Tag Archives: Facebook

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Calling BS on Facebook’s PR Ruse

15 Friday Jun 2018

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In March 2018, Facebook announced they would no longer integrate with third-party data providers that enable marketers to create targeted audiences on its platform as a response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Consequently, I wrote an article about this entitled Facebook’s Red Herring, because that is exactly what it was–a very artful distraction and attempt to deceive consumers into believing Facebook’s action was about addressing their privacy. But that is not what it was about.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was about data leaving Facebook and being used in ways that were not authorized by participants of the survey. The decision to dissolve third-party data partnerships is about data that goes into Facebook to segment audiences for relevant targeting. However, what consumers have not seen the same publicity on is that Facebook has modified their stance on third-party partnerships so their data can still be used. The point I made in my article is that Facebook demonized third-party data providers in the press by announcing their dissolution of partnerships while avoiding the same public scrutiny around the real reason for their action.

Marketers can still append third-party data, which is compiled by a vendor to provide context, to a customer or prospect outside of Facebook and then ‘onboard it’ for digital marketing. Marketers simply need to sign an agreement with an onboarding provider that includes Facebook’s new terms and conditions. They can then append third-party information to customer lists and create target groups, or they obtain prospect lists of their target groups from a third-party data provider. From there advertisers onboard that data and upload it via Campaign Manager to Facebook. Some onboarders such as LiveRamp have third-party data available in their platforms so prospect audiences can be created and pushed to Facebook without the need to purchase the prospect list with personally identifiable information (PII) from the third-party data provider.

Regardless of how the marketer goes about it, once data is onboarded or audiences are created in an onboarding platform, they can be activated (used for media purchase) on Facebook. Voilá – third party data is still being used on Facebook. Facebook’s move to divorce themselves from third-party data did not mean it couldn’t be used, they are just requiring an additional step that many marketers are already proficiently executing.

If you are unfamiliar with how consumer data onboarding works, here is a short explanation: Consumer data onboarders like LiveRamp, Neustar and Oracle move offline marketing lists containing PII such as CRM data, loyalty databases, prospecting lists, etc., to the online ecosystem and match or link (via a common identifier such as email address) to cookies and device IDs in a privacy-compliant manner. The reason this matching is considered privacy compliant is because consumer PII is anonymized. Marketers never receive which specific cookies and device IDs are associated with the consumer profile.

Onboarders can connect consumer PII to cookies because they visit websites that are part of the onboarder’s network where consumers have provided permission to share their information with third parties. One example of a website that collects consumer PII and online attributes such as cookies, device IDs, etc. is Tripit. When you create an account on Tripit, you provide information that associates a cookie or device ID with your PII. If you look at Tripit’s privacy policy under “Cookies, Analytics and Tracking”, it expressly states: “…providers may also automatically collect the above information about you through the App and on other sites and services, including personally identifiable information about your online activities over time and across different websites, devices, online services, and applications when you use our App. Some third parties help us and others associate your activities across the browsers and devices you use, or that your household uses, for retargeting, cross-device advertising, analytics, and measurement purposes”. Because an onboarded list will include PII, it can be matched to a cookie/device ID if a website with these permissions are in the onboarder’s network of partner contributors.

Sorry dear consumer, Facebook’s dissolution of third-party data partnerships continues to be a red herring and does not prevent such data from being used on their platform. Furthermore, Facebook continues to collect and store first-party data (i.e., owned by them) on you that advertisers can leverage for target audience creation; and they have those rights because it is buried in the required terms and conditions you consented to when your account was created.

So, while Facebook has demonized third-party data in the press right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (even though completely unrelated to the latter’s dubious use), they have not prevented its use. Frankly, I find Facebook’s use of first-party data and passive surveillance via their pixel on other websites resulting in those creepy retargeting advertisements much more intrusive then my being a member of a target audience based on my demographics and other modeled assumptions.

Consumer trust is the new “oil” in today’s data economy, and it requires more than lip service. Perhaps it is time for Facebook to figure that out.

