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swedna · 5 years

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The US government is sharpening its antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech. In a sign that formal inquiries could be forthcoming, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission last week divvied up antitrust oversight for Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. While the timing caught some by surprise, the companies have been preparing for this moment for a while, hiring lawyers and lobbyists and publicly making their case. History may be on their side: Corporate breakups are a significant, and rare, undertaking for the US government.

The last major breakup of a monopoly was AT&T in 1982. Microsoft was ordered split up by a federal judge in 2000 after the Justice Department sued the software company in 1998, a decision that was reversed on appeal.In the past few years, there has been a groundswell of calls to at least rein in, if not break up, technology companies that are seen by some as having become too big and powerful in many ways.

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has made perhaps the most detailed case for breaking up and regulating the four companies, but the Massachusetts Democrat is not alone in her aggressive views on the industry. Any formal investigation will take a long time. Government scrutiny of Microsoft lasted years.

As all sides dig in, here’s a look at some of the issues the government could home in on as it builds its case, and some of the ways the companies might argue their way out.

APPLE

The Case: Though perhaps best known for the iPhone, Apple’s vulnerability is the App Store, which supports tools and games for mobile devices and increasingly holds the key to the company’s growth. Apple and Google control more than 95% of all mobile app spending by consumers in the US, meaning that most developers must work with them to reach millions of smartphone users. Spotify Technology SA is among those that have long complained about the 30% cut Apple takes of each app, claiming it amounts to an effective tax on competitors. Some smaller developers sued Apple this week, claiming the App Store suppresses competition. The European Union is already preparing to look into the case and Warren, in her proposal, said the App Store should be separated from the rest of Apple because its own apps compete with those of outside developers.

Last month the Supreme Court ruled that a large antitrust case, regarding App Store pricing, could proceed.

The Defence: Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is adamant that Apple is “not a monopoly” in any way. He points to its share of the smartphone market in the U.S., which is only about 30% and is even lower on PCs. ''We don’t have a dominant position in any market,” he said in an interview Tuesday with CBS. Apple has long sought to distinguish itself from the rest of big tech, from providing tighter security on its hardware and software to highlighting that it doesn’t monetize users’ data. Regarding the App Store, Apple recently added a new section to its website to show the benefits it provides to developers, such as reaching a huge global audience and handling payment and identity details, thereby taking friction out of the sign-up process.

Apple, along with Google, has also pointed out its ability to filter out fake apps and malicious software, making its store more secure.

FACEBOOK

The Case: Facebook has received a barrage of government criticism over the past year due to the sheer amount of data it collects on some 2 billion users and its control over content posted on the platform. Digital advertising, where Facebook and Google together control about 60% of spending in the US, is also an area where regulators might seek to base a case. Warren and Representative David Cicilline, the Democratic chairman of the House’s antitrust panel, have suggested that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp might need to be unwound. Chris Hughes, one of the company’s co-founders, recently wrote at length why he thought Facebook is a monopoly run by a chief executive officer whose “influence is staggering.”

The Defence: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he welcomes regulation, but that breaking up the company wouldn’t address legislators’ privacy and data concerns. In fact, Facebook argues that its size actually enables it to do the things that regulators want to see, such as better policing of content, which would be much harder if Instagram or WhatsApp were separate companies. Furthermore, in an age where the government is concerned about the rise of China, Facebook argues that the US needs its big tech companies. Breaking up Facebook would simply clear the way for Chinese tech companies, which don’t share American values, to step in and dominate, Zuckerberg has said. As for digital advertising, Facebook notes that it doesn’t even lead the market.

EMarketer pegs its share at 22% of the U.S. market in 2019. Facebook’s $55 billion in advertising revenue last year was less than half of Google’s. And, other social media companies are growing in key demographics, like Snapchat, which said earlier this year that it now reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds in the US.

GOOGLE

The Case: Google appears to be the company that’s facing the most serious antitrust scrutiny now, after the FTC closed a two-year investigation in 2013 without any action. The company has a large or a majority market share in several important industries: Search, digital advertising and mobile operating systems. And Google could face concerns similar to Apple for its own app store.

