Huh. I would have expected the company to go with "we didn't say gay and we didn't use external information. We just noticed that users who like X page buy a lot of copies of Playgirl so we hooked you up".
Sounds like he managed to prove more in his case than is apparent from the article.
Privacy legislation has always been a bit iffy about the distinction between data and information. Depending on how this ruling treats that issue it could have knock-on effects.
Basically the issue here is that meta was almost certainly in possession of information on Max's sexual orientation and was using this information for advertising, but it's unclear if they had any data.
Privacy wise it is great that even partial information counts, but practically almost any data about a person is tainted with fractions of bits of information about their sexual orientation (or political views, or almost any of the protected classes of information). Without resorting to information theory I don't really see any way forward that doesn't end up in endless court cases over how much information is too much.
Then again we could just ban targeted advertising and avoid the whole issue in the first place. When differential privacy gets to a usable state we can worry about those instances where it would be nice to use some information for the public good without infringing privacy.
Rather it's that, in the course of evaluating this case, the court has been forced to make statements clarifying how certain rules and principles in GDPR are to be interpreted. And this has, in effect, narrowed the way Meta etc can use data.
Which for Schrems is really his ultimate goal anyway - his case is just a way to force the courts to rule / establish legal precedent on broader issues.
> Schrems had complained that Facebook had processed personal data including information about his sexual orientation to target him with online advertising, even though he had never disclosed on his account that he was gay. The only time he had publicly revealed this fact was during a panel discussion.
But processed what personal data? Where would Facebook even get reliable data on users' sexual orientation in bulk? It's not like you can buy that the way you can get credit scores or geographic locations. (Or can you? I've never heard of it.)
I'm very curious for the actual details here. And just because you get ads for products that seem to be marketed to the gay population, what leads the court to determine FB "identified" him as gay? My YouTube regularly has random ads in Spanish probably just because of some bug. Most ads seem to mistarget me, in fact.
I'd guess that it's inferred from the content you interact with. If you spend a lot of time liking fireman calendar photoshoots and give no likes to women in swimsuits, there's a reasonable inference to be made.
I'd also guess that Facebook can do this pretty reliably for gender and age, martial status, parental status, and lots of other things.
What if the underlying algorithm simply matches "users who like X also like Y" without having concepts like sexual orientation baked in. And it just happened that it accidentally suggested certain things gay people generally like, because Max Schrems liked that "X" once.
This is where it gets murky. The algorithm could also recover a group without labeling anything — "Latent Group 7539".
Even then, how do you know the algorithm is recommending something "because" of the unlabeled sexual orientation class per se, and not because of some closely associated latent class?
But that's not how Facebook sells ads. It would be one thing to recommend more content like what you've engaged with already. It's another thing to let advertisers check boxes that let them say "sell my product to gay men between the ages of 25 and 35" and to satisfy that without ever having the user tell you their orientation or age. Facebook deliberately crunches the numbers and produces a clear signal from them that advertisers can filter on.
Creating a lookalike audience is literally just saying "create ad targeting that parallels the things that would target this other group of people". Just because you're not specifically choosing interests or behaviors and instead relying on automation to do the work doesn't mean that's not what's happening under the hood. "Show this ad to mothers" is effectively the same as "here's 100 mothers, show this ad to people like them".
This differs from betting shown recommendations because you're actively being targeted.
Hmm, not exactly. It’s more akin to “here’s 100 customers, show my ad to others who have similar interests/behaviors”. You don’t upload a list of 100 identical customers, nor would that be useful for lookalikes.
And to my point, in no way is this equivalent to "you liked this one thing, so here's another thing you might like". It's still targeting. Facebook isn't arbitrarily showing you ads. "People like this" is what advertisers set, whether that comes from the advertiser checking boxes or providing a sample of similar users is an unimportant distinction.
At no point is Facebook ever making the self directed decision to show an ad to someone that doesn't positively match some criteria that the advertiser specified. That would be wild, and as I said, that's not how Facebook sells ads.
No, it's not selected criteria. Your POV seems focused on an easily explainable classification style model. However, Ads (or any recommender) ML models have been using black box neural networks for a long while now. Lookalike audiences are most commonly used when the Advertiser does not know the criteria - instead hoping FB/Google can magically match their ads with users who are "similar" in web activity or whatever, and hopefully lead to conversions.
It's hard to explain a black box, but for eg, a Todo list SaaS company uploads a list of customers most likely having a diverse set of interests and behaviors. The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors, or have the same apriori but unrelated actions as someone who ended up doing the above or a combination of all of these.
> The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors
If the audience you provide has none of these attributes, there's no way for it to magically intuit that you want these things from your customers. The neutral net doesn't know what a to-do list is or who uses one. It doesn't know the price of your service. The only thing happening is it's determining which of the signals about the users in your source audience are the most impactful. By supplying the source audience, you're supplying criteria for who your ads should be shown to.
Whether you're explicitly setting those things or not, you're still supplying criteria. You can't swap this system for a recommendation system, they don't work the same way at all.
Only in tech can you ask a question like this and have it be taken seriously. Which is ironic because we're the people who understand authz vs authn.
I'm sure from their ToS Facebook legally has claim to
my firstborn but this is obviously flagrantly unethical. There's too much money to be made behaving unethically for any legal hurdles to exist. There is a reasonable expectation about what you are allowed to do with someone else's data that you're stewarding. And data-mining your users to discover information they haven't and wouldn't voluntarily disclosed you isn't one of them. Hell in most cases accessing that data at all not in service of a direct user request shouldn't be allowed.
There is no reason for Google to access files stored in my Google Drive except to serve them back to me when asked.
I say this as someone who at $dayjob is a steward of petabytes of extremely personal data about people. I/my company would be genuinely be betraying our users' trust if we pulled something like this. Because we could and it would even arguably be useful, but it would be a complete violation of their privacy.
Does end-running around privacy by saying, "well I technically didn't violate your privacy I just compared your semi-private data you gave us/we collected to millions of other people and now know a bunch of private information about you with high accuracy" feel like it would go over well with people?
The short answer to your question is it is obviously unethical unless it is specifically done for a relevant and lawful purpose and it can absolutely be illegal depending on the data protection regime you are operating under. Specifically in the UK and EU, sexual orientation is a highly-protected class of personal information known as "Special Category Data". The UK ICO has actually issued guidance on the legality of inference on this category of data[1]:
If this is the case, then you are processing special category data regardless of how confident you are that the inference is correct.