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Facebook’s Red Herring

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Advertising, Personal Data

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Cambridge Analytica collected data on over 50 Million Facebook users without their consent. How? Dr. Aleksander Kogan a psychology professor at Cambridge University built a survey on Facebook that many users participated in. However, only 270,000 of those participants consented to their data being used and according to the New York Times that consent was for “academic purposes” only. Cambridge Analytica told the Times that they did receive the data, however they blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook’s terms. Facebook claims that when they learned of this violation they took the app off their site and demanded all the data Cambridge Analytica acquired be deleted. Facebook claims they now believe all that data was not destroyed. The problem described is an issue of data LEAVING Facebook and consumer consent, not data going into Facebook.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it will sever all ties with third party data partners to protect consumer privacy. Some privacy proponents believe that this is a great step in protecting the privacy of consumers. In my opinion, this is a red herring and has nothing to do with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, nor has Facebook done anything substantial with this decision to protect your privacy. Let’s start with some standard definitions before I go on and explain why this is nothing other than a distraction.

Third-party data is used by marketers to help them create marketing messages that are more relevant to target a segment. Segmentation is when a marketer defines a group of consumers (current customers or prospects) that have similar attributes. Marketers will then send the same message to that group (a different message to every individual would not be practical). For example, a segment could look something like “people between 25-45, with young children in the household and an interest in skiing”.

Third-party data comes from many sources (there are thousands of sources). For example, demographic information which is a description of the individual such as age, income, marital status, children in the home, etc. is all public information that can be gathered from sources such as the census. Another type of third party data is behavioral data and that can include what types of interests you have. For example, if you have a magazine subscription to a golf magazine or to a hiking magazine, likely that magazine has sold its’ subscriber list data and associates you with an interest in that category. Another way behavioral data is collected is by observing what content you click on, read or share socially. For example, if you share an article on Aspen Ski Vacations, you are likely categorized as someone with an interest in skiing. Purchase data is collected on individuals as well and can be done many ways. For instance, whenever you buy anything with a warranty that you register (like consumer electronics), your personal information is then associated with that purchase. Another source of purchase data can be credit card companies, banks and credit bureaus. Your purchases can be analyzed and then assumptions about other consumers that have similar attributes to you can be inferred (this is called look-a-like or LAL in the data industry). Your actual personal information tied to your specific transactions are NOT available on the market to buy (unless there has been a data breach at one of these organizations, then your information could be on the darknet). All these data sources in combination can be used to infer assumptions about you and others to improve advertisement targeting.

Bringing the thousands of data sources together would be near impossible for every marketer to vet for privacy compliance much less analyze and create the needed elements and models to perform audience segmentation. Therefore, data aggregators such as Acxiom, Experian, Equifax, Trans Union, Oracle, Cardlytics and many others step in. They aggregate multiple data sources so that they can be easily transformed into elements and models that enable segmentation. Some aggregators are much better than others at ethically sourcing their data. The best ones have a process where they vet data sources through their privacy departments and policies to insure consumers gave consent for the data being included as a source in the elements and models created for marketing use. Furthermore, the best aggregators are also transparent with consumers by allowing them to see what data they have and provide the ability to opt out. Finally, the more credible aggregators will not source data in sensitive categories such as sexual orientation or health indications for example.

When marketers leverage social media or digital publishers to advertise they can select elements and models supplied by aggregators to narrow the target audience. Marketers don’t want to advertise baby products to people that are most likely not parents, nor do they want to push golf products on someone who is likely never going to be a golfer. Furthermore, if marketers were not able to target audiences then advertising costs would become unrealistic for all digital media and those increased costs will need to be absorbed somewhere. Possibilities could include increased prices on goods or subscriber fees to use social platforms which would be wildly unpopular with consumers.

Facebook’s announcement yesterday was that they will no longer partner with data aggregators enabling marketers to target on the platform. Regardless of how you feel about third-party data for targeting, this has nothing to do with the Cambridge Analytica controversy. The Cambridge Analytica issue was about Facebook’s user data going out of Facebook to be analyzed and used without consent from the user. Facebook’s recent action is targeting aggregators of data going into the platform. In my opinion, this is a red herring to distract consumers that do not understand what Facebook is really doing.

In my March 2018 article, When Advertisements Become Too Personal I noted how Facebook leverages trackers that passively surveil consumers and collects that data. Facebook uses trackers to conduct surveillance on you without your conscious knowledge since you likely agreed to this surveillance in the terms of service and privacy policies on their platform and advertiser websites. Consumers don’t have the time to read through long privacy policies, terms and conditions. Furthermore, if consumers don’t agree to a digital property’s terms, often they can’t do business on or use the platform. Advertisers can still target on Facebook without aggregator data being available on the platform. For example, a Facebook Custom Audience is a targeting option created from an advertiser owned customer list, so they can target users on Facebook. Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code for websites that allows the website owner AND Facebook to log any Facebook users. Facebook also tracks the kind of content you share, who you are friends with, what your friends share, what you like, what you talk about in Instant Messenger, what you share on Instagram and other Facebook owned properties. Facebook can aggregate all that data themselves to create targeting tools.

