Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers, says confidential document

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: April 15, 2018 at 4:21:52 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers, says 
> confidential document
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers, says confidential document
> By Sam Biddle
> Apr 13 2018
> <https://theintercept.com/2018/04/13/facebook-advertising-data-artificial-intelligence-ai/>
>
> Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March, Facebook has been attempting to make a moral stand for your 
> privacy, distancing itself from the unscrupulous practices of the U.K. political consultancy. “Protecting people’s 
> information is at the heart of everything we do,” wrote Paul Grewal, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, just a few 
> weeks before founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit Capitol Hill to make similar reassurances, telling lawmakers, 
> “Across the board, we have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good.” 
> But in reality, a confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the two companies are far more 
> similar than the social network would like you to believe.
>
> The recent document, described as “confidential,” outlines a new advertising service that expands how the social 
> network sells corporations’ access to its users and their lives: Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability 
> to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them 
> based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a 
> self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed 
> “FBLearner Flow.”
>
> One slide in the document touts Facebook’s ability to “predict future behavior,” allowing companies to target people 
> on the basis of decisions they haven’t even made yet. This would, potentially, give third parties the opportunity to 
> alter a consumer’s anticipated course. Here, Facebook explains how it can comb through its entire user base of over 2 
> billion individuals and produce millions of people who are “at risk” of jumping ship from one brand to a competitor. 
> These individuals could then be targeted aggressively with advertising that could pre-empt and change their decision 
> entirely — something Facebook calls “improved marketing efficiency.” This isn’t Facebook showing you Chevy ads 
> because you’ve been reading about Ford all week — old hat in the online marketing world — rather Facebook using facts 
> of your life to predict that in the near future, you’re going to get sick of your car. Facebook’s name for this 
> service: “loyalty prediction.”
>
> Spiritually, Facebook’s artificial intelligence advertising has a lot in common with political consultancy Cambridge 
> Analytica’s controversial “psychographic” profiling of voters, which uses mundane consumer demographics (what you’re 
> interested in, where you live) to predict political action. But unlike Cambridge Analytica and its peers, who must 
> content themselves with whatever data they can extract from Facebook’s public interfaces, Facebook is sitting on the 
> motherlode, with unfettered access to staggering databases of behavior and preferences. A 2016 ProPublica report 
> found some 29,000 different criteria for each individual Facebook user.
>
> Zuckerberg has acted to distance his company from Cambridge Analytica, whose efforts on behalf of Donald Trump were 
> fueled by Facebook data, telling reporters on a recent conference call that the social network is a careful guardian 
> of information:
>
> The vast majority of data that Facebook knows about you is because you chose to share it. Right? It’s not tracking. 
> There are other internet companies or data brokers or folks that might try to track and sell data, but we don’t buy 
> and sell. … For some reason, we haven’t been able to kick this notion for years that people think we will sell data 
> to advertisers. We don’t. That’s not been a thing that we do. Actually it just goes counter to our own incentives. 
> Even if we wanted to do that, it just wouldn’t make sense to do that.
>
> The Facebook document makes a similar gesture toward user protection, noting that all data is “aggregated and 
> anonymized [to protect] user privacy,” meaning Facebook is not selling lists of users, but rather essentially renting 
> out access to them. But these defenses play up a distinction without a difference: Regardless of who is mining the 
> raw data Facebook sits on, the end result, which the company eagerly monetizes, are advertising insights that are 
> very intimately about you — nowpackaged and augmented by the company’s marquee machine learning initiative. And 
> although Zuckerberg and company are technically, narrowly correct when they claim that Facebook isn’t in the business 
> of selling your data, what they’re really selling is far more valuable, the kind of 21st century insights only 
> possible for a company with essentially unlimited resources. The reality is that Zuckerberg has far more in common 
> with the likes of Equifax and Experian than any consumer-oriented company. Facebook is essentially a data wholesaler, 
> period.
>
> [snip]
>
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