If you carry out any form of profiling which infers things like ethnicity, beliefs, politics, health status (condition or risks), sexual orientation or sex life, you will be processing special category data and must identify an Article 9 condition for processing.
The only article 9 conditions that suffice to make processing of special category data legal are "explicit consent", "not for profit bodies" (under certain conditions) and "substantial public interest" [2]
> If you spend a lot of time liking fireman calendar photoshoots ...
That could be incorrect if (say) someone was researching fireman calenders for some non-sexual reason. ie boss assigned them the task of writing an article about fireman calenders through history
I'd have to wonder what other weird things such a person would be labelled with, given that they'd probably be researching a bunch of topics every week or so. ;)
>That could be incorrect if (say) someone was researching fireman calenders for some non-sexual reason. ie boss assigned them the task of writing an article about fireman calenders through history
That's fine. It doesn't have to be accurate for every single individual. As long as it's vaguely accurate to bring a targeting uplift, it'll be worthwhile to use.
To add one row of anecdata: I recently got an ad on Instagram (= Meta) for an "only for gay men" holiday resort. I'm straight. Took a screenshot of it because I thought it was funny and I'd never seen it (nor such a place) before.
Facebook (and others) don't just track you on their website. They do so on every website that includes their "like button", "analytics", "ads" and such
Reading your reply I just became aware that I haven't seen a single thumbs up button outside Facebook for maybe ten years. In 2011 they were everywhere and I remember that I implemented them on my personal website. I'm a hobby dev, so that was a big deal for me. How curious!
So, you claim that you're not interested in software development, but somehow according to this data we have here, you spend an hour a day reading Linux kernel mailing lists.
Why do you think you can't buy that? These companies have been building up profiles on millions (billions?) of people for many years now. It is not unreasonable to think they could infer stuff that they don't directly measure. Nor that these profiles would be shared/sold.
The GDPR does not care about the specifics of tech.
The GDPR does not care if FB has a database column for “sexuality” or if FB never gathers that information directly. All it cares about is the fact that Facebook process personal data, and, using some of the data Facebook processes, sexuality can be inferred.
I think we in tech get hung up on technicalities, while the GDPR was specifically written to be as citizen-focussed and tech-agnostic as possible.
Regardless, this specific ruling seems a bit odd-it implies that FB took a fact he mentioned in a panel discussion (not on the platform), and used that information to serve him targeted ads based on his sexuality.
I have no idea of the mechanisms he supposes led to this.
Sure, Schrems' claims seem to hinge on the fact that the only evidence of direct self-identification by Schrems is that one instance of a verbal claim on a panel discussion. (That is not how sexual orientation works, by the way: it necessarily involves conduct, activity or interests...)
But if advertising works on a recommendation engine basis, or groups similar tastes together, then if someone uses the Meta platform enough, there will be circumstancial evidence that this person's interests and activities coincide with other gay people.
Perhaps the merit of the case rested with Schrems barely using Meta/FB, not providing any direct data or engagement, and only to discover that advertising was targeted. Of course, Meta is a vast platform, including comments sections and widgets and third-party cookies across many websites.
But Meta takes Meta's privacy very seriously, so perhaps nobody but the court will ever see what Meta and their partners learned about Schrems, or how they learned it.
If only the AP had gone web-first instead of staying legacy, we'd all probably be able to just follow a link to the actual case information instead of having to guess.
> it necessarily involves conduct, activity or interests.
nit: did you mean conduct (which connotes moral principles) or did you mean plain behaviour (which doesn't lump what you do together with if it's "right" or "wrong", according to some but maybe not some other rulebook)
first, to your question above, repeated here. indeed meta "guesses" your age, gender identity, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, stance on various political issues, and many other traits, consumer profile and all. and meta guesses this from your interaction with your feed, from what you like or dislike and what you share and don't share, and where you comment in or don't. and it's accurate enough for your their purpose, placing content you'll positively react to, positive solely in the sense of those buying the content placement. that's the meta ad business. have profiles that are good enough to allow content targeting.
is it scientific, fully spot on, diagnostically sound? hell no. is it good enough to overturn Britain (brexit...) or get trump im office? you bet.
that's the first question, and the one you ask here and above.
the second is what I'm talking about in my nit. it's about assumed and hypothesized nuances of gayness, and the language to express those nuances. and what I'm saying is that the concepts of "only gay feelings, attractions" vs "living by it" are a moral concepts. in other words, the language, the words in the questions you've posted imply, carry, a good and evil dichotomy. and I point that out and reject it.
you are not less gay if you are closeted and suppress that trait. "oh I don't _do_ gay things, I 'only' am attracted to men, but I wouldn't allow myself to actually fall in love" is being gay, period. closeted. self-suppressing. but: gay.
claiming you were only gay when you kissed may be an environmental necessity (oppressive states or affiliations) I give you that.
but being gay is about attraction. fun fact: social sciences measure it by measuring arousal. if gay content turns you on, you're gay, scientifically speaking.
Well, this case seemed to hinge on a single public self-identification vs. those accurate inferences.
So your people, and my people, and Facebook, and the EU, may all have differing standards on what "being gay" means. But you would agree that a verbal assertion on a panel discussion would not necessarily be accurate or diagnostic.
I would also suggest that it's not a "yes/no" binary as you imply; many terms are left ambiguous and subjective; and my people would say that "orientation" may change over time or based on situation.
I don't know what you'd consider "gay content", but if you mean "Bewitched" or "The Wizard of Oz" or Marc Almond and The Smiths, then I must be gay as well, so where is my ad content?
> That is not how sexual orientation works, by the way
The way it works according to this judgement seems to be that if you don't explicitly tell FB something, they can't use the data anyway for targetting ads.
This sounds like it'll kill the vast majority of their inferred data points, as well as any ingested from 3rd parties.
Sounds fair enough to me. Glad I sold my FB shares last month.
> Wait so someone at Meta entered somewhere that this person is gay? Or was this based on, say, cookies and general browsing habits?
General browsing habits - he interacted with ‘gay content’ - websites, facebook groups etc. so could be targeted by advertisers that wanted their ads shown to people who interacted with that content.
I don’t think FB have a gay checkbox for targeting now but advertisers can choose websites and FB groups. Im not sure if this ruling effectively kills FB targeted advertising using data from outside FB or just if you're gay or not
The court decision pertains only to targeting advertising to the same user.