Google commands about 37% of the US digital ad market, according to EMarketer, where it sells much of the online real estate available to advertisers, such as search ads and spots that play before YouTube videos. In search, where Google has 90% of the market, opponents claim the company can manipulate rankings to favor its own listings. And Google’s Android smartphone operating system is by far the most popular in the world, with 85% of the market, outpacing Apple’s iOS with 14%, according to IDC.

The company has already gone several rounds of antitrust scrutiny with the European Union and has been forced to pay billions of dollars in three different cases, including a record $5 billion fine for the practice of tying its search and browser tools to Android. Google has also made many enemies among smaller businesses, ranging from media to advertising technology companies that are now assembling evidence to help the Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The Defence: Google has well-defined arguments ready to push back, honed over years of doing battle with the EU and the FTC. To counter the claim of favortism in search, Google argues that it's only trying to surface the best information faster for users. Google is appealing the $1.7 billion EU fine for stifling competition in the online advertising market. Regulators’ demands for Android will force Google to change its business model and start charging customers for the software, rather than giving it to handset makers for free, the company claims. Google may also argue that the global nature of the internet means it doesn’t actually have the power that its critics say it does, pointing to companies such as Amazon and Tencent Holdings Ltd. The internet has low barriers to entry, and if someone builds a better search engine or advertising system, customers can easily switch over, the argument goes. Google likes to say that “competition is only one click away.’’

AMAZON

The Case: The antitrust debate about Amazon focuses on the retailing giant’s perceived dominance of e-commerce, where it has nearly 50% of U.S. online sales. Since it’s both a retailer and a marketplace for third-party sellers, Amazon has drawn scrutiny over whether it uses its clout and huge amount of sales data to give itself a leg up over smaller vendors – an issue the EU is already investigating. Warren has suggested that Amazon, like Apple, should be barred from competing with other players that sell on its marketplace. Regulators may also look into Amazon’s fulfillment practice, in which the company handles all aspects of fulfilling customer orders from shipping to packing and storing, according to Vox.

The problem is that Amazon often charges much lower fees than competing platforms. Amazon Prime could also be a target. While consumers may love the fact that they can get free shipping on a wide range of goods and services with the subscription program, the FTC has shown interest in the question of whether bundling these services allows Amazon to undercut competitors on price, according to Vox.

The Defence: Every time Amazon buys another company in another sector it sends a jolt of fear throughout the industry -- whether groceries or pharmaceuticals or logistics. But Amazon claims it actually only holds a small percentage of the total retail market in the US and faces formidable competition from the likes of Walmart Inc. The company, also a frequent target of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for its treatment of workers, also prides itself on being able to keep prices low for consumers.

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webbygraphic001 · 5 years

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Internet Censorship is Here: How Far Will it Go?

Within hours of the recent mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque by a far-right terrorist, the country’s authorities were scrambling to ensure a sickening video the murderer streamed on Facebook was barred from the nation’s screens. Due to the nature of the Internet, the task of removal proved very difficult. But eventually, the government succeeded — using controversial tactics usually associated with Internet censorship by authoritarian regimes.

For some, the action of one highly democratic nation was a worrying reminder that Internet freedom should not be taken for granted. For others it was a triumph of taste and decency over a Wild West online community that still refuses to accept regulation while simultaneously failing to take responsibility for its actions.

a billion Internet users are barely aware that Facebook and Google exist

Versions of this debate are being played out around the world, as authorities, online companies, journalists and web professionals try to strike a balance between free speech and protecting Internet users from highly offensive — and potentially also subversive — content. The spread of “fake news”, alleged attempts by foreign powers to meddle in elections, and the age-old difficulty of defining what should be permitted in a free society, are all part of this debate.

With the technology and the excuses for Internet censorship already in place, it’s a debate that will shape the future of the Web. Or should that be ‘futures’, plural?

Full Censorship Can Be Achieved

In China, a billion Internet users are barely aware that Facebook and Google exist. Authorities have no difficulty in ensuring unpleasant content is not seen on the search engines and social media boards that are available there: The Christchurch video was blocked just as effectively as disturbing footage of the Tiananmen Square massacre is, because the Chinese government has built a system of highly effective controls on the Internet known as “the Great Firewall of China”.

