Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching(recode.net)
recode.net
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
9 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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.
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."
"Facebook Clear History doesn't fully erase user data, information later sold to a group of Zombie Nazis bent on world domination."
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.
> 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.
At Facebook's granularity of data collection it would be almost trivial to identify a user even if that user's name is not connected with the data.
> "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.
I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.
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".
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.
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.
Or, maybe, making a product which has to deal with legacy code for billions of users is actually difficult?
Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?
Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?
> Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can’t be that evil, right?
People keep saying this and they keep being surprised.
People keep saying this and they keep being surprised.
I don't know man when they wanted to generate a highlight video of new year's resolution for each user and they went from 0 to executed in a few days and blogged about it they seemed very capable people.
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I would call supporting genocide for years and helping to drown democracy in a number of countries (Hungary, Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka among others) pretty fucking evil.
Blowing vile, antisemitic dog whistles from the very top level also doesn't do much in order to improve their image
Blowing vile, antisemitic dog whistles from the very top level also doesn't do much in order to improve their image
This is event steam data, at what large tech company do you work for where you can possibly store that in a SQL database? At my current company our clickstream data is in the petabytes, Facebook has orders of magnitude more. It’s probably stored in HDFS or something, not too far from chronological flat files.
It's probably not just stored as gigantic combined flatfiles, but imagine what would happen if they launched this feature and it only actually deleted some copies of the user's browsing history.
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.
At this rate, I predict a John Oliver segment taking apart their abuse of the English language in about a month.
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!
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.
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.
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...
The amount of data they collect surely they stream much of it directly to log files. Those log files are not by user. You try reading and rewriting petabytes of data out of S3 to remove lines matching a specified ID.
“[Stores] by date and time” doesn’t preclude having user information in there either! It’s the perfect non-answer.
It’s like saying the contents of a dictionary don’t matter because they’re sorted lexicographically.
‘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.
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.
So how you store the data is important in a post-sql world.
I’m sure they’re not but using a standard relational database too. They obviously extract the information and work with it, so whether it’s ‘a database’ is basically an implementation detail. For the purposes of this discussion, a flat file is essentially a database. A CSV has fields and is easily made searchable.
The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
(Minus the extraneous ‘but’ in the first sentence)
Thanks for clarifying. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation. I work with "big data". I'm not sure what facebook is at but something's not adding up here because the statement
> For the purposes of this discussion, a flat file is essentially a database. A CSV has fields and is easily made searchable
absolutely doesn't apply to the type of data I'm thinking about. (Data in the petabytes+ is not easily made searchable, indexing isn't common, joins are basically impossible at scale. Instead the data is partitioned on a specific field which makes it fast to access by that field but slow to access on others. Usually for this type of data that field would be a timestamp, but it could also technically be partitioned by a userid which makes it easier to split on user at the cost of splitting by time, since you now need to search all partitions in order to find a time range. )
So either I'm mistaken about the nature of facebook's data (I assumed it was clickstream data, like "User X clicked Box Y at Time Z with Metadata A"), or I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that statement.
Also
> The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
I can access clickstream data by a specific individual user with a 10 minute Mapreduce job, but re-partitioning the data is going to be a production.
Apologize if you already know all of this, but I saw a lot of people making references to SQL in this extended thread which strikes me as strange because even sql-frontends to analytics backends like HIVE get compiled down to 10 minute mapreduce jobs, it's an entirely different world.
> For the purposes of this discussion, a flat file is essentially a database. A CSV has fields and is easily made searchable
absolutely doesn't apply to the type of data I'm thinking about. (Data in the petabytes+ is not easily made searchable, indexing isn't common, joins are basically impossible at scale. Instead the data is partitioned on a specific field which makes it fast to access by that field but slow to access on others. Usually for this type of data that field would be a timestamp, but it could also technically be partitioned by a userid which makes it easier to split on user at the cost of splitting by time, since you now need to search all partitions in order to find a time range. )
So either I'm mistaken about the nature of facebook's data (I assumed it was clickstream data, like "User X clicked Box Y at Time Z with Metadata A"), or I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that statement.
Also
> The overall point is that of course they can access the data by individual and not just by time of access.
I can access clickstream data by a specific individual user with a 10 minute Mapreduce job, but re-partitioning the data is going to be a production.
Apologize if you already know all of this, but I saw a lot of people making references to SQL in this extended thread which strikes me as strange because even sql-frontends to analytics backends like HIVE get compiled down to 10 minute mapreduce jobs, it's an entirely different world.