They didn't say that the data can't be collected. They didn't say the data can't be processed at all. They didn't say that the data can't be "aggregated and analysed" for some purpose other than "to offer him personalised advertising".
Meta does indeed offer controls to disable personalised and targeted advertising. If Schrems had disabled these settings appropriately, would Schrems have learned what Meta knew? It would seem that the targeting and personalisation is often the only way a user will find out what social media knows about us.
So IMHO, this is a sad, sad day for your privacy and Schrem's privacy, because if Meta can't reveal what they know about us through advertising and targeting, then Meta does indeed take Meta's privacy very seriously.
Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation shall be
prohibited.
There is a list of exceptions, but I'm not sure any of them apply. I don't really see how what the court says matters all that much. They can't overturn the law.
As far as I understand CJEU does not, at least not on this type of case where their opinion regarding EU law is asked by national court. Damages & fines are left to national courts, in this case Austria's Supreme Court (who might send it back to lower courts, I do not have any specific knowledge of Austria's court system).
I logged into Twitter after years and it was clear the ad algo was trying to determine my sexual preference - it would start by throwing in a hot girl, if I ignored then the image became a hot girl in bikini, then a hot girl's butt etc etc. Eventually it just showed me a fully nude girl with her legs open. In the middle, it threw in tweets about homo topics with images of dudes kissing.
These were always 1 tweet, below the fold, and once a day.
Eventually I just clicked one of the hot girls and I've never got anything since.
> Meta said it was awaiting publication of the court’s full judgment and that it “takes privacy very seriously.”
I wonder how Meta employees can keep a straight face lying their faces off. I'm getting second hand embarrassment from them. Imagine being caught in such a blatant and egregious privacy violation and having to gall to make such a claim.
That's just basic PR-speak; it's apparently important to release a statement saying "we are and have always been very serious about not doing (thing that we do and got caught doing)" after you've been caught doing a thing.
I think the idea is there's some percentage of the public that will just uncritically accept the last thing they were told as gospel truth, and the rest don't believe you any less than they did before, so it's a net win.
To note, they're not talking about not screwing X.
All they're saying is they take X very seriously. Which can be interpreted positively by some, yet doesn't put them too much at risk when tomorrow they're found again screwing X. They'll still be taking X very seriously at that time.
Exactly, it's often weasel-wording that loosely suggests they're seriously against something, but state they are just generically serious regarding a topic in an abstract manner.
"The police officers killed my dog! Right through the screen door!"
"Please calm down sir, I assure you the the department takes the handling of pets very seriously..."
I just mentally translate any PR statement like that as "fuck you we'll keep doing what we're doing, enjoy your portion of the paltry fine we pay once you receive it after a decade of appeals."
> I wonder how Meta employees can keep a straight face lying their faces off.
Did you see that Social Dilemma documentary? People only find their conscience after they've checked a big bankroll.
I've been in tech for almost two decades now and I've seen many many many good people throw their values right out the window once the price was right.
> If you're a startup founder with high morality…you are going to have trouble succeeding
This reminds of people who claim they’re too honest to disguise that they’re assholes. You can absolutely start a company and make lots of money without compromising your values. Someone claiming otherwise is usually trying to excuse bad behaviour or get over a past failure.
Go to jail ... so many startup bro(s) have lied, cheated, stole and possibly worse to get to where they are and they didnt care. Same with many politicians on the left and right should be locked up for doing worse but arent and wont. Pardon to get political just saying the uber successful that most lack the same morality regular folks do. That was a downfall in my startup adventures my morality and being a nice guy!
This reminds me of the popular view of insider trading. Numpties think everyone does it. So they do. And then they get caught. Because executing an insider trade ex ante versus detecting it ex post facto is an P != NP problem.
Sure, you can start a company and make money, but if you wanna do startups and win the race, you will have to plow over everyone (without caring an ounce) in your way
> License: Use of Llama 3.2 is governed by the Llama 3.2 Community License (a custom, commercial license agreement).
In that license: Section 1(b)(i) requires you to display "Built with Llama" (branding requirements, really?). Section 2 has additional restrictive licensing requirements. Section 5(c) has retaliation that your license is terminated if you initiate legal proceedings. There is probably more too.
Pretty close to "Not Open Source". Yet, Meta continue marketing Llama as such.
It feels safe to ignore licenses on models trained with copyrighted material. Meta should feel free to open that can of worms if they’re bothered by it.
The article is short on details. Schrems alleges that Facebook somehow picked up his sexual orientation from a panel meeting, and then advertised to him based on that?
Is it not more likely that the group of people/profiles and activities he participated on Facebook are what "outed" him instead?
I had hoped for more details about how Schrems and/or a court were able to prove Facebook took his off-site meeting into account and based ads on that alone.
How did Facebook determine that Schrems was gay? Do they even know he's gay? Just because they showed him an ad for something that gay people would find relevant doesn't mean they targeted him for being gay. Its possible he likes a lot of stuff gay people like. I get targeted by advertisements for institutions offering degrees in Christian studies or some such thing, even though I'm an atheist. But say I was a Christian, should I then deduce that Facebook knew I was Christian and used that information?
They are just spraying and praying with their ads on best guesses as to what is relevant to you.
It's a lawsuit because Schrems only needs enough of a basis to force the courts to consider certain issues, and to make statements about how GDPR should apply in principle in certain situations, in order to effectively restrict big tech's use of data.
It's a case brought strategically in order to trigger certain questions of interpretation of GDPR rules to be litigated.
Schrems' specific claim only needs to hold enough water to give him standing to get the case through enough filters in the court system to facilitate this.
You get targeted by advertisements for institutions offering degrees in Christian studies or some such thing, because you're an atheist.
I fixed that quote for you, because advertising is often targeted to the opposite demographic for various reasons.
Just try enjoying your favorite show on radio or regular TV, and you'll perceive ads for stuff you would never touch, but they are paying good $$$ to support that show you like, and to get in front of everyone possible, and perhaps wear you down with brand recognition and exciting jingles to influence your buying decisions in a moment of weakness.
However, targeted advertising may know exactly what you like, and be an effective means of call-to-action and conversion to sales.
On the back end, Meta advertisers fill out a list of audience interests and demographics. So yes, if the advertisements and their buyers were documented, Meta should also have sales info on the intended audiences.
Facebook didn’t determine he was gay, it’s just spray-and-pray by the algorithm exactly like you said. He’s just bringing the court case in bad faith to raise the issue and create another foothold for the EU to extract further billions in fines. The outcome will be more laws so nobody creates anything new in the consumer space or takes any risks that aren’t sanctioned by EU central planners ever again.