Officially called the Golden Shield Project, China’s system of Internet controls has made fools of the experts who said that the Internet could not be tamed or censored. Jon Penney, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told Open Democracy recently that although China’s technology is not yet fully understood by the west, it is:

…among the most technically sophisticated Internet filtering/censorship systems in the world.

“Basically, access to the Internet in China is provided by eight Internet Service Providers, which are licensed and controlled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,” he said. “These ISPs are important, because we’re learning that they do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of content filtering and censorship.” 

Controlling ISPs was one crucial brick of that firewall that allowed New Zealand to take the Christchurch killer’s video down. Indeed, what was controversial for many was the use of such an approach — and the fact that the government used a set of unpublished ‘blacklists’ of the sites it required to be blocked. Kalev Leetaru, a big data expert, wrote on Forbes: “The secret nature of the blacklist and opaque manner in which the companies decided which websites to add to the list or how to appeal an incorrect listing, echoed similar systems deployed around the world in countries like China.”

A Different Internet

China’s great firewall also tracks and filters keywords used in search engines; blocks many IP addresses; and can ‘hijack’ the Domain Name System to ensure attempts to access banned sites draw a blank. This is thought to be done at ISP level, but also further along the system as well, ensuring that browsing even a permitted foreign site from within China can be frustratingly slow. But with sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia blocked, most Chinese users simply view an entirely different Internet and App ecosystem.

most Chinese users simply view an entirely different Internet

Adrian Shahbaz, the research director for technology and democracy at Freedom House, an independent watchdog for democracy, says other authoritarian regimes — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are already showing interest in China’s technology and censorship system. Russia is building its own version, which will allow it to totally isolate the domestic web from the rest of the Internet; ostensibly, this is to ensure the country’s ability to defend itself from a “catastrophic cyber attack”.

There are concerns that this censorship will spread to the West, where attempts to clamp down on hate speech, and to stop foreign ‘trolls’ pushing fake news in a bid to cause instability and influence elections, mean there is no shortage of justification for introducing controls. French President Emanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump are among the democratic leaders who have threatened crackdowns in the last few months alone.

Censorship or Responsible Regulation?

ISP controls and direct censorship are not the only threats to a unified and ‘free’ internet. With most people consuming their Internet through just a few very popular social media platforms or mainstream news providers, governments can also lean directly on these companies. Singapore — a country that admittedly sits in the bottom 30 of the Press Freedom Index — has just introduced a new “anti-fake news law” allowing authorities in the city-state to remove articles deemed to breach government regulations.

The country’s prime minister said the law will require media outlets to correct fake news articles, and “show corrections or display warnings about online falsehoods so that readers or viewers can see all sides and make up their own minds about the matter.”

Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have their Asia headquarters in Singapore and are expected to come under pressure to aid implementation, meaning that those sites could look different when viewed from the city-state. Singapore may not be known for its freedom of speech, but its approach is telling as to how less authoritarian regimes — and those without China’s technology — can impose a creeping web censorship by leaning of the big tech companies that deliver most of the Internet users see.

The Singaporean premier added that “in extreme and urgent cases, the legislation will also require online news sources to take down fake news before irreparable damage is done.” It is not hard to imagine these words coming from a Western leader, or a judge.

Facebook is Already on Board

Facebook itself, after coming under intense pressure over the use of the site to spread everything from dubious news reports to videos promoting suicide, has now joined the calls for regulation. “From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement recently.

On the subject of data, Zuckerberg cited Europe’s GDPR — a set of regulations governing the use and storage of personal data — as an example to follow. But it is another EU law, passed in recent weeks, that threatens further Internet fragmentation.

The new Copyright Directive will require tech firms to automatically screen for and remove unauthorised copyrighted material from their platforms. Many campaigners have argued the directive will be harmful to free expression, since the only way to guarantee compliance is to simply block any user-generated content that references other copyrighted material in any way, including criticism, remixes, or even simple quotes.

until now, people have been relatively free to publish material online and then suffer the consequences

While the EU directive aims to bolster quality online news journalism by banning its wholesale re-use, sites that rely on user-generated content could end up looking very different when viewed from within Europe, compared to the US for example. Experts talk of a “splintering”, which means that there will effectively be different Internets in different jurisdictions.