Facebook’s own passive surveillance on us across all their platforms, messaging applications, other websites and even texts on our phones (if you haven’t locked down those permissions) is a much larger concern in my opinion. Instead Facebook is distracting consumers with this announcement into thinking they are making a huge step to protect consumer privacy when in fact the data they have and continue to collect on consumers is much more unsettling.

Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Psychology

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By David Ginsberg, Director of Research, and Moira Burke, Research Scientist at Facebook

With people spending more time on social media, many rightly wonder whether that time is good for us. Do people connect in meaningful ways online? Or are they simply consuming trivial updates and polarizing memes at the expense of time with loved ones?

These are critical questions for Silicon Valley — and for both of us. Moira is a social psychologist who has studied the impact of the internet on people’s lives for more than a decade, and I lead the research team for the Facebook app. As parents, each of us worries about our kids’ screen time and what “connection” will mean in 15 years. We also worry about spending too much time on our phones when we should be paying attention to our families. One of the ways we combat our inner struggles is with research — reviewing what others have found, conducting our own, and asking questions when we need to learn more.

A lot of smart people are looking at different aspects of this important issue. Psychologist Sherry Turkle asserts that mobile phones redefine modern relationships, making us “alone together.” In her generational analyses of teens, psychologist Jean Twenge notes an increase in teen depression corresponding with technology use. Both offer compelling research.

But it’s not the whole story. Sociologist Claude Fischer argues that claims that technology drives us apart are largely supported by anecdotes and ignore the benefits. Sociologist Keith Hampton’s study of public spaces suggests that people spend more time in public now — and that cell phones in public are more often used by people passing time on their own, rather than ignoring friends in person.

We want Facebook to be a place for meaningful interactions with your friends and family — enhancing your relationships offline, not detracting from them. After all, that’s what Facebook has always been about. This is important as we know that a person’s health and happiness relies heavily on the strength of their relationships.

In this post, we want to give you some insights into how the research team at Facebook works with our product teams to incorporate well-being principles, and review some of the top scientific research on well-being and social media that informs our work. Of course, this isn’t just a Facebook issue — it’s an internet issue — so we collaborate with leading experts and publish in the top peer-reviewed journals. We work with scientists like Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon; Sonja Lyubomirsky at UC Riverside; Dacher Keltner, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, and Matt Killingsworth from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and have partnered closely with mental health clinicians and organizations like Save.org and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

What Do Academics Say? Is Social Media Good or Bad for Well-Being?

According to the research, it really comes down to how you use the technology. For example, on social media, you can passively scroll through posts, much like watching TV, or actively interact with friends — messaging and commenting on each other’s posts. Just like in person, interacting with people you care about can be beneficial, while simply watching others from the sidelines may make you feel worse.

The bad: In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward. In one experiment, University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook. A study from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey. Though the causes aren’t clear, researchers hypothesize that reading about others online might lead to negative social comparison — and perhaps even more so than offline, since people’s posts are often more curated and flattering. Another theory is that the internet takes people away from social engagement in person.

The good: On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being. This ability to connect with relatives, classmates, and colleagues is what drew many of us to Facebook in the first place, and it’s no surprise that staying in touch with these friends and loved ones brings us joy and strengthens our sense of community.

A study we conducted with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness. The positive effects were even stronger when people talked with their close friends online. Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network. Other peer-reviewed longitudinal research and experiments have found similar positive benefits between well-being and active engagement on Facebook.

In an experiment at Cornell, stressed college students randomly assigned to scroll through their own Facebook profiles for five minutes experienced boosts in self-affirmationcompared to students who looked at a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing on past meaningful interactions — seeing photos they had been tagged in and comments their friends had left — as well as reflecting on one’s own past posts, where a person chooses how to present themselves to the world.

In a follow-up study, the Cornell researchers put other students under stress by giving them negative feedback on a test and then gave them a choice of websites to visit afterward, including Facebook, YouTube, online music and online video games. They found that stressed students were twice as likely to choose Facebook to make themselves feel better as compared with students who hadn’t been put under stress.

In sum, our research and other academic literature suggests that it’s about how you use social media that matters when it comes to your well-being.


So what are we doing about it?