Knocking over US big tech companies for fines is literally the fastest growing EU industry by total profits.
I’ve never heard of a malware that tells you exactly what it’s doing with your data upfront.
But anyways, not sure the EU will love it so much once the US finally puts its foot down and the EU capitulates. Unfortunately it’s hard to say no to the only country that will protect your sovereignty (NATO doesn’t work without the US and I’m sure Russia would like to keep going further into Europe).
After that data privacy revenue stream dries up, the only thing left will be the laws and regulations that permanently keep the EU tech industry from ever being competitive with the US or China.
But maybe the ballooning population of European social benefits retirees will pay for themselves? Who needs evil private industry to generate tax revenues when you have bulletproof data privacy over what toilet paper you bought last week. Who can afford the insane risk of somebody creating products that might disclose this highly sensitive data?
Believe it or not surveillance capitalism isn't the only business model out there. Builders and makers may perhaps find something more interesting to do.
Schrems has launched several strategic court cases like this to push back on privacy issues, and even runs a non-profit focused on doing so.
I think "activist" is just giving him well-deserved credit for the amount of legwork he puts in to see these cases through.
He is absolutely doing this out of principle / for a cause, and not because of his own individual grievance - he just needs to be able to point to something affecting him personally to give him the legal footing to bring the case to court.
That's always been a major component of activism, because legal compliance is never automatic or something you should take for granted. Nothing has changed.
Other major components include changing the law, and changing people's behaviors where law is irrelevant.
The "such as" part of that definition is very important.
Without it, you'd have only "The practice of using action to achieve a result", which applies to anything, e.g. me pressing "submit" (an action) to achieve the result that my comment is posted.
I don't think the "such as" clause covers lawsuits.
That's not how dictionaries work. The definition points at a meaning: it doesn't construct it, mathematics-style.
Activism is where you take action to change something specific and significant, relative to the counterfactual where you did not take such action. (It also includes failed attempts at the same.)
If – say – there were strong social taboos against using the letter "e", and by using them in your comment you aimed to erode them, then yes, pressing "submit" would be activism. The same if you were coming out publicly, with the aim to make it easier for others to do so. Wearing clothes can be activism. There's no reason that lawsuits shouldn't qualify, if their goal is to create a better world.
"Create a better world" isn't a necessary condition for being activism.
> A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones, but their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones, but in six months, we never met anyone who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.
> So why steal them? Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
— The Dark Knight, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
This says more about the (low) quality of the AP and it's (mediocre) editorial staff than about TFA and EU citizens exercising their rights in a court of law under the GDPR.
This is a weird thing to be upset about. As a gay person, I don't want to see ads that are meant for straight people. I would rather see ads relevant to me.
Here is a provocative thought experiment that might help you get the point:
Replace the word gay with bone cancer, which just so happened that you’ve been diagnosed with. Would you feel comfortable with Meta inferring that from your activity and flood you with ads related to cancer?
Ads don't reveal targeting criteria, the visible content of the ad doesn't indicate the user's private profile, it just means an advertiser chose to target them. No one treats the ads you're shown as credible & accurate determinants of anything, let alone sexuality.
It might show up in the "ad preferences" page if someone glances over your shoulder while you're looking at it, but generally people glancing over your shoulder to view private information isn't a Facebook privacy problem, it's a people-glancing-over-your-shoulder privacy problem. It turns out that even the most private & secure systems will leak information when you open it and let people see it over your shoulder. It's like saying your web browser puts you in danger if someone glances over your shoulder to see the gay porn you're watching on it.
Yes. Trying to convince someone to change their opinion can easily get out of hand. Its trying to do too much.
Helping people understand other people's opinions is a better stance.
I.e. The person in the article finds being surveilled by a company, outside of their relationship with the company, and having that information available for advertisers to manipulate them for money disturbing, immoral and offensive. Especially for very personal attributes.
And many other people do too. And the European Union.
--
At some point I hope there is a wave of non-ad social media. Imagine how few resources are required to run an online scrapbook?
When you don't need to have thousands of servers collating every scrap of information about you they can get, and applying ever more sophisticated AI to optimally insert "sticky" posts, reinforce your notification checking habit, finding the minimum number of organic friends & family posts they need to give you, and matching you to advertisers and ads.
Applied psychology is 99% of social media's expenses. 99% of the rest is legal and lobby.
Huh. I would have expected the company to go with "we didn't say gay and we didn't use external information. We just noticed that users who like X page buy a lot of copies of Playgirl so we hooked you up".
Sounds like he managed to prove more in his case than is apparent from the article.
Privacy legislation has always been a bit iffy about the distinction between data and information. Depending on how this ruling treats that issue it could have knock-on effects.
Basically the issue here is that meta was almost certainly in possession of information on Max's sexual orientation and was using this information for advertising, but it's unclear if they had any data.
Privacy wise it is great that even partial information counts, but practically almost any data about a person is tainted with fractions of bits of information about their sexual orientation (or political views, or almost any of the protected classes of information). Without resorting to information theory I don't really see any way forward that doesn't end up in endless court cases over how much information is too much.
Then again we could just ban targeted advertising and avoid the whole issue in the first place. When differential privacy gets to a usable state we can worry about those instances where it would be nice to use some information for the public good without infringing privacy.
I don't think he even needed to prove that.
Rather it's that, in the course of evaluating this case, the court has been forced to make statements clarifying how certain rules and principles in GDPR are to be interpreted. And this has, in effect, narrowed the way Meta etc can use data.
Which for Schrems is really his ultimate goal anyway - his case is just a way to force the courts to rule / establish legal precedent on broader issues.
> Schrems had complained that Facebook had processed personal data including information about his sexual orientation to target him with online advertising, even though he had never disclosed on his account that he was gay. The only time he had publicly revealed this fact was during a panel discussion.
But processed what personal data? Where would Facebook even get reliable data on users' sexual orientation in bulk? It's not like you can buy that the way you can get credit scores or geographic locations. (Or can you? I've never heard of it.)
I'm very curious for the actual details here. And just because you get ads for products that seem to be marketed to the gay population, what leads the court to determine FB "identified" him as gay? My YouTube regularly has random ads in Spanish probably just because of some bug. Most ads seem to mistarget me, in fact.
I'd guess that it's inferred from the content you interact with. If you spend a lot of time liking fireman calendar photoshoots and give no likes to women in swimsuits, there's a reasonable inference to be made.