Copyright enforcement, of course, is not censorship. And there have always been categories of images, for example, that are illegal in most jurisdictions. But until now, people have been relatively free to publish material online and then suffer the consequences, as was the case in the days of print. Proponents of tighter controls at source argue that simply removing material from sites once it is known to be illegal is a never-ending and ultimately pointless task, especially in the face of organized ’trolls’ who can re-post at will.

During the first 24 hours after the Christchurch attack, Facebook removed 1.5 million re-posts of the murderer’s video, for example. It was only the introduction of controls at ISP level that finally blocked it in New Zealand, at least.

The Human Element

“Extremist content” and “fake news’ look set to be the next targets for politicians who favor stricter Internet controls, or, as they may argue, greater responsibility from ISP providers or major websites. Unlike copyright, this is at least partially subjective, and would require real people, employed by the authorities, to decide what is acceptable on our screens. China, naturally, already employs an army of such censors; it even pays another large group to post material that is explicitly favorable to its policies.

Leetaru said: “Like New Zealand’s recent blocking efforts, China’s system officially exists for the same reason: to block access to disturbing content and content that would disrupt social order. In the Chinese case, however, the system has famously morphed to envelope all content that might threaten the government’s official narratives or call into question its actions.

“In New Zealand’s case, website censorship was limited to a small set of sites allegedly hosting sensitive content relating to the attack. Yet, the government’s apparent comfort with instituting such a nation-wide ban so swiftly and without debate reminds us of how Chinese-style censorship begins.”

Can’t imagine it happening? Britain’s government recently published a ‘White Paper’ — a way of signalling possible legislation — which proposed that social media companies should be forced to take down, within 24 hours, “unacceptable material” that “undermines our democratic values and principles”.

What Constitutes Fake News?

Exactly what constitutes “fake news” has always been open to interpretation: during election campaigns, some democratic leaders have already learned that it is a good label to discredit critical reports with. In Russia, fake news was banned recently, and is defined as anything that “exhibits blatant disrespect for the society, government, official government symbols, constitution or governmental bodies of Russia.”

One area that is being actively targeted in Europe is “extremist” material fostering violence or hatred. In Germany, which already has a system to force platforms to remove “hate speech,” this has recently included censure on a woman who posted pictures of the Iranian women’s volleyball team to contrast their attire in the 1970s (shorts and vests) and now (headscarves and long sleeves).

The following joke was deemed hateful enough to land the poster a social media ban: “Muslim men are taking a second wife. To finance their lives, Germans are taking a second job.”

Another area that Western governments are showing increasing concern about is private groups that carefully regulate membership, designed to allow like-minded people to share their views unchallenged. Already, there have been calls for Facebook to clamp down on these closed groups or “echo chambers”, on the grounds that they are able to serve undiluted misinformation without challenge. While these requests may once again sound reasonable, it is unclear what would constitute an echo chamber and what kind of ‘misinformation’ could be considered unacceptable — or indeed, who would decide that.

How to Beat the Censors

For those wanting to beat EU copywrite laws and, for example, see a meme their friend in California is ‘lol-ing’ about, a virtual private network (VPN) should be a good solution. Already recommended by many security experts, VPNs are encrypted proxy servers that hide your own IP address and can make it look like you are browsing from a different country. For occasional use, even using a public proxy site, a ‘browser within a browser’ may well work.

There are various levels of VPN – an in depth look at the options is available here. However, sophisticated censorship systems such as the Great Firewall of China are capable of detecting VPN use and blocking that too.

A popular alternative to VPN use is the Tor browser, which is designed with anonymity in mind. Although experts rate Tor’s privacy features (and therefore its anti-censorship abilities) higher than VPNs, Tor can also be blocked. What’s more, you have to install the browser on your device and using Tor does not hide the fact that you are using Tor. Both Tor and VPNs are illegal in some countries and their use could put you at risk.

Tor is also the gateway of preference for accessing the Deep Web or Dark Web — which are also used heavily by activists and journalists who are trying to circumvent curbs on their freedom of expression. In a detailed article explaining how to access and use the Dark Web, technology journalist Conor Shiels says:

The Deep Web has been heralded by many as the last bastion of internet privacy in an increasingly intrusive age, while others consider it one of the evilest places on the internet.