We’re working to make Facebook more about social interaction and less about spending time. As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said, “We want the time people spend on Facebook to encourage meaningful social interactions.” Facebook has always been about bringing people together — from the early days when we started reminding people about their friends’ birthdays, to showing people their memories with friends using the feature we call “On This Day.” We’re also a place for people to come together in times of need, from fundraisers for disaster relief to groups where people can find an organ donor. We’re always working to expand these communities and find new ways to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

We employ social psychologists, social scientists and sociologists, and we collaborate with top scholars to better understand well-being and work to make Facebook a place that contributes in a positive way. Here are a few things we’ve worked on recently to help support people’s well-being.

News Feed quality: We’ve made several changes to News Feed to provide more opportunities for meaningful interactions and reduce passive consumption of low-quality content — even if it decreases some of our engagement metrics in the short term. We demote things like clickbait headlines and false news, even though people often click on those links at a high rate. We optimize ranking so posts from the friends you care about most are more likely to appear at the top of your feed because that’s what people tell us in surveys that they want to see. Similarly, our ranking promotes posts that are personally informative. We also recently redesigned the comments feature to foster better conversations.

Snooze: People often tell us they want more say over what they see in News Feed. Today, we launched Snooze, which gives people the option to hide a person, Page or group for 30 days, without having to permanently unfollow or unfriend them. This will give people more control over their feed and hopefully make their experience more positive.

Take a Break: Millions of people break up on Facebook each week, changing their relationship status from “in a relationship” to “single.” Research on peoples’ experiences after breakups suggests that offline and online contact, including seeing an ex-partner’s activities, can make emotional recovery more difficult. To help make this experience easier, we built a tool called Take a Break, which gives people more centralized control over when they see their ex on Facebook, what their ex can see, and who can see their past posts.

Suicide prevention tools: Research shows that social support can help prevent suicide. Facebook is in a unique position to connect people in distress with resources that can help. We work with people and organizations around the world to develop support options for people posting about suicide on Facebook, including reaching out to a friend, contacting help lines and reading tips about things they can do in that moment. We recently released suicide prevention support on Facebook Live and introduced artificial intelligence to detect suicidal posts even before they are reported. We also connect people more broadly with mental health resources, including support groups on Facebook.


What About Related Areas Like Digital Distraction and the Impact of Technology on Kids?

We know that people are concerned about how technology affects our attention spans and relationships, as well as how it affects children in the long run. We agree these are critically important questions, and we all have a lot more to learn.

That’s why we recently pledged $1 million toward research to better understand the relationship between media technologies, youth development and well-being. We’re teaming up with experts in the field to look at the impact of mobile technology and social media on kids and teens, as well as how to better support them as they transition through different stages of life.

We’re also making investments to better understand digital distraction and the factors that can pull people away from important face-to-face interactions. Is multitasking hurting our personal relationships? How about our ability to focus? Next year we’ll host a summit with academics and other industry leaders to tackle these issues together.

We don’t have all the answers, but given the prominent role social media now plays in many people’s lives, we want to help elevate the conversation. In the years ahead we’ll be doing more to dig into these questions, share our findings and improve our products. At the end of the day, we’re committed to bringing people together and supporting well-being through meaningful interactions on Facebook.

When Advertisements Become Too Personal

23 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Advertising, Media Literacy, Media Psychology, Personal Data, Psychology

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GuerraGPhoto's/Shutterstock.com

GuerraGPhoto’s/Shutterstock.com

With the proliferation of media channels over the last 20 years, advertisers have taken advantage of marketing technologies combined with data to serve more personalized advertisements to consumers. Personalization is a marketing strategy that delivers specific messages to you by leveraging data analysis and marketing technology    enabling them to target (the ability to identify a specific person or audience). Thus, companies leverage many data sources about you whether obtained directly from you, purchased from data brokers, or passively collected on you (tracking your online behavior). There are advantages to this as a consumer such as advertisement relevance, time savings and product pricing. For example, I don’t like to see the media I consume littered with advertisements on golf equipment or hunting gear, since the products are not of any interest to me. Secondly, I hate it when I have already purchased a product the same product shows up in Facebook, as this is just a waste of my attention. Rather, the marketer should show me something that is at least complimentary to what I have already purchased instead of wasting my time. There is a good reason for optimizing advertising because if targeting were not available companies would need to increase their advertising budgets every time a new media channel presented itself resulting in price increases to consumers. From an advertiser perspective, there is no argument with the return on investment that leveraging data for targeting provides across all channels which is why almost all companies engage in the practice. However, there are times when advertiser personalization attempts cross the line and it recently happened to me.

