Facebook Operations

 
 

Vocabulary

main	founder	mission (2)
ads	revenue	campaign
classify	tailor (2)	target (2)
reveal	content	interaction
gender	heritage	sexual orientation
profile	available	orientation
impact	variable	collaborate
sort	identify	transparent (2)
aware	model (3	personality
exist	analyze	black box
search	behavior	addition (2)
retail	location	prediction
access	provide	server (2)
hardly	mine (2)	fair game
fair (3)	game (2)	figurative
literal	trade (2)	considering
broker	give up	jurisdiction
opinion	view (2)	manipulated
in turn	lucrative	ultimately
browse	influence	protection

 
 

 
 
 

Video: Facebook Operations

 
 
 
 

Transcript

Facebook’s main mission according the founder Mark Zuckerberg is to connect people online.

But the company makes most of its money selling ads: in 2017, around nine-eight percent (98%) of its revenue — over thirty-billion euros (€30) came from advertising.

Whether it’s a political campaign or a commercial company, Facebook can identify the correct target group, and send them specifically-tailored content.

Interaction alone reveals a lot about any give user, such as their ethnic heritage, gender, sexual orientation and political or religious views.

Predictions made using interaction are correct eighty percent (80%) of the time, and feed into the personality profiles up to fifty-two thousand (52,000) variables Facebook uses in its economic model.

Ingo Dachwitz, Publication: Netzpolitik.org: “We need to talk about the impact of the new economic system. Users across Germany are being made transparent: they are sorted, classified and targeted by companies.

They’re not even aware that this is happening.”

Facebook also collaborates with other data collectors. The largest data brokers have more than five billion personality profiles, meaning that every person with internet access has been recorded in some form.

Data brokers analyze browsing behavior and user searchers online. In addition, there’s the data from retail groups. This information is added to postal addresses, email addresses and location data.

Almost anyone with a smartphone can be analyzed.

Data brokers make individuals’ information available to Facebook, so that the company can improve its users’ profiles. In turn, Facebook gives data brokers access to some of its data.

Johannes Caspar, Function: Data Protection Officer: “The data broker market is huge, especially in the US. That’s also due to the fact that data protection laws, like the ones we have in Europe, hardly exist in the US.

That means that mining and trading data is basically fair game.”

So all the data exchanges between companies like Facebook and other data brokers takes place in a figurative “black box”.

Data brokers’