The Deep Web is technically any site not indexed by search engines. Such sites would be an obvious place for private groups to base themselves if they are thrown of Facebook or even banned — although of course they may find it harder to recruit new members if they remain hidden from the casual user.

Although the Deep or Dark Web is a popular place for illegal activity, it is not illegal in itself. For those seeking an uncensored experience, it remains a place hidden from the authorities, but of course, the flip side is that you will be hiding your own postings from the vast majority of web users. This aspect of censorship will perhaps be the hardest to bypass as authorities move to cut off the most popular sites and platforms from certain news, views and activities.

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neptunecreek · 5 years

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The Public Deserves a Return to the 2015 Open Internet Order

Congress is actively debating how to fix the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules. But the first bills offered (H.R. 1101 (Walden), H.R. 1006 (Latta), and H.R. 1096 (McMorris Rodgers) focus narrowly on the “bright line” rules of no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization. A major problem with this approach is that the public supported the 2015 Open Internet Order and a huge array of parties (with the exception of basically just AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon) supported Title II reclassification because of what else was protected. Privacy, competition, and public safety are all worse off when all you do is ban three basic tactics.

Restoring the entirety of the 2015 Open Internet Order means protecting the vital components to keeping the Internet a free and open platform. If Congress decides to act, it should not shortchange the American public. Unfortunately, that appears to be where the House of Representatives is heading right now.

The Rules Need To Cover Anticompetitive Zero Rating

A straight ban on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization would leave out important limits on the practice of exempting certain traffic from data caps, also known as “zero rating.” This practice can be used to drive Internet users to the ISP’s own content or favored partners, squelching competition. A recent Epicenter.works multi-year study on zero-rating practices in the EU has found that countries that allow zero-rating plans have more expensive wireless services than countries that do not. It also found that when ISPs engage in zero-rating practices, only large companies are able to maintain the market relationships needed to be zero-rated. In addition, we already knew how zero rating can be used in anti-competitive ways and discriminates against low-income users, which is why EFF supported California’s ban on most harmful zero-rating practices.

Ignoring the harms that anticompetitive zero rating does to net neutrality is essentially just doing the bidding of AT&T, which has regularly leveraged its data caps in an anticompetitive way. It is worth noting that the current administration is concerned that AT&T intends to use tactics like this to privilege Time Warner content over that of competitors. Antitrust law may be unsuited to address this problem. As we see more and more of these kinds of vertical mergers, we need rules on zero rating to protect consumers.

While the 2015 Open Internet Order’s “general conduct rule” covering zero rating was too vague, a narrower alternative, like that in California’s net neutrality law, would ensure lower prices and keep ISPs from steering users to privileged websites and services. FCC staff had in fact found AT&T’s and Verizon’s zero rating practices to be in violation of the 2015 Order under the general conduct rule (which is not included in the three bills that have been introduced), but those investigations were terminated by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai before initiating the process to repeal net neutrality.

People Want Their ISP Privacy Rights Back

When all broadband access companies were classified under Title II of the Communications Act, Section 222 of the Act gave users a legal right to privacy when we use broadband communications. It also imposed a duty on your ISP to protect your personal information. In light of major wireless and broadband companies’ creation of a black market for bounty hunters (and everyone else) to be able to purchase the physical location of any American, it’s really important to restore these privacy rights. Over 90 percent of Americans feel that they have lost control of their personal information when they use the Internet, so restoring ISP privacy rules should be a part of any new legislation.

Congress made a huge mistake when it reversed and prohibited the widely supported FCC privacy rules that stemmed from the 2015 Open Internet Order. Congress still appears headed in the wrong direction on consumer privacy when it openly entertains preempting strong state privacy laws (such as Illinois’ BIPA and California’s CCPA) not just on behalf of big ISPs but also at the request of Google and Facebook. But should a new communications law come into focus, reinstating Section 222’s protections would yield a huge benefit to users. ISPs are the only entities that are able to track your entire Internet experience because you have to tell them where you want to go. Virtual private networks (VPNs) offer a partial fix at best. It makes little sense for Congress to ignore consumer privacy laws it already has on the books and not reapply them to broadband access companies once again.

