For some time now, the fact that Facebook doesn’t sell
your personal data directly to advertisers has been a shield that
company executives use to protect the company from criticism over its
privacy policies. Unfortunately for Facebook, critics have tended to
pick up this shield and beat the company with it.
Michal Kosinski, an assistant professor at Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business, is the latest to go after Facebook’s
favorite self-defense mantra. In a widely shared op-ed in the New York Times,
Kosinski argues that Facebook’s promise not to sell your data is a
distraction from the fact that it profits enormously from it:
When the company argues that it is not selling data, but rather selling targeted advertising, it’s luring you into a semantic trap, encouraging you to imagine that the only way of selling data is to send advertisers a file filled with user information. Congress may have fallen for this trap set up by Mr. Zuckerberg, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The fact that your data is not disclosed in an Excel spreadsheet but through a click on a targeted ad is irrelevant. Data still changes hands and goes to the advertiser.Facebook’s claiming that it is not selling user data is like a bar’s giving away a free martini with every $12 bag of peanuts and then claiming that it’s not selling drinks. Rich user data is Facebook’s most prized possession, and the company sure isn’t throwing it in for free.
That second paragraph showed up in a lot of screenshots
Wednesday evening on media Twitter, even if Kosinski’s zinger didn’t
really scan (what is Facebook’s $12 bag of peanuts, exactly?) and the
second sentence isn’t even in dispute. Of course Facebook profits
greatly from the data we volunteer to it; the question is how we feel
about it — and, perhaps, what to do about it.
Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of ads, rebutted
the op-ed in a Twitter thread today. “You are certainly entitled to your
opinion, but we don’t sell people’s data. Period,” he wrote. “That’s not a dodge or semantics, it’s a fact. We don’t sell or share personal information.”
Between Kosinski and Goldman, we have a perfect Twitter
debate — one in which each side can win by being right in important
ways, while being wrong in others. Goldman can say “actually, we don’t sell your data,” while Kosinski can say “actually,
you basically do,” and the only question is whether we will be having
this debate longer than “what role did social media play in the 2016
election.” (I’d put them at even odds?)
Still, Goldman draws a meaningful distinction here, insofar as there are giant corporations that really do
sell your data. They have wonderfully dystopian sci-fi names: Acxiom,
Experian, Epsilon, Exactis, and — perhaps my favorite — Recorded Future.
They are quite profitable — although not, say, Facebook-level
profitable. And while I don’t know that anyone aware of their existence
feels great about them, generally speaking we aren’t up in arms about
the Epsilons of the world the way we are about data privacy on Facebook.
As is pointed out whenever the does-Facebook-sell-data
debate rears its head — this feels like the third or fourth time we’ve
had it this year — renting access to anonymized data sets, as Facebook
does, is a much better business than the one-time purchases and
subscriptions offered by data brokers. When Facebook says it doesn’t
sell your data, it often implies that to do so would be a terrible
breach of trust. The implication is that the company deserves moral
credit for its business model, even though it’s at least as much a
revenue consideration as it is anything else.
To his credit, Goldman more or less said this today.
“It’s is not in our business interest to sell or share personal
information with anyone,” he wrote. “Our business model only works if it
works for people — if people don’t, they won’t come to Facebook,
advertisers won’t be able to reach them, and we won’t have a business.”
Goldman had another peace offering for the more privacy-minded among us: a link to the Ads Preference Manager,
which you can use to prevent Facebook from targeting you based on what
it knows about you. (And maybe you’ll even learn something about
yourself when you visit, as I did. Apparently I am a frequent visitor to
Mediterranean restaurants, at least statistically.)
Of course, it’s unlikely that a significant percentage of
Facebook users will modify these settings — and I suspect that Goldman
knows that. A more helpful question might be what kind of
advertising-based business model the majority of us can live with. As Benedict Evans said Wednesday evening:
We don’t want irrelevant ads or ads that are too relevant. We don’t want anyone to know what we bought but we want the advertiser to know we already bought that. And we refuse (mostly) to pay but we don’t really want ads anyway. Our feelings about online ads are pretty unresolved
The tensions that Evans describes are real — I’m not sure
I could get a supermajority of Americans to agree on a path forward.
Which is perhaps why we find ourselves having the same debates over and
over. We know we want something other than the current data privacy
regime, but we still can’t quite name it.