many ads turn "creative" using bright flashing text, or strong white/red light. Some cunts are convinced they're just doing their job installing this shit or selling the airtime.
It probably didn’t influence the judgement much (if at all). But the relevance to the story is in the next paragraph and pretty straightforward
> The Meta spokesperson said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service to UK users and would "share further information in due course."
It doesn't, but afaik the reason they introduced the pricing model was that they fell foul of EU data laws. They also issued some PR this morning suggesting this was something they were looking at for the UK, so perhaps it's indicative of their direction of travel.
I'm glad to see a court agreeing that targeting specific characteristics of people and then Facebook using their knowledge of individuals to serve them ads is targeting specific individuals.
Slight tangent but while this is bad with disclosed ads, I think it's even worse with algorithmic feeds. A lot of users don't realize that not only their feed is heavily personalized, but the "top comments" are also selected just for them.
This bias will be implemented in LLMs sooner or later. Combined with the current misunderstanding of "AI" by the general population, it makes me worried about the future of misinformation.
Cambridge Analytica/SCL/Meta are knowingly in the personalised propaganda business - political behaviour modification tailored to individual emotional triggers, sweetened with personally irresistible content that looks harmless but exists to hook users on the real payload.
"And here's some more content about your favourite band/movie/TV show/influencer. And now, some reels. Aren't those cats cute? But anyway. Here's a reel that looks unobjectionable but subtly makes a political point you should definitely think about. Would you like to know more?"
AI has the potential to make this much more effective.
Certain noteworthy historical figures from Germany would have been absolutely delighted.
From the caption I thought there was someone (like ex-boyfriend) who targeted ill-meaning ads (like an ad for funeral services) against the woman, but it turns out it was not so bad.
Luckily, ads that steal people's credit card's info are allowed and not removed by Facebook even after multiple reports. That's how you become one of the richest man?
In this case, ad redirected to a copy of a famous apparel store. When clicking to pay for item, the site would redirect to what looked like a genuine auto parts store that was probably hacked. You would enter the card data there. What got me was that I was tired and the fact that fb opened the websites on their embedded browser. At the time at least, the browser would not show the web address so you would not know that you are on a fake website, or on a website that clearly had "auto parts" in it's name.
I didn't lost any money because I blocked the card. In about more than a month I receive a notification grom my bank that an ATM transaction was tried but it failed.
> Facebook and Instagram cost a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and these services are free for British consumers because of personalised advertising.
It could just as well be free without personalized ads but with regular advertisement.
As far as I know Facebook is extremely profitable.
As far as ads and Europe are concerned, I'm astonished how Kaufland and Lidl get away with distributing weekly unsolicited physical leaflets to every doorstep within certain radius of their shops which is the case at least in Poland and Germany. I do not want to be on their blacklist or whitelist, simply do not fucking deliver me this paper okay?
> She said the adverts she got "suddenly started changing within weeks to lots of baby photos and other things - ads about babies and pregnancy and motherhood".
> "I just found it unnerving - this was before I'd even told people in my private life, and yet Facebook had already determined that I was pregnant," she continued.
Facebook likely knew she was pregnant by covertly eavesdropping on her life via her phones microphone. When these companies started using their apps to eavesdrop on your entire life via your phone, I immediately deleted them. No way is that creeptastic shit allowed in my life. I mean, imagine talking about doritos in a nostalgic context only to have amazon suggest you buy them when you open the app. Deleted. The only apps on my phone are banking and utility. Bye Felicia.
> Facebook likely knew she was pregnant by covertly eavesdropping on her life via her phones microphone
That's quite an assumption to make. The very famous example of data tracking and creepy correlations is the story about the supermarket sending baby ads to a household based on nothing more than their purchasing habits.
People change the way they act in measurable ways for much less intense psychological events than pregnancy. Just the grocery prices you look up (and that doesn't include things like pregnancy tests) is enough to determine likelihood of pregnancy, let alone an app you take with you all day and possibly spend hours scrolling through. The amount of data you're passively giving off to these apps is enormous.