I'd also guess that Facebook can do this pretty reliably for gender and age, martial status, parental status, and lots of other things.
What if the underlying algorithm simply matches "users who like X also like Y" without having concepts like sexual orientation baked in. And it just happened that it accidentally suggested certain things gay people generally like, because Max Schrems liked that "X" once.
This is where it gets murky. The algorithm could also recover a group without labeling anything — "Latent Group 7539".
Even then, how do you know the algorithm is recommending something "because" of the unlabeled sexual orientation class per se, and not because of some closely associated latent class?
But that's not how Facebook sells ads. It would be one thing to recommend more content like what you've engaged with already. It's another thing to let advertisers check boxes that let them say "sell my product to gay men between the ages of 25 and 35" and to satisfy that without ever having the user tell you their orientation or age. Facebook deliberately crunches the numbers and produces a clear signal from them that advertisers can filter on.
No, that really is how Facebook sells ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531?id=40...
Creating a lookalike audience is literally just saying "create ad targeting that parallels the things that would target this other group of people". Just because you're not specifically choosing interests or behaviors and instead relying on automation to do the work doesn't mean that's not what's happening under the hood. "Show this ad to mothers" is effectively the same as "here's 100 mothers, show this ad to people like them".
This differs from betting shown recommendations because you're actively being targeted.
Hmm, not exactly. It’s more akin to “here’s 100 customers, show my ad to others who have similar interests/behaviors”. You don’t upload a list of 100 identical customers, nor would that be useful for lookalikes.
And to my point, in no way is this equivalent to "you liked this one thing, so here's another thing you might like". It's still targeting. Facebook isn't arbitrarily showing you ads. "People like this" is what advertisers set, whether that comes from the advertiser checking boxes or providing a sample of similar users is an unimportant distinction.
At no point is Facebook ever making the self directed decision to show an ad to someone that doesn't positively match some criteria that the advertiser specified. That would be wild, and as I said, that's not how Facebook sells ads.
No, it's not selected criteria. Your POV seems focused on an easily explainable classification style model. However, Ads (or any recommender) ML models have been using black box neural networks for a long while now. Lookalike audiences are most commonly used when the Advertiser does not know the criteria - instead hoping FB/Google can magically match their ads with users who are "similar" in web activity or whatever, and hopefully lead to conversions.
It's hard to explain a black box, but for eg, a Todo list SaaS company uploads a list of customers most likely having a diverse set of interests and behaviors. The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors, or have the same apriori but unrelated actions as someone who ended up doing the above or a combination of all of these.
> The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors
If the audience you provide has none of these attributes, there's no way for it to magically intuit that you want these things from your customers. The neutral net doesn't know what a to-do list is or who uses one. It doesn't know the price of your service. The only thing happening is it's determining which of the signals about the users in your source audience are the most impactful. By supplying the source audience, you're supplying criteria for who your ads should be shown to.
Whether you're explicitly setting those things or not, you're still supplying criteria. You can't swap this system for a recommendation system, they don't work the same way at all.
They do have a checkbox "Sell to gay men"?
Incidentally they removed the checkbox for LGBT targeting in 2022, but that doesn't mean you can't get the same results with other targeting options.
Is inferring something from data you legally obtained illegal or immoral?
Only in tech can you ask a question like this and have it be taken seriously. Which is ironic because we're the people who understand authz vs authn.
I'm sure from their ToS Facebook legally has claim to my firstborn but this is obviously flagrantly unethical. There's too much money to be made behaving unethically for any legal hurdles to exist. There is a reasonable expectation about what you are allowed to do with someone else's data that you're stewarding. And data-mining your users to discover information they haven't and wouldn't voluntarily disclosed you isn't one of them. Hell in most cases accessing that data at all not in service of a direct user request shouldn't be allowed.
There is no reason for Google to access files stored in my Google Drive except to serve them back to me when asked.
I say this as someone who at $dayjob is a steward of petabytes of extremely personal data about people. I/my company would be genuinely be betraying our users' trust if we pulled something like this. Because we could and it would even arguably be useful, but it would be a complete violation of their privacy.
Does end-running around privacy by saying, "well I technically didn't violate your privacy I just compared your semi-private data you gave us/we collected to millions of other people and now know a bunch of private information about you with high accuracy" feel like it would go over well with people?
The short answer to your question is it is obviously unethical unless it is specifically done for a relevant and lawful purpose and it can absolutely be illegal depending on the data protection regime you are operating under. Specifically in the UK and EU, sexual orientation is a highly-protected class of personal information known as "Special Category Data". The UK ICO has actually issued guidance on the legality of inference on this category of data[1]:
The only article 9 conditions that suffice to make processing of special category data legal are "explicit consent", "not for profit bodies" (under certain conditions) and "substantial public interest" [2][1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
[2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Both, as it turns out
> If you spend a lot of time liking fireman calendar photoshoots ...
That could be incorrect if (say) someone was researching fireman calenders for some non-sexual reason. ie boss assigned them the task of writing an article about fireman calenders through history
I'd have to wonder what other weird things such a person would be labelled with, given that they'd probably be researching a bunch of topics every week or so. ;)
>That could be incorrect if (say) someone was researching fireman calenders for some non-sexual reason. ie boss assigned them the task of writing an article about fireman calenders through history
That's fine. It doesn't have to be accurate for every single individual. As long as it's vaguely accurate to bring a targeting uplift, it'll be worthwhile to use.
To add one row of anecdata: I recently got an ad on Instagram (= Meta) for an "only for gay men" holiday resort. I'm straight. Took a screenshot of it because I thought it was funny and I'd never seen it (nor such a place) before.
Facebook (and others) don't just track you on their website. They do so on every website that includes their "like button", "analytics", "ads" and such
Reading your reply I just became aware that I haven't seen a single thumbs up button outside Facebook for maybe ten years. In 2011 they were everywhere and I remember that I implemented them on my personal website. I'm a hobby dev, so that was a big deal for me. How curious!
YouTube still uses thumbs up!
So, you claim that you're not interested in software development, but somehow according to this data we have here, you spend an hour a day reading Linux kernel mailing lists.
Curious.
That'd be explaining by someone trying to "fix the damn disconnection bug with this new usb $THING I bought a few weeks ago".
Stuff like that often ends up trawling through LKML posts trying to figure out wtf kernel might have a fix, potential things to try, and so on.
Probably also by people with zero interest in software development themselves.