Last December I had a health matter I needed to address. My doctor recommended I try a supplement that can be only bought online. After trying some samples provided by my doc, I went directly to the company’s website and made the purchase. I never viewed the company’s page nor saw an advertisement for the product on Facebook (i.e. I left no previous online behavior that could be tracked). One day later, a post showed up on my Facebook feed from that same company. Serenol ad screen shot

I immediately yelled “Are You F***ing Kidding Me???” among other things. So dear reader…..you now know I bought a supplement called Serenol which helps alleviate PMS symptoms – hence my use of four letter words above (yes it works). From my perspective this was a complete invasion of my privacy and feels unethical. It may also be against HIPAA laws, or it should be! In the end, what this means, is Serenol, without my permission, disclosed my health condition.  Furthermore, it also begs the question: Now that Facebook has this data on me how will they use it moving forward?

Being from the data integration and marketing technology industry myself I personally have a moderate perspective on the use of data attributes for targeted marketing. I don’t want to see advertisements from companies that are completely irrelevant to me nor do I want to pay increased prices for goods and services, thus I have some comfort with use of my data. However, this scenario violated my personal boundaries, so I downloaded a tracker monitor and followed the data.

Ghostery provides a free mobile browser and search engine plug-in for tracking the trackers, something anyone can access for free.Ghostery Screen Shot

Ghostery shows you what type of trackers are firing on any website that you visit. With this tool I learned there were multiple pixels firing on Serenol’s site, Facebook being one of many.  The two pixels that interested me most were the “Facebook Custom Audiences” and the “Facebook Pixel” trackers. The custom audience pixel enables Serenol (or any other advertiser) to create Facebook Custom Audiences based on their website visitors.

A Facebook Custom Audience is essentially a targeting option created from an advertiser owned customer list, so they can target users on Facebook (Advertiser Help Center, 2018). Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code for websites that allows the site owner AND Facebook to log any Facebook users (Brown, Why Facebook is not telling you everything it knows about you, 2017). Either of these methods would have enabled the survey post I was shown from Serenol. What likely happened is Serenol and Facebook used these tags to conduct surveillance on me without my conscious knowledge and re-targeted me, hence the offending post. Yes – this is technically legal. Why? Because, I mostly likely agreed to this surveillance in the terms of service and privacy policies on each site.  Also, this method of targeting does not provide data back to Serenol who I am on Facebook, only Facebook knows. However, now Facebook has data that associates me with PMS!

Facebook collects information on things you do such as content you share, groups you are part of, things someone may share about you (regardless of whether you granted permission), payment information, the internet connected devices you and your family own and information from third-party partners including advertisers (Data Policy , 2016). They can monitor your mouse movements, track the amount of time you spend on anything and the subject of your photos via machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, when you do upload photos, Facebook scans the image and detects information about that photo such as whether it contains humans, animals, inanimate objects, and potential people you should tag in the picture (Brown, The amount of data facebook collects from your photos will terrify you, 2017). The social media company directly states in their data policy that they use the information they collect to improve their advertising (this means targeting) and then measure such advertising effectiveness (Data Policy , 2016). While Facebook’s data policy states that they do not share personally identifiable information (PII), they do leverage non-personally identifying demographic information that can be used for advertisement targeting purposes provided they adhere to their advertiser guidelines (Data Policy , 2016). This policy is subject to all Facebook companies, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. So that private message you are sending on Messenger isn’t as private as you think, Facebook is collecting data on that content. With Facebook owning 4 of the Top 5 Social Media applications, isn’t this a little creepy?

The next obvious question, is how can this data be used for nefarious purposes? Facebook’s advertiser policies state that an advertiser can’t use targeting options to discriminate against or engage in predatory advertising practices (Advertising Policies, n.d.). While they do withhold some demographics from certain types of advertising like housing, there are other questionable practices for targeting. For example, last year an article appeared in AdAge that called out Facebook, LinkedIn and Google who all allow employment advertising targeting using age as a criteria. Facebook has defended using the demographic despite criticism the practice contributes to ageism in the workforce and is illegal in the actual hiring practices of public companies (Sloane, 2017).

