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Facebook Privacy Social Networks Your Rights Online

Facebook Knows What You're Streaming (bloomberg.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the they-know-what-you-did-last-summer,-too dept.
Facebook is gathering information about the shows Roku and Apple TV owners are streaming. The company then uses the Facebook profile linked to the same IP addresses to tailor the commercials that are shown to individual users. From a report on Bloomberg: For the past few weeks, the social network says, it's been targeting ads to people streaming certain shows on their Roku or Apple TV set-top boxes. It customizes commercials based on the Facebook profiles tied to the IP addresses doing the streaming, according to a company spokesman. He says Facebook is trying out this approach with the A&E network (The Killing, Duck Dynasty) and streaming startup Tubi TV, selecting free test ads for nonprofits or its own products along with a handful of name brands. This push is part of a broader effort by social media companies to build their revenue with ads on video. Twitter is placing much of its ad-sales hopes on streaming partnerships with sports leagues and other content providers. In October, CFO Anthony Noto told analysts on an earnings call that the ads played during Twitter's NFL Thursday Night Football streaming exclusives had been especially successful, with many people watching them in their entirety with the sound turned on. The participants in these partnerships don't yet have a default answer to questions such as who should be responsible for selling the ads or who should get which slice of revenue.
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Facebook Knows What You're Streaming More

Facebook Knows What You're Streaming

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  • 100% positive I made the right decision (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @11:42AM (#53409127)
    by never creating a FB account. Fuck you Zuck.

  • I dont get it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @11:52AM (#53409191)

    How are Facebook even able to see what other devices on your LAN are doing? Have they made some deal with ISPs or something? Does this shock headline silently presume everyone necessarily controls their Roku or AppleTv through a cellphone with a facebook app running on it?

    • Re:I dont get it (Score:5, Informative)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @11:59AM (#53409251) Homepage Journal
      Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you. As an added bonus you are paying Apple and/or Roku a monthly fee so they can do this.

      • Re:I dont get it (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:09PM (#53409347)

        Yeah, and this strikes me as disgusting. Facebook, apple, google, et. al get most of their data on us through selling data and to avoid it you have to be completely disconnected. Even if you don't have a facebook account or a google account, or an Apple account, they still have masses of data on you.

        I would really like each and every data transfer to require written consent (not just a check here to agree to our terms that include selling data on you). Obviously this would be too much of a hassle so wouldn't happen.

        I don't believe our current regime, or the impending replacement regime would have any interest in protecting digital privacy rights though.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        It gets even more insidious - a number of apps will capture all audio in the vicinity and identify sub-hearing audio codes in shows and advertising.

      • Roku and Apple don't see what you are streaming. The individual apps inside do however. Also you rarely pay roku directly I don't have a current credit card on my roku.

      • I've seen the flip side of this coin too. I was in the market for a Microsoft Surface this year and had been doing a lot of research on them (or similar tablets) with my PC, laptop and phone. Sure enough, after a few weeks, watching Hulu on an Apple TV and a majority of what I see is MS Surface ads. Since I bought one and hadn't been searching, those ads disappeared.

        That's just one example that stood out to me. I'm sure there are others that are a bit more subtle.

      • Re:I dont get it (Score:5, Informative)

        by Wrath0fb0b ( 302444 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:55PM (#53409681)

        Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you.

        Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.

        • --User points his media player (e.g. Roku) at some streaming service (e.g. A&E). As a result, A&E knows the IP address that is requesting streaming video.
        • --Streaming service shares data with some other party (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) using this IP as an identifier
        • --Other party correlates those IPs with the IPs making requests against its services and makes decisions (e.g. ads) based on that.

        It is a fundamental part of the design of the internet (as it exists today) that two different service providers can cross-correlate requests based on a semi-stable* identifier (IP) if they chose to share data. There's literally nothing the client application can do to remedy this, it's in the network-layer. You can try to fix this at the network layer with some multi-VPN setup (not just a VPN, one that assigns a different external IP to each outgoing request) but that's sort of not how the internet was designed to work. The internet was designed to be sort-of pseudonymous, but it was not designed with true anonymity (in the sense of having no identifiers) in mind.

        If you want a meatspace analogy, this is like two different dead-tree newspapers comparing their subscribers for home addresses. You want the newspapers to end up on your driveway in the morning, so you either have to give them your home address or use a different PO Box for each newspaper (which seems expensive).

        [*] Yes, IPs are not really stable identifiers. But within the timespan of a few hours/days, it's good enough to get a few extra ad views. In other words, the downside of using a stale/incorrect identifier here (multiple parties on the same IP, router rebooted and got a new DHCP) is pretty low -- they show an irrelevant ad to those folks.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.

          Oh, the devices do it too. If you have a smart TV connected to the internet, it's sending screen shot hashes back to the mothership regularly so that your viewing habits can be sold. Seems naive to assume that Roku et al aren't doing the same.

          • If you have a smart TV connected to the internet, it's sending screen shot hashes back to the mothership regularly so that your viewing habits can be sold.[CITATION NEEDED]

            FTFY.

        • Re:I dont get it (Score:4, Informative)

          by Ericular ( 876826 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @02:19PM (#53410329)

          Isn't this still wrong? Facebook doesn't even need anyone to share data.