Ah, you're in good company. I also keep an archive of saved gay porn videos due to my academic interest in homosexuality.
???
You think that people with zero interest in programming are trawling the LKML to fix a low-level kernel issue with their USB device?
I've literally seen it happen, more than once, for all kinds of devices (not just usb). :)
Why do you think you can't buy that? These companies have been building up profiles on millions (billions?) of people for many years now. It is not unreasonable to think they could infer stuff that they don't directly measure. Nor that these profiles would be shared/sold.
FB trackers that phone home on various websites, for one.
The GDPR does not care about the specifics of tech.
The GDPR does not care if FB has a database column for “sexuality” or if FB never gathers that information directly. All it cares about is the fact that Facebook process personal data, and, using some of the data Facebook processes, sexuality can be inferred.
I think we in tech get hung up on technicalities, while the GDPR was specifically written to be as citizen-focussed and tech-agnostic as possible.
Regardless, this specific ruling seems a bit odd-it implies that FB took a fact he mentioned in a panel discussion (not on the platform), and used that information to serve him targeted ads based on his sexuality.
I have no idea of the mechanisms he supposes led to this.
They can infer it from your friends who do publicise it. Same as political views, etc
Wait so someone at Meta entered somewhere that this person is gay? Or was this based on, say, cookies and general browsing habits?
I think of the story where Target was pushing diaper ads on someone before her dad (maybe even her?) knew she was pregnant
Sure, Schrems' claims seem to hinge on the fact that the only evidence of direct self-identification by Schrems is that one instance of a verbal claim on a panel discussion. (That is not how sexual orientation works, by the way: it necessarily involves conduct, activity or interests...)
But if advertising works on a recommendation engine basis, or groups similar tastes together, then if someone uses the Meta platform enough, there will be circumstancial evidence that this person's interests and activities coincide with other gay people.
Perhaps the merit of the case rested with Schrems barely using Meta/FB, not providing any direct data or engagement, and only to discover that advertising was targeted. Of course, Meta is a vast platform, including comments sections and widgets and third-party cookies across many websites.
But Meta takes Meta's privacy very seriously, so perhaps nobody but the court will ever see what Meta and their partners learned about Schrems, or how they learned it.
> Perhaps the merit of the case rested with
If only the AP had gone web-first instead of staying legacy, we'd all probably be able to just follow a link to the actual case information instead of having to guess.
> it necessarily involves conduct, activity or interests.
nit: did you mean conduct (which connotes moral principles) or did you mean plain behaviour (which doesn't lump what you do together with if it's "right" or "wrong", according to some but maybe not some other rulebook)
It's the difference between mere claims and actual being/status.
Does Meta differentiate these when processing personal data?
Does Meta seek truth/evidence? Does Meta weight inferences accordingly? does Meta accept subject's claims about self at face-value?
I see. so there are _two_ replies necessary here.
first, to your question above, repeated here. indeed meta "guesses" your age, gender identity, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, stance on various political issues, and many other traits, consumer profile and all. and meta guesses this from your interaction with your feed, from what you like or dislike and what you share and don't share, and where you comment in or don't. and it's accurate enough for your their purpose, placing content you'll positively react to, positive solely in the sense of those buying the content placement. that's the meta ad business. have profiles that are good enough to allow content targeting.
is it scientific, fully spot on, diagnostically sound? hell no. is it good enough to overturn Britain (brexit...) or get trump im office? you bet.
that's the first question, and the one you ask here and above.
the second is what I'm talking about in my nit. it's about assumed and hypothesized nuances of gayness, and the language to express those nuances. and what I'm saying is that the concepts of "only gay feelings, attractions" vs "living by it" are a moral concepts. in other words, the language, the words in the questions you've posted imply, carry, a good and evil dichotomy. and I point that out and reject it.
you are not less gay if you are closeted and suppress that trait. "oh I don't _do_ gay things, I 'only' am attracted to men, but I wouldn't allow myself to actually fall in love" is being gay, period. closeted. self-suppressing. but: gay.
claiming you were only gay when you kissed may be an environmental necessity (oppressive states or affiliations) I give you that.
but being gay is about attraction. fun fact: social sciences measure it by measuring arousal. if gay content turns you on, you're gay, scientifically speaking.
simples.
Well, this case seemed to hinge on a single public self-identification vs. those accurate inferences.
So your people, and my people, and Facebook, and the EU, may all have differing standards on what "being gay" means. But you would agree that a verbal assertion on a panel discussion would not necessarily be accurate or diagnostic.
I would also suggest that it's not a "yes/no" binary as you imply; many terms are left ambiguous and subjective; and my people would say that "orientation" may change over time or based on situation.
I don't know what you'd consider "gay content", but if you mean "Bewitched" or "The Wizard of Oz" or Marc Almond and The Smiths, then I must be gay as well, so where is my ad content?
> That is not how sexual orientation works, by the way
The way it works according to this judgement seems to be that if you don't explicitly tell FB something, they can't use the data anyway for targetting ads.
This sounds like it'll kill the vast majority of their inferred data points, as well as any ingested from 3rd parties.
Sounds fair enough to me. Glad I sold my FB shares last month.
> Wait so someone at Meta entered somewhere that this person is gay? Or was this based on, say, cookies and general browsing habits?
General browsing habits - he interacted with ‘gay content’ - websites, facebook groups etc. so could be targeted by advertisers that wanted their ads shown to people who interacted with that content.
I don’t think FB have a gay checkbox for targeting now but advertisers can choose websites and FB groups. Im not sure if this ruling effectively kills FB targeted advertising using data from outside FB or just if you're gay or not
The court decision pertains only to targeting advertising to the same user.
They didn't say that the data can't be collected. They didn't say the data can't be processed at all. They didn't say that the data can't be "aggregated and analysed" for some purpose other than "to offer him personalised advertising".
Meta does indeed offer controls to disable personalised and targeted advertising. If Schrems had disabled these settings appropriately, would Schrems have learned what Meta knew? It would seem that the targeting and personalisation is often the only way a user will find out what social media knows about us.
So IMHO, this is a sad, sad day for your privacy and Schrem's privacy, because if Meta can't reveal what they know about us through advertising and targeting, then Meta does indeed take Meta's privacy very seriously.
Article 9 of the GDPR says:
Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
There is a list of exceptions, but I'm not sure any of them apply. I don't really see how what the court says matters all that much. They can't overturn the law.
Do these rulings assign damages or fines?