I have yet to see any evidence of spying through microphones by large companies. I know some small ad network got caught doing so, but not the big suspects everyone is (rightfully) afraid of. The Google phone I'm carrying would've spawned much more relevant ads than "buy a new €200k electric car" and "where to apply for welfare" right after each other if it actually listened in.
Spying through your microphone ala 1960's FBI wiretap is not worse than reading credit card history, location data, google searches, etc. Sure, it sounds more spooky, but probably they would have less data if they only listened through the microphone. That's probably an improvement over our current situation.
>That's quite an assumption to make. The very famous example of data tracking and creepy correlations is the story about the supermarket sending baby ads to a household based on nothing more than their purchasing habits.
While a fun anecdote, it really shouldn't be taken seriously as something that actually happened.
Did you actually read that Medium post? It's idle FUD and speculation that the author of the original 2012 Forbes article lied about the Target incident, without anything to substantiate that claim. It's also evidently written by someone working in data science at Meta, who would naturally have incentive to deny the reality of their industry.
Most of the Medium comments are calling them out on this:
>Title: "Target didn’t figure out a teenager was pregnant before her father did, and that one article that said they did was silly and bad."
A clear assertion. A solid claim.
One of the first paragraphs: "I won’t belabor this since we can’t actually know, but the anecdote about the father calling the store and talking to the manager is probably just not true. "
So, a person who contradicts himself right in the beginning uses articles that are being hyperbolic as proof that the articles got it all wrong. Smells a bit like double standards, no?
And the point of the conversation is less about accuracy of the findings and more about such models being in place.
I mean, Facebook did this, right? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-categorize-users-...
And I'm not sure but there was this little company, very obscure, not sure anyone heard of it. Cambridge Analytica? Again, very obscure.
>Did you actually read that Medium post? It's idle FUD and speculation that the author of the original 2012 Forbes article lied about the Target incident, without anything to substantiate that claim. It's also evidently written by someone working in data science at Meta, who would naturally have incentive to deny the reality of their industry.
Did you? From the article:
>[...]The Forbes writer who rehashes the anecdote even describes it as “so good that it sounds made up.” Indeed.
>But this is an easy criticism and beside the point, so for the remainder of this article, let’s suppose that the anecdote is true.
The bulk of the objections in the article are that a single instance of Target correctly predicting a pregnancy isn't enough evidence to conclude they have some sort of a galaxy-brained AI that can predict pregnancies before the mothers even know. It's far more plausible it randomly guessed someone was pregnant, and got lucky.
The comment you quoted has the same issue. It gets way too hung up on the first part, ignores everything else the author wrote, and then tries to move the goalposts to "the conversation is [...] more about such models being in place". That's a huge cope. It's fairly obvious how concerned we should be about such models is proportional to how accurate they are, and the author is trying to harness that with the Target anecdote. Nobody would care if the story was "24 year old man got sent ads for Zyn, without telling Target that he smoked".
The target one always seemed like bullshit to me. They don’t have any magic algorithms. There were likely some hard tells that she was pregnant. As in something like a doctor’s office told them.
I worked in computer infra stuff at Target at the time.
For one, they were incredibly paranoid about customer data privacy at the time, because of the famous incident of an unknown entity siphoning off data from some of their in store payment terminals for an unknown length of time. They instituted barriers and strict need to know basis access to everything touching customer history.
The amount of internal systems and departments that would have had to cooperate in order to start trying to sell a customer pregnancy related products because another arm of the company detected an individual customer was pregnant just boggles my mind, it could not and would happen at Target.
I have heard numerous anecdotes from multiple people I know of them being served targeted ads shortly after saying something similar aloud with a device microphone nearby. You're right that there are a lot more ways than a microphone for ad targeting to work, but I wouldn't necessarily dismiss that guess as wrong.