The overall question is, is that statement by Facebook misleading? In my opinion, yes. They are tracking individual behavior, not producing overall website analytics. There is no question that they can and do have that data in some way associated with a specific individual, not concentrating on time of access as if that’s the important part of the data. Are you saying you believe that Facebook just leave that data in difficult to access data-stores and doesn’t use it for anything? Considering it’s practically the core of their business?
The implementation details are fairly unimportant. It’s what they do with the data, and the satement that it is “stored by” time of access is intended to be misleading to non-experts, in my opinion. Apparently they are even managing to distract experts and technical people.
The implementation details are fairly unimportant. It’s what they do with the data, and the satement that it is “stored by” time of access is intended to be misleading to non-experts, in my opinion. Apparently they are even managing to distract experts and technical people.
I’m not sure they are “tracking individual user behavior”, what do you mean by that?
Usually when you train a model you extract features for each event and then you apply your model at prediction time. There is no step in which you have the user’s entire history set aside in an easy to query fashion. Instead the model learns aggregate user behavior.
Out of curiosity do you work with analytics scale data? Nothing in their statements seemed odd to me, it would easily take a few months at my current company for those reasons.
For analogy it would be like if fb said “oh we support IE 7 to 11 but it’s taking us longer to support IE6”, and people said “it’s just one lower than 7 how hard can it be? Facebook is clearly hiding something, I write for IE7 all the time”. And I’m not quite sure how to convey the fact that IE6 is a different beast altogether.
Usually when you train a model you extract features for each event and then you apply your model at prediction time. There is no step in which you have the user’s entire history set aside in an easy to query fashion. Instead the model learns aggregate user behavior.
Out of curiosity do you work with analytics scale data? Nothing in their statements seemed odd to me, it would easily take a few months at my current company for those reasons.
For analogy it would be like if fb said “oh we support IE 7 to 11 but it’s taking us longer to support IE6”, and people said “it’s just one lower than 7 how hard can it be? Facebook is clearly hiding something, I write for IE7 all the time”. And I’m not quite sure how to convey the fact that IE6 is a different beast altogether.
To add to this, your questions are bizarre.
What do I mean by ‘Facebook tracking individual user behavior’? Um... I don’t know what to say to that. What a strange question. It’s pretty clear what is meant by that. It’s the primary focus of their business.
Next, “usually when you train a model you extract features for each event and then you apply your model at prediction time”. That’s nice, but when did we start discussing ‘training models’?
Facebook has a list of internet activity. It’s stored by user. They’re in the business of selling personal data. Nothing you said has anything to do with that. I have no idea what we are even discussing.
Whether someone can make an ad hoc a query by user is completely not the point and has nothing to do with anything. I would assume that they have extracted the information into other reports or data stores, obviously, not process trillions of lines of entries whenever they want to access it by individual.
What do I mean by ‘Facebook tracking individual user behavior’? Um... I don’t know what to say to that. What a strange question. It’s pretty clear what is meant by that. It’s the primary focus of their business.
Next, “usually when you train a model you extract features for each event and then you apply your model at prediction time”. That’s nice, but when did we start discussing ‘training models’?
Facebook has a list of internet activity. It’s stored by user. They’re in the business of selling personal data. Nothing you said has anything to do with that. I have no idea what we are even discussing.
Whether someone can make an ad hoc a query by user is completely not the point and has nothing to do with anything. I would assume that they have extracted the information into other reports or data stores, obviously, not process trillions of lines of entries whenever they want to access it by individual.
> I have no idea what we are even discussing.
Yea I figured. I'm not talking about Facebook at this point, this is a general engineering comment.
My point with the modeling comment is that the might not access it by individual, because models can be trained on statistical averages and time-ordered instead of by individual. Also the models are trained offline (meaning not in real-time).
If you have an analytics table sitting in HDFS ordered by timestamp and you want to produce a realtime UI for users, that'll take some engineering work, right?
Yea I figured. I'm not talking about Facebook at this point, this is a general engineering comment.
My point with the modeling comment is that the might not access it by individual, because models can be trained on statistical averages and time-ordered instead of by individual. Also the models are trained offline (meaning not in real-time).
If you have an analytics table sitting in HDFS ordered by timestamp and you want to produce a realtime UI for users, that'll take some engineering work, right?
Okay, so your position is that Facebook is unable to query for a list of activity by user, and does not have it divided by user in any other way? That seems nonsensical to me, but if you say so.
Let's take Facebook out of the picture, it's too hot a topic. Let's talk about the datawarehouse of some other big tech company like amazon or adcrunch. The DW can be queried by user but each query might take 10 mins to evaluate, so it can't be used for realtime UIs. Instead you would have to denormalize the data to display to a user. That's a project, it might take a few months.
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.
> 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.
I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-atto...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180
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.
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.
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.
They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.
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.
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.
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.
facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)
"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.