So, can Facebook use data about my PMS for targeting? Will they allow potential employers to use this data? What about health insurance companies? This is a slippery slope indeed. The answer is yes, and no. Facebook recently updated its’ policies and now they prevent advertisers from using targeting attributes such as medical conditions (Perez, 2018). This means that Facebook will not provide demographic selection data in their targeting tools to select or deselect users based on medical conditions. This type of targeting requires using third-party data, meaning that the advertiser is using the data provided by Facebook or other data aggregators to create an audience. However, I did not find anything that prevents companies like Serenol from using first-party data to find me on Facebook. Furthermore, when I went to the Serenol site on February 21st, 2018 (after the Facebook policy update), Ghostery showed that Facebooks’ Pixel and Facebook for Developers along with other pixels and tags from The Trade Desk, Adobe, Google, etc. were all live on the site.

This month’s Harvard Business Review published an article about how consumers react to personalization. The authors ran a series of experiments to understand what causes consumers to object to targeting and found out that we don’t always behave logically when it comes to privacy. People will often share details with complete strangers while keeping that information secret from those where close relationships exist. Furthermore, the nature of the information impacts how we feel about it – for example data on sex, health and finances are much more sensitive. Secondly, the way that data exchanges hands (information flows) matter. They found that sharing data with a company personally (first party sharing) generally feels fine because it is necessary to purchase something or engage with a company. However, when that information is shared without our knowledge (third-party sharing) consumers are reacting in a similar way as if a friend shared a secret or talked behind our backs. While third party sharing of data is legal, the study showed that scenarios where companies obtain information outside the website one interacted with or deduced inferred information about someone from analytics elicits a negative reaction from consumers. The study also found when consumers believe their data has been shared unacceptably, purchase interest substantially declines (John, Kim, & Barasz, 2018). Some of the recommendations from the authors to mitigate backlash from consumers included staying away from sensitive subjects, maintain transparency and provide consumers choice/ the ability to opt out.

I reached out to Michael Becker, Managing Partner at Identity Praxis for his point of view on the subject. Michael is an entrepreneur, academic and industry evangelist who has been engaging and supporting the personal identity economy for over a decade. “People are becoming aware that their personal information has value and are awakening to the fact that its’ misuse is not just annoying, but can lead to material and lasting emotional, economic, and physical harm. They are awaking to the fact that they can enact control over their data. Consumers are starting to use password managers, identity anonymization tools, and tracker management tools [like Ghostery]; for instance, 38% of US adults have adopted ad blockers and this is just the beginning. Executives should take heed that a new class of software and services, personal information management solutions, are coming to the market. These solutions, alongside new regulations (like the EU GDPR), give individuals, at scale, the power to determine what information about them is shared, who has access to it, when it can be used, and on what terms. In other words, the core terms of business may change in the very near future from people having to agree to the businesses terms of service to business having to agree to the individuals’ terms of access.”

In the United States the approach to regulations for personal data collection and use is such that if the action from the business or technology isn’t expressly forbidden, then companies can do it regardless of whether it is ethical or not. Unfortunately, regulations do not necessarily keep up with the pace of innovation in the world of data collection. In Europe the approach to data privacy is such that unless a personal data collection practice and its use is explicitly called out as legal then companies CANNOT do it. There are some actions you can take to manage passive data collection; however, this list is not meant to be exhaustive:

  • Use Brave Browser: This browser allows you to block ads and trackers to sites that you visit. Brave claims it will increase download speeds, save you money on your mobile device data since you don’t have to load ads and protect your information.
  • Ghostery permits you to allow what trackers are accepted by site that you visit, or block trackers entirely.
  • Add a script blocker plug-in to your browser such as No-script. No-script has a white list of trustworthy websites and it enables you to choose which sites you want to allow scripts.
  • Review what permissions to track your data on your mobile device and limit it. Do you really want Apple sharing your contact list and calendar with other applications? Do all applications need access to your fitness and activity data? You can find helpful instructions on how for iPhone here or for Android here.

Regardless of what is legal or illegal, comfort levels with how our personal data is used varies by individual. When you think about it, there is similarity to the debate in the 60’s on what constituted obscenity. When we find use of our personal data offensive we will likely say “I’ll know it when I see it”.

References:

Advertiser Help Center. (2018). Retrieved from Facebook Business: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/610516375684216

Advertising Policies. (n.d.). Retrieved February 20, 2018, from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

Brown, A. (2017, January 6). The qmount of data facebook collects from your photos will terrify you. Retrieved February 20, 2018, from Express: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/751009/Facebook-Scan-Photos-Data-Collection

Brown, A. (2017, January 2). Why facebook is not telling you everything it knows about you. Retrieved February 2018, 2018, from Express: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/748956/Facebook-Login-How-Much-Data-Know

Data Policy . (2016, September 29). Retrieved from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy

John, L. K., Kim, T., & Barasz, K. (2018, February). Ads that don’t overstep. Harvard Business Review, pp. 62-69.