We Need More Competition in Broadband Internet, Which the 2015 Open Internet Order Promoted

Dozens of small ISPs wrote the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and asked them not to abandon the Open Internet Order because it provided a clear framework to address anticompetitive conduct by the largest players in the market (AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon). Specifically, being classified as a common carrier under Title II of the Act applied Section 251, which required ISPs to “interconnect” with other broadband providers and related market players in good faith. This prevents large players from leveraging their size to harm the competition.

The dispute made most famous by comedian John Oliver was between Comcast and Netflix where Comcast demanded new payments from Netflix simply because they had leverage. Large ISPs regularly misrepresent the cost of providing access to video services from their competitors, but the estimated cost to Comcast was a fraction of a penny per hour of viewing HD video and dropping when they demanded new fees. Other disputes exist that are less in the public eye including two between Comcast and unknown edge providers that came to light in a court filing after the passage of California’s net neutrality law (SB 822). Ultimately what this boils down to is whether interconnection charges become a rent-seeking opportunity for big ISPs as they have in many parts of the world.

The other pro-competition outcome of classifying broadband companies under Title II was the application of Section 224 of the Communications Act, otherwise known as “pole attachment rights.” Under the Open Internet Order, anyone selling broadband access was given a legal right to access infrastructure such as the poles outside your home that run wires. Given that the close to 60 to 80 percent of the cost of deploying a network can be attributed to local civil works like digging up the roads, equal access to infrastructure already built helps reduce the cost of market entry. Knowing this cost barrier, it should surprise no one that when an ISP owns the infrastructure it will categorically deny access to competitors much like AT&T did with Google Fiber. Today under the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, only telephone companies (like AT&T and Verizon) and cable television companies (like Comcast) have legal rights to infrastructure. New entrants that sell competitive broadband access, like Common Networks of Alameda, are forced to explore more difficult workarounds such as asking residents to offer a portion of their rooftops.

Public Safety Needs a Referee

Despite the fact that Verizon has admitted all fault for its throttling and upselling activities in California to firefighters during one of the worst fires in the state’s history, the FCC has done nothing to proactively address the problem. This is despite the problem remaining unresolved in Santa Clara County months after the fact. And that is because without its Title II authority under Section 201 and Section 202, the FCC can literally do nothing about Verizon’s conduct. Such an outcome raised serious questions at the D.C. Circuit’s oral arguments on the Restoring Internet Freedom Order as judges openly questioned the FCC’s wisdom in letting first responders navigate this field alone, despite the FCC’s legal duty to address public safety. As Santa Clara County’s attorney Danielle Goldstein pointed out during oral arguments, it is not rational to expect public safety entities to come to the FCC after an emergency occurs. Given the life and death matters involved, avoiding this issue carries extreme risks of recurrence in the future not because ISPs are bad actors, but because it is not their job to figure out the balancing act between their for-profit duties and less profitable needs of public safety. That has always been a government responsibility.

There is more at stake in the battle for net neutrality than preventing ISPs from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization. Bills that are limited to those three rules ignore the high-speed cable monopoly problem that tens of millions of Americans face, and how a lack of privacy protections harms broadband adoption. These bills miss the larger impact of the 2015 rules and ask the public, which overwhelmingly opposed the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, to accept only a fraction of its benefits. The public deserves better.

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sheminecrafts · 5 years

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Most Facebook users still in the dark about its creepy ad practices, Pew finds

A study by the Pew Research Center suggests most Facebook users are still in the dark about how the company tracks and profiles them for ad-targeting purposes.

Pew found three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users did not know the social networking behemoth maintains a list of their interests and traits to target them with ads, only discovering this when researchers directed them to view their Facebook ad preferences page.

A majority (51%) of Facebook users also told Pew they were uncomfortable with Facebook compiling the information.

While more than a quarter (27%) said the ad preference listing Facebook had generated did not very or at all accurately represent them.

The researchers also found that 88% of polled users had some material generated for them on the ad preferences page. Pew’s findings come from a survey of a nationally representative sample of 963 U.S. Facebook users ages 18 and older which was conducted between September 4 to October 1, 2018, using GfK’s KnowledgePanel.