As far as I understand CJEU does not, at least not on this type of case where their opinion regarding EU law is asked by national court. Damages & fines are left to national courts, in this case Austria's Supreme Court (who might send it back to lower courts, I do not have any specific knowledge of Austria's court system).
I logged into Twitter after years and it was clear the ad algo was trying to determine my sexual preference - it would start by throwing in a hot girl, if I ignored then the image became a hot girl in bikini, then a hot girl's butt etc etc. Eventually it just showed me a fully nude girl with her legs open. In the middle, it threw in tweets about homo topics with images of dudes kissing.
These were always 1 tweet, below the fold, and once a day.
Eventually I just clicked one of the hot girls and I've never got anything since.
Max Schrems is an international treasure.
> Meta said it was awaiting publication of the court’s full judgment and that it “takes privacy very seriously.”
I wonder how Meta employees can keep a straight face lying their faces off. I'm getting second hand embarrassment from them. Imagine being caught in such a blatant and egregious privacy violation and having to gall to make such a claim.
That's just basic PR-speak; it's apparently important to release a statement saying "we are and have always been very serious about not doing (thing that we do and got caught doing)" after you've been caught doing a thing.
I think the idea is there's some percentage of the public that will just uncritically accept the last thing they were told as gospel truth, and the rest don't believe you any less than they did before, so it's a net win.
To note, they're not talking about not screwing X.
All they're saying is they take X very seriously. Which can be interpreted positively by some, yet doesn't put them too much at risk when tomorrow they're found again screwing X. They'll still be taking X very seriously at that time.
Exactly, it's often weasel-wording that loosely suggests they're seriously against something, but state they are just generically serious regarding a topic in an abstract manner.
"The police officers killed my dog! Right through the screen door!"
"Please calm down sir, I assure you the the department takes the handling of pets very seriously..."
I just mentally translate any PR statement like that as "fuck you we'll keep doing what we're doing, enjoy your portion of the paltry fine we pay once you receive it after a decade of appeals."
And of course that you welcome the judgment against you and look forward to blah blah blah
> I wonder how Meta employees can keep a straight face lying their faces off.
Did you see that Social Dilemma documentary? People only find their conscience after they've checked a big bankroll.
I've been in tech for almost two decades now and I've seen many many many good people throw their values right out the window once the price was right.
If you're a startup founder with high morality you could never go against you are going to have trouble succeeding!
> If you're a startup founder with high morality…you are going to have trouble succeeding
This reminds of people who claim they’re too honest to disguise that they’re assholes. You can absolutely start a company and make lots of money without compromising your values. Someone claiming otherwise is usually trying to excuse bad behaviour or get over a past failure.
> You can absolutely start a company and make lots of money without compromising your values.
Here's the thing though, and I say this from personal experience...if you're willing to compromise your values...you can make a shitload of money.
> if you're willing to compromise your values...you can make a shitload of money
Of course. But then you’re also playing a different game, one where the downsides are expanded from make no money to go to jail or worse.
Or be outright killed, depending upon who you decided to cross.
Go to jail ... so many startup bro(s) have lied, cheated, stole and possibly worse to get to where they are and they didnt care. Same with many politicians on the left and right should be locked up for doing worse but arent and wont. Pardon to get political just saying the uber successful that most lack the same morality regular folks do. That was a downfall in my startup adventures my morality and being a nice guy!
This reminds me of the popular view of insider trading. Numpties think everyone does it. So they do. And then they get caught. Because executing an insider trade ex ante versus detecting it ex post facto is an P != NP problem.
Sure, you can start a company and make money, but if you wanna do startups and win the race, you will have to plow over everyone (without caring an ounce) in your way
Meta/Facebook kind of have a track record of strong claims that doesn't really hold up when scrutinized.
From https://www.llama.com/
> The open-source AI model [...] Llama is the leading open source model family
Then from https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B
> License: Use of Llama 3.2 is governed by the Llama 3.2 Community License (a custom, commercial license agreement).
In that license: Section 1(b)(i) requires you to display "Built with Llama" (branding requirements, really?). Section 2 has additional restrictive licensing requirements. Section 5(c) has retaliation that your license is terminated if you initiate legal proceedings. There is probably more too.
Pretty close to "Not Open Source". Yet, Meta continue marketing Llama as such.
yes and, it is essential that Meta is doing this with LLama at this time.. it is literally at their whim. so, complicated...
It feels safe to ignore licenses on models trained with copyrighted material. Meta should feel free to open that can of worms if they’re bothered by it.
There is no way that legal proceedings clause could hold up.
> I wonder how Meta employees can keep a straight face lying their faces off.
We have created a dystopian system where honesty is punished and lying is incentivized. This is the only natural outcome anyone should expect.
Yes he is, please donate yearly to https://noyb.eu/.
They are taking privacy, very seriously.
Beautifully placed comma
Meta does take privacy seriously. It is an existential threat to their "business". Meta is serious about violating privacy for profit.
The article is short on details. Schrems alleges that Facebook somehow picked up his sexual orientation from a panel meeting, and then advertised to him based on that?
Is it not more likely that the group of people/profiles and activities he participated on Facebook are what "outed" him instead?
I had hoped for more details about how Schrems and/or a court were able to prove Facebook took his off-site meeting into account and based ads on that alone.
How did Facebook determine that Schrems was gay? Do they even know he's gay? Just because they showed him an ad for something that gay people would find relevant doesn't mean they targeted him for being gay. Its possible he likes a lot of stuff gay people like. I get targeted by advertisements for institutions offering degrees in Christian studies or some such thing, even though I'm an atheist. But say I was a Christian, should I then deduce that Facebook knew I was Christian and used that information?
They are just spraying and praying with their ads on best guesses as to what is relevant to you.
How is this a lawsuit?
It's a lawsuit because Schrems only needs enough of a basis to force the courts to consider certain issues, and to make statements about how GDPR should apply in principle in certain situations, in order to effectively restrict big tech's use of data.
It's a case brought strategically in order to trigger certain questions of interpretation of GDPR rules to be litigated.
Schrems' specific claim only needs to hold enough water to give him standing to get the case through enough filters in the court system to facilitate this.
You get targeted by advertisements for institutions offering degrees in Christian studies or some such thing, because you're an atheist.
I fixed that quote for you, because advertising is often targeted to the opposite demographic for various reasons.