Perez, S. (2018, February 8). Facebook updates its ad policies and tools to protect against discriminatory practices. Retrieved from Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/08/facebook-updates-its-ad-policies-and-tools-to-protect-against-discriminatory-practices/

Sloane, G. (2017, December 21). Facebook defends targeting job ads based on age. Retrieved from Ad Age: http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-defends-targeting-job-ads-based-age/311726/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Las Vegas Shooting News Coverage – A Perspective

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Advertising, Media Effects, Media Psychology, Psychology

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News Man Pic

Last night I received a text from my mom wondering if we should attend the Bruno Mars concert coming up in November. I bought tickets for her birthday this year and we have been excited about attending. What brought on this sudden second guessing? The news coverage of the mass shooting in Las Vegas of course! What happened in Vegas was truly horrible and many are now second guessing how safe it is to attend concerts and other events. While I scrolled through my news feed and perused Facebook, my friends wondered in their posts how such a horrific event could happen. As expected, proponents for tighter gun laws have been in the news which has started a lively debate in my Facebook feed. This post is not about my political views on gun laws, nor is it intended to downplay what has happened. My heart truly goes out to everyone affected. My aim is to bring to light some food for thought as we all absorb the events and news coverage.

The likeliness of being killed in a homicide by a firearm is relatively low compared to other potential causes of death. In 2014 there were 11,008 homicide deaths from a firearm in the U.S. This translates to 3.5 people out of 100,000 or a 0.0035% chance (CDC, 2017). However, firearm homicides are dwarfed in comparison to the top 10 causes of death in 2016 which are as follows:

  • Heart disease: 633,842
  • Cancer: 595,930
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 155,041
  • Accidents (unintentional injuries): 146,571
  • Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 140,323
  • Alzheimer’s disease: 110,561
  • Diabetes: 79,535
  • Influenza and pneumonia: 57,062
  • Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 49,959
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide): 44,193 (CDC, 2017)

Looking at the numbers, we should all be more concerned about lifestyles and choices that directly contribute to heart disease and cancer. So why aren’t stories about the leading causes of death receiving the same amount of media coverage? Because media’s #1 job is to create audiences and anything sensational or out of the ordinary does the best job attracting attention (it is like trying to pass a car crash on the freeway and not look). However, creating audiences is much more hyper targeted than it used to be. News Media companies collect personally identifiable information on our viewing and reading habits through cookies, device IDs and set-top box data to name a few. This data collected is then utilized so they can sell their advertisers the best target audiences across their platforms. For example, Apple’s algorithms know I have recently been following hurricanes since I was in Florida right before Irma. On October 3rd in the “For You” section, there was an article from the Miami Herald about the tropical depression moving towards the Caribbean. Right below that article, an advertisement from Wells Fargo (my bank) was strategically placed. Wells Fargo has my personal information and so does Apple, so they can leverage an intermediary to anonymize and match my data between the companies while remaining privacy compliant. From there my anonymized information is leveraged enabling Wells Fargo to strategically target their advertisement in my Apple news feed. Because the targeting is more precise to the audience, Wells Fargo in theory sees a lift in their ROI and Apple commands higher advertising rates.

While media uses sensational headlines and stories to gain more of our attention, the bad news in the media affects our stress levels. A study on news coverage from the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings increased “acute stress” in students at other universities who followed the happenings in the news media. Furthermore, the more news media on the subject consumed the higher the probability the students would respond with higher degrees of stress symptomology (Fallahi & Lesik, 2009). Constant news negativity can exacerbate our own feelings of sadness and anxiety as well as the severity of how we perceive our own situation (Davey, 2012). A big dose of negative news daily can certainly send me into a spin of constant mobile device checking for updates and an overall pessimistic view that day.

Does this mean we should all turn off the news and not pay attention to what is going on in the world? Of course not, as the news media plays a positive role in society as well. We just all need to remember that News Media’s first priority is to create audiences and react accordingly.

References:

CDC. (2017, March 17). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Assault or Homicide. Retrieved October 6, 2017, from National Center for Health Statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

CDC. (2017, March 17). National Center for Health Statistics Leading Causes of Death. Retrieved October 2017, 2017, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Davey, G. (2012). Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-we-worry/201206/the-psychological-effects-tv-news

Fallahi, C. R., & Lesik, S. A. (2009). The effects of vicarious exposure to the recent massacre at Virginia Tech. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy, 1(3), 220-230. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0015052

 

 

Does Facebook Make You Feel Like a Guinea Pig?