In a senate hearing last year Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed users have “complete control” over both information they actively choose to upload to Facebook and data about them the company collects in order to target ads.

But the key question remains how Facebook users can be in complete control when most of them they don’t know what the company is doing. This is something U.S. policymakers should have front of mind as they work on drafting a comprehensive federal privacy law.

Pew’s findings suggest Facebook’s greatest ‘defence’ against users exercising what little control it affords them over information its algorithms links to their identity is a lack of awareness about how the Facebook adtech business functions.

After all the company markets the platform as a social communications service for staying in touch with people you know, not a mass surveillance people-profiling ad-delivery machine. So unless you’re deep in the weeds of the adtech industry there’s little chance for the average Facebook user to understand what Mark Zuckerberg has described as “all the nuances of how these services work”.

Having a creepy feeling that ads are stalking you around the Internet hardly counts.

At the same time, users being in the dark about the information dossiers Facebook maintains on them, is not a bug but a feature for the company’s business — which directly benefits by being able to minimize the proportion of people who opt out of having their interests categorized for ad targeting because they have no idea it’s happening. (And relevant ads are likely more clickable and thus more lucrative for Facebook.)

Hence Zuckerberg’s plea to policymakers last April for “a simple and practical set of — of ways that you explain what you are doing with data… that’s not overly restrictive on — on providing the services”.

(Or, to put it another way: If you must regulate privacy let us simplify explanations using cartoon-y abstraction that allows for continued obfuscation of exactly how, where and why data flows.)

From the user point of view, even if you know Facebook offers ad management settings it’s still not simple to locate and understand them, requiring navigating through several menus that are not prominently sited on the platform, and which are also complex, with multiple interactions possible. (Such as having to delete every inferred interest individually.)

The average Facebook user is unlikely to look past the latest few posts in their newsfeed let alone go proactively hunting for a boring sounding ‘ad management’ setting and spending time figuring out what each click and toggle does (in some cases users are required to hover over a interest in order to view a cross that indicates they can in fact remove it, so there’s plenty of dark pattern design at work here too).

And all the while Facebook is putting a heavy sell on, in the self-serving ad ‘explanations’ it does offer, spinning the line that ad targeting is useful for users. What’s not spelt out is the huge privacy trade off it entails — aka Facebook’s pervasive background surveillance of users and non-users.

Nor does it offer a complete opt-out of being tracked and profiled; rather its partial ad settings let users “influence what ads you see”.

But influencing is not the same as controlling, whatever Zuckerberg claimed in Congress. So, as it stands, there is no simple way for Facebook users to understand their ad options because the company only lets them twiddle a few knobs rather than shut down the entire surveillance system.

The company’s algorithmic people profiling also extends to labelling users as having particular political views, and/or having racial and ethnic/multicultural affinities.

Pew researchers asked about these two specific classifications too — and found that around half (51%) of polled users had been assigned a political affinity by Facebook; and around a fifth (21%) were badged as having a “multicultural affinity”.

Of those users who Facebook had put into a particular political bucket, a majority (73%) said the platform’s categorization of their politics was very or somewhat accurate; but more than a quarter (27%) said it was not very or not at all an accurate description of them.

“Put differently, 37% of Facebook users are both assigned a political affinity and say that affinity describes them well, while 14% are both assigned a category and say it does not represent them accurately,” it writes.

Use of people’s personal data for political purposes has triggered some major scandals for Facebook’s business in recent years. Such as the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — when user data was shown to have been extracted from the platform en masse, and without proper consents, for campaign purposes.

In other instances Facebook ads have also been used to circumvent campaign spending rules in elections. Such as during the UK’s 2016 EU referendum vote when large numbers of ads were non-transparently targeted with the help of social media platforms.

And indeed to target masses of political disinformation to carry out election interference. Such as the Kremlin-backed propaganda campaign during the 2016 US presidential election.

Last year the UK data watchdog called for an ethical pause on use of social media data for political campaigning, such is the scale of its concern about data practices uncovered during a lengthy investigation.

Yet the fact that Facebook’s own platform natively badges users’ political affinities frequently gets overlooked in the discussion around this issue.