Just try enjoying your favorite show on radio or regular TV, and you'll perceive ads for stuff you would never touch, but they are paying good $$$ to support that show you like, and to get in front of everyone possible, and perhaps wear you down with brand recognition and exciting jingles to influence your buying decisions in a moment of weakness.
However, targeted advertising may know exactly what you like, and be an effective means of call-to-action and conversion to sales.
On the back end, Meta advertisers fill out a list of audience interests and demographics. So yes, if the advertisements and their buyers were documented, Meta should also have sales info on the intended audiences.
Facebook didn’t determine he was gay, it’s just spray-and-pray by the algorithm exactly like you said. He’s just bringing the court case in bad faith to raise the issue and create another foothold for the EU to extract further billions in fines. The outcome will be more laws so nobody creates anything new in the consumer space or takes any risks that aren’t sanctioned by EU central planners ever again.
Knocking over US big tech companies for fines is literally the fastest growing EU industry by total profits.
Making profit by punishing foreign surveillance malware, I love it!
I’ve never heard of a malware that tells you exactly what it’s doing with your data upfront.
But anyways, not sure the EU will love it so much once the US finally puts its foot down and the EU capitulates. Unfortunately it’s hard to say no to the only country that will protect your sovereignty (NATO doesn’t work without the US and I’m sure Russia would like to keep going further into Europe).
After that data privacy revenue stream dries up, the only thing left will be the laws and regulations that permanently keep the EU tech industry from ever being competitive with the US or China.
But maybe the ballooning population of European social benefits retirees will pay for themselves? Who needs evil private industry to generate tax revenues when you have bulletproof data privacy over what toilet paper you bought last week. Who can afford the insane risk of somebody creating products that might disclose this highly sensitive data?
Believe it or not surveillance capitalism isn't the only business model out there. Builders and makers may perhaps find something more interesting to do.
2024: When asking companies to comply with the law is being an "activist".
Schrems has launched several strategic court cases like this to push back on privacy issues, and even runs a non-profit focused on doing so.
I think "activist" is just giving him well-deserved credit for the amount of legwork he puts in to see these cases through.
He is absolutely doing this out of principle / for a cause, and not because of his own individual grievance - he just needs to be able to point to something affecting him personally to give him the legal footing to bring the case to court.
Perhaps the lesson is we should all be activists. We set activism as a civic duty, and teach it in primary school.
What does 2024 have to do with it?
That's always been a major component of activism, because legal compliance is never automatic or something you should take for granted. Nothing has changed.
Other major components include changing the law, and changing people's behaviors where law is irrelevant.
“You want justice? You’re a troublemaker.”
— <http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2700/fv02673.htm>
Taking a company to court is definitely in the realm of activism.
Demanding that your basic rights be respected by billion-dollar scale ad-peddlers doesn't sound like activism to me.
Demanding basic rights is the most traditional and respected form of activism there is!
> Demanding that your basic rights be respected
How do you think we got basic rights? (Natural rights are a philosophical object.)
Activism doesn't have to be a pejorative.
It's doing something, therefore it's activism.
Did you look up the definition?
Never in my life before now, but Wiktionary agrees with me. https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=activism&oldid=8...
> The practice of using action to achieve a result, such as political demonstration or a strike in support of or in opposition to an issue.
If you're doing something about it, that can be called activism.
The "such as" part of that definition is very important.
Without it, you'd have only "The practice of using action to achieve a result", which applies to anything, e.g. me pressing "submit" (an action) to achieve the result that my comment is posted.
I don't think the "such as" clause covers lawsuits.
That's not how dictionaries work. The definition points at a meaning: it doesn't construct it, mathematics-style.
Activism is where you take action to change something specific and significant, relative to the counterfactual where you did not take such action. (It also includes failed attempts at the same.)
If – say – there were strong social taboos against using the letter "e", and by using them in your comment you aimed to erode them, then yes, pressing "submit" would be activism. The same if you were coming out publicly, with the aim to make it easier for others to do so. Wearing clothes can be activism. There's no reason that lawsuits shouldn't qualify, if their goal is to create a better world.
"Create a better world" isn't a necessary condition for being activism.
> A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones, but their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones, but in six months, we never met anyone who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.
> So why steal them? Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
— The Dark Knight, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
This says more about the (low) quality of the AP and it's (mediocre) editorial staff than about TFA and EU citizens exercising their rights in a court of law under the GDPR.
This is a weird thing to be upset about. As a gay person, I don't want to see ads that are meant for straight people. I would rather see ads relevant to me.
Here is a provocative thought experiment that might help you get the point:
Replace the word gay with bone cancer, which just so happened that you’ve been diagnosed with. Would you feel comfortable with Meta inferring that from your activity and flood you with ads related to cancer?
Or pregnancy and no subsequent childbirth in any of the many states in the US that harshly penalize abortion.
I wouldn't care. I might even be glad if one of those ads informed me of a lifesaving cure.
now live in a country that punishes you for being gay. and have someone incidentally glance over your shoulder with them gay ads in your stream.
do you see the danger these ads put you in?
Ads don't reveal targeting criteria, the visible content of the ad doesn't indicate the user's private profile, it just means an advertiser chose to target them. No one treats the ads you're shown as credible & accurate determinants of anything, let alone sexuality.
It might show up in the "ad preferences" page if someone glances over your shoulder while you're looking at it, but generally people glancing over your shoulder to view private information isn't a Facebook privacy problem, it's a people-glancing-over-your-shoulder privacy problem. It turns out that even the most private & secure systems will leak information when you open it and let people see it over your shoulder. It's like saying your web browser puts you in danger if someone glances over your shoulder to see the gay porn you're watching on it.
if you watch enough gay content to get gay ads, then this concern is redundant
Wow, you’ve really moulded this into something different.
Yes. Trying to convince someone to change their opinion can easily get out of hand. Its trying to do too much.
Helping people understand other people's opinions is a better stance.
I.e. The person in the article finds being surveilled by a company, outside of their relationship with the company, and having that information available for advertisers to manipulate them for money disturbing, immoral and offensive. Especially for very personal attributes.
And many other people do too. And the European Union.
--
At some point I hope there is a wave of non-ad social media. Imagine how few resources are required to run an online scrapbook?
When you don't need to have thousands of servers collating every scrap of information about you they can get, and applying ever more sophisticated AI to optimally insert "sticky" posts, reinforce your notification checking habit, finding the minimum number of organic friends & family posts they need to give you, and matching you to advertisers and ads.
Applied psychology is 99% of social media's expenses. 99% of the rest is legal and lobby.