          1. Bob logs in and uses Facebook. (Facebook now knows things about Bob, and knows Bob's IP).
          2. Bob uses his media player, which is requesting an ad from Facebook.
          3. Facebook receives the ad request, recognizes Bob's IP address, and serves up a tailored ad based on what it knows about Bob (on the good chance that it's Bob on the receiving end of the ad).

          This scenario involves no two companies sharing data. It's just Facebook correlating an external ad request to the last known IP address of a Facebook user.

           

          • So what if I don't have any apps on my Roku/AppleTV that serve ads? How does Facebook determine which shows are being streamed by which IP addresses?

      • Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you. As an added bonus you are paying Apple and/or Roku a monthly fee so they can do this.

        Wow, +5 Informative for something that's factually incorrect.

        The article actually explains how this works - they're getting their information from the streaming source - in this case, the A&E channel and something called Tubi TV.

        "He says Facebook is trying out this approach with the A&E network (The Killing, Duck Dynasty) and streaming startup Tubi TV, selecting free test ads for nonprofits or its own products along with a handful of name brands."

      • No commercials on netflix so that's ok too. And no facebook.

    • Re:I dont get it (Score:4, Informative)

      by ObiWanKenblowme ( 718510 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:02PM (#53409273)
      Facebook (the app) can't, but Facebook (the ad network streaming commercials to set-top devices through Tubi TV) can see your IP, and then compare it to Facebook (the app) users' IP addresses. What a terrible, misleading headline - Facebook knows what you're streaming because they're serving the commercials that are streaming to you. Still, note to self: NEVER use Tubi TV.

  • In October, CFO Anthony Noto told analysts on an earnings call that the ads played during Twitter's NFL Thursday Night Football streaming exclusives had been especially successful, with many people watching them in their entirety with the sound turned on.

    Shouldn't the ads only be considered "successful" if there is an accompanying quantifiable uptick in purchases for those products that can be attributed to those ads? All this data collection just to sell more and more ads-has anyone ever shown that they actually work?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      Advertising decoupled from actual measurable results sometimes during 90s. I don't know if ineffective even starts to describe it.

  • it's fucking christmas time people! (Score:4, Funny)

    by vel-ex-tech ( 4337079 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:04PM (#53409301)

    You better watch out,
    You better not cry,
    You better not pout,
    I'm telling you why:
    Zuckerberg is coming to town!

    He's making a list,
    And checking it twice,
    Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.
    Zuckerberg is coming to town!
    He sees what you've been streaming,
    He knows demographics.
    He knows when you've been bad or good,
    So be good for profit's sake!

    OH!...You better watch out, You better not cry
    You better not pout, I'm Telling you why.
    Zuckerberg is coming to town.

    He sees what you've been streaming,
    He knows demographics.
    He knows when you've been bad or good,
    So be good for profit's sake!

    (Yeah, fine, I broke the rhyme scheme, oh well. Merry fucking Christmas everyone!)

    • I was tempted to alter the final line of the chorus to something like "So be good for his profits!" to get a half-rhyme, but that really forces the meter.

      While I like the reference to demographics, maybe change that line to something that rhymes with "sake"? Perhaps "He knows each choice you make"?

  • Facebook knows when you're awake
    Facebook knows when you've been bad or good
    So click the ads for Zuckerbergs' sake

  • ... what we're screaming?

    The Internet is ruined because, money.

    The shareholders want asymptotic profit curves.

  • 'Tis the season (Score:3)

    by ausekilis ( 1513635 ) on Friday December 02, 2016 @12:29PM (#53409479)
    They know what you've been streaming,
    They know that you're awake,
    They've sold you to be advertized
    So bend over and close your eyes...

    Just thought I'd spread a little holiday cheer ;-)

  • Dumb question? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How does Facebook know what I am streaming on my Roku or AppleTV?

  • Facebook watches over you.
    Everybody loves Facebook.
    Trust Facebook.

  • All these marketroids work so damn hard to track where people are going and what they're looking at through painstaking forensic analysis of, like, picosecond differentials of access modalities and, like, transliminal modulation of ultrasonic speaker spectrum spreads.

    And it's all completely fucking unnecessary, because the kind of people who are swayed by online ads will happily tell you what brands they like if you ask them. In fact, sometimes it's harder to get them to stop telling you about their commer

  • Good to know they're personalizing the commercials that I mute and look away from.

  • Are there any ISP out there who rotate or shuffle IP adresses?

    It should be easy to do periodically.

    I remember that in the early days of cable modem internet my IP address was changing from time to time.

    Now it seems much more stable.

    • Why would you want to have your neighbor's ads?

      • I don't see ads anyway...

        And that way they couldn't track me or anyone.

        It's already stupid to try to track someone by IP. My IP address represents my wifi router. We're a family of six, with something like 15 devices connected to it, not counting visitors.

  • If you're REALLY obsessed by this, force using IPv6 on your WiFi network.

    Not only are IPv6 addresses typically NOT NAT'd (they'll share a prefix that's ISP dependent but not the whole address), but properly configured devices will vary their IPv6 addresses over time.

    Of course, this solution will break other parts of your App/Web experience - especially if you disable IPv4 on your WiFi. And it's going to require you to build your own router. But FreeBSD with two ethernet ports does that just fine - and I s

  • I suffer^W enjoy ad blindness. For one reason or another I seem to lose focus each time an ad shows up, regardless of location. It just registers as a patch of noise. Now, technically, I have focus issues in general as I tend to go inside my head quite regularly, but ads seems to be the pinnacle of this syndrome.

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