For all the outrage generated by revelations that Cambridge Analytica had tried to use Facebook data to apply political labels on people to target ads, such labels remain a core feature of the Facebook platform — allowing any advertiser, large or small, to pay Facebook to target people based on where its algorithms have determined they sit on the political spectrum, and do so without obtaining their explicit consent. (Yet under European data protection law political beliefs are deemed sensitive information, and Facebook is facing increasing scrutiny in the region over how it processes this type of data.)

Of those users who Pew found had been badged by Facebook as having a “multicultural affinity” — another algorithmically inferred sensitive data category — 60% told it they do in fact have a very or somewhat strong affinity for the group to which they are assigned; while more than a third (37%) said their affinity for that group is not particularly strong.

“Some 57% of those who are assigned to this category say they do in fact consider themselves to be a member of the racial or ethnic group to which Facebook assigned them,” Pew adds.

It found that 43% of those given an affinity designation are said by Facebook’s algorithm to have an interest in African American culture; with the same share (43%) is assigned an affinity with Hispanic culture. While one-in-ten are assigned an affinity with Asian American culture.

(Facebook’s targeting tool for ads does not offer affinity classifications for any other cultures in the U.S., including Caucasian or white culture, Pew also notes, thereby underlining one inherent bias of its system.)

In recent years the ethnic affinity label that Facebook’s algorithm sticks to users has caused specific controversy after it was revealed to have been enabling the delivery of discriminatory ads.

As a result, in late 2016, Facebook said it would disable ad targeting using the ethnic affinity label for protected categories of housing, employment and credit-related ads. But a year later its ad review systems were found to be failing to block potentially discriminatory ads.

The act of Facebook sticking labels on people clearly creates plenty of risk — be that from election interference or discriminatory ads (or, indeed, both).

Risk that a majority of users don’t appear comfortable with once they realize it’s happening.

And therefore also future risk for Facebook’s business as more regulators turn their attention to crafting privacy laws that can effectively safeguard consumers from having their personal data exploited in ways they don’t like. (And which might disadvantage them or generate wider societal harms.)

Commenting about Facebook’s data practices, Michael Veale, a researcher in data rights and machine learning at University College London, told us: “Many of Facebook’s data processing practices appear to violate user expectations, and the way they interpret the law in Europe is indicative of their concern around this. If Facebook agreed with regulators that inferred political opinions or ‘ethnic affinities’ were just the same as collecting that information explicitly, they’d have to ask for separate, explicit consent to do so — and users would have to be able to say no to it.

“Similarly, Facebook argues it is ‘manifestly excessive’ for users to ask to see the extensive web and app tracking data they collect and hold next to your ID to generate these profiles — something I triggered a statutory investigation into with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. You can’t help but suspect that it’s because they’re afraid of how creepy users would find seeing a glimpse of the the truth breadth of their invasive user and non-user data collection.”

In a second survey, conducted between May 29 and June 11, 2018 using Pew’s American Trends Panel and of a representative sample of all U.S. adults who use social media (including Facebook and other platforms like Twitter and Instagram), Pew researchers found social media users generally believe it would be relatively easy for social media platforms they use to determine key traits about them based on the data they have amassed about their behaviors.

“Majorities of social media users say it would be very or somewhat easy for these platforms to determine their race or ethnicity (84%), their hobbies and interests (79%), their political affiliation (71%) or their religious beliefs (65%),” Pew writes.

While less than a third (28%) believe it would be difficult for the platforms to figure out their political views, it adds.

So even while most people do not understand exactly what social media platforms are doing with information collected and inferred about them, once they’re asked to think about the issue most believe it would be easy for tech firms to join data dots around their social activity and make sensitive inferences about them.

Commenting generally on the research, Pew’s director of internet and technology research, Lee Rainie, said its aim was to try to bring some data to debates about consumer privacy, the role of micro-targeting of advertisements in commerce and political activity, and how algorithms are shaping news and information systems.

Update: Responding to Pew’s research, Facebook sent us the following statement:

We want people to understand how our ad settings and controls work. That means better ads for people. While we and the rest of the online ad industry need to do more to educate people on how interest-based advertising works and how we protect people’s information, we welcome conversations about transparency and control.

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years