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Meta gave Netflix and Spotify access to users private messages (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

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[–] 22 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Does going this far with targeted ads actually increase people's likelihood to buy something? Like, the value of data you can get on someone has to plateau at some point, right?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    I think its about decreasing the costs of Netflix by having the right selection of movies available for a given geography at the right time.

    Anyway this limited library thing is another reason I prefer streaming from torrents

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My thinking is that on a case by case basis you are absolutely correct but that statistically the gains much average out in the large scale so that it makes it worth it. Otherwise, surely advertising wouldn't be nearly as big as it is right?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I don't know. I feel like you need to be predisposed to a product category in order for an advertisement to have any impact on you. I don't give a shit about most of the products I see advertised. They're gathering all this data on me but still end up using it in stupid ways. So much so that even the stuff I am interested in gets presented to me in a worse fashion than it probably would with random ads.

    For example, I built a new pc about a year ago and to this day I get tons of targeted ads trying to sell me GPUs and other PC parts. Like, cool, you figured out something I was interested in buying at one point but that interest evaporated the moment I made that purchase. Every ad I've seen since then has been a waste of everyone's time and yet they keep showing them to me.

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