Why not dismiss it? Like you say, the targeting could work in legal ways. That would be feasible and sensible. But what makes you doubt it is that you listened to a bunch of dweebs with superstitions?
For what it's worth, I don't think there's any hard evidence that big companies are doing this. Aside from the technical difficulties of constantly listening to 1+ B mobile devices and running speech-to-text, it'd also be a legal quagmire.
What's more likely happening is far more boring: humans as a whole are very predictable, and the metadata that Facebook et al have access to is more than enough to identify these patterns.
To _really_ try and test this, you could download the Facebook (or Amazon or whatever) app, and (within earshot of your phone) consistently talk about some completely random purchaseable item that you have no intent to purchase and have never otherwise indicated you have an interest in. Chances are you will not get ads for it.
To make it less likely you pick something that is subconsciously on your mind (and thus able to be picked up via your metadata), try playing word association games to pick the product in question. E.g. banana > yellow > raincoat > weather > digital thermometer
> To _really_ try and test this, you could download the Facebook (or Amazon or whatever) app, and (within earshot of your phone) consistently talk about some completely random purchaseable item that you have no intent to purchase and have never otherwise indicated you have an interest in. Chances are you will not get ads for it.
That's the trick isn't it. How do you choose a random purchasable item without indicating interest in.
Is it because it was something you saw recently, but don't want to buy? How many (targetting) similar people near you also saw that and may want to buy?
How much is that ad being shown to you now, but you hadn't noticed because you weren't interested in the product?
It's certainly possible to carefully craft an experiment, but it's not easy. And a poorly crafted expirement won't show much.
Source? Because so far this claim has been debunked every time.
I assume you are aware how Android and iOS have a visual indicator to show that the microphone is active? Have you analyzed any network traffic that included unexpected voice samples? Please, explain yourself.
It's nonsense, only mentioned in some random deck with no technical details, the article says as much. So probably just a hopeful middle manager that let their fantasies get the better of them. Got an actual source?
CMG Responds to Reports About Discontinued Active Listening Product
As we stated before, CMG businesses have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement. The information referenced in recent stories is based on outdated materials for a product that CMG Local Solutions no longer sells (although the product never listened to customers, it has long been discontinued to avoid misperception). CMG Local Solutions markets a wide range of advertising tools. Like other advertising companies, some of those tools include third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by digital publishers and other applications and then packaged and resold to data servicers. Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users. This data can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
In particular, let me highlight this sentence:
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.
To me, this sounds like "We did not spy ourselves, but we bought data from other people who did the spying for us, and that was legal because some user checked a checkbox somewhere".
Those indicators aren't trustworthy. If your phone is configured to respond to "Hey Google", it will do so even when you say it while that indicator isn't lit up.
If the Tensor security chip works on the Google side the same as Apple there is dedicated hardware specific to detecting the trigger phrases. No sound is processed at a software level until that security chip requests further processing at which point it shows the fake LED. The LED itself is added to the graphics layer in a way that cannot be hidden or obscured.
It is always a question of trust, but after more than a decade of phones they are pretty determined to earn trust. I have not seen any trustworthy reports of a secret always on microphone. Just the occasional recording made after a misheard trigger word or button which is an issue being further secured year by year.
> That doesn't explain how facebook (google's competitor) got ahold of that info, or how people with iPhones are being eavesdropped on.
It can easily explain how people with iPhones are being eavesdropped on: "those indicators aren't trustworthy". According to this theory, the microphone in an iPhone is active despite the indicator not being displayed. That's identical to the Android theory.
To extend the theory to Facebook, you'd need to assume one of these:
(1) The unreliability of the indicator on Android is a matter of incompetence on the part of Google, and Facebook is exploiting it.
(2) Google has a privileged stealth-microphone-access permission, and Facebook has negotiated for access to it.
Go reverse the operating system and you'll find this is just a paranoid fantasy. Many others have done so already, so you can also just hit up google and find their analyses.