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Media Literacy, Media Psychology, Psychology, Social Psychology

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Guest post by Liza Persson.

Recently Facebook conducted an experimental study exploring online “emotional contagion”; the emotional bias or “tone” (negative or positive) of the content of what people see online and whether it affects the emotional “tone” of content they create online afterwards. Emotional bias or tone of content was inferred using an algorithm developed for this purpose, which in itself is a good tool for analyzing content (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014).

What Facebook was doing was not psychology or science in any other area though. Facebook violated procedures and principles in regard to conducting research scientifically. It didn’t live up to the ethical safeguards of protecting those participating in the study, although it did get consent via its terms and services policy which is probably sufficient enough to protect itself in the case of lawsuits (American Psychological Association, 2010). The goal of raising ad revenue is not the rationale for scientific research; serving the good of humanity is (Riley, 2014; Nisen, 2014).
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Personalized Pricing Brought to You by the Internet and now Facebook!

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Media Literacy, Media Psychology, Psychology

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Discrimination deemed legal, product pricing based on data collected about an individual is slowly coming to the public’s attention, although the practice came into being long before the Internet did. It appears that corporations are regularly using what they know about their customers – their income and personal purchasing habits – to make adjustments to the price points for items that appear on computer screens (Fertik, 2013; Shpanya, 2013; Valentino-DeVries, Singer-Vine, & Soltani, 2012). In effect, what you are charged for an item may not be what your friend sitting next to you is being asked to pay while shopping at the same online store for the same product. According to an unidentified programmer most of these alterations are based on your location, browsing history and your preferred operating system (Shpanya, 2013). Computer cookies pick up this information and transmit them to the store fronts (Potter, 2013). So what’s new? Do you use Facebook? If so, your preferences are about to be sold globally to enhance your mobile advertising experience using the Facebook Audience Network (FAN) (Beer, 2014).
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Zuckerberg’s Dream of Connecting the World: What Can We Expect? (Part 5 – Implications)

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Media Psychology, Psychology, Social Psychology

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Recapping the previous four posts on this topic, Mark Zuckerberg’s new non-profit consortium of information and communication technology (ICT) corporations would like to connect the remaining 5 billion inhabitants of the planet to the Internet who are not now connected (Internet.org, 2013). This post examines the implications of what the  studies conducted on a reduced scale involving the distribution of laptops in Ethiopia found.

What has been established is that when Western ICT is available on a daily, long term basis to an individual who lives in a third-world, collectivistic environment, the ICT does cause change in individual self-construal, fosters the growth of individualistic, modern and agentic values, and increases levels of abstract reasoning among children. Although, these changes are individually significant, it does not immediately alter the individual’s culture and they are, from what appears to date, subsumed into the culture’s uniqueness (Hansen & Postmes, 2013; Hansen & Postmes, 2013; Hansen, Postmes, van der Vinne, & van Thiel, 2012; Kocsev, Hansen, Hollow, & Pischetola, 2009).
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Zuckerberg’s Dream of Connecting the World: What Can We Expect? (Part 4 – The Findings)

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in Media Effects, Media Psychology, Psychology

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Recapping the previous posts on this topic, Mark Zuckerberg’s new non-profit consortium of information and communication technology (ICT) corporations would like to connect the remaining 5 billion inhabitants of the planet to the Internet who are not now connected (Internet.org, 2013). Many of the five billion people in question will most likely come from collectivistic non-western cultures. This post examines the results of studies conducted on a reduced scale involving the distribution of laptops in Ethiopia during which the researchers claim to have found the “first systematic evidence that usage of Western ICT can instigate cultural change in a traditional developing country” (Hansen N. , Postmes, van der Vinne, & van Thiel, 2012, p. 230).
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Zuckerberg’s Dream of Connecting the World: What Can We Expect? (Part 3)

30 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Media Effects, Psychology

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Recapping the earlier posts on this topic, Mark Zuckerberg’s new non-profit consortium of information and communication technology (ICT) corporations would like to connect the remaining 5 billion inhabitants of the planet to the Internet who are not now connected (Internet.org, 2013). Many of the five billion people in question will most likely come from collectivistic non-western cultures. What effects can we expect?

As connecting the world’s populations has never been attempted before, literature focusing on the potential effects is non-existent. As a result, a reduced scale of the effort can be examined in regard to the insertion of Western ICT into countries that have not been previously exposed to it en masse or subject to its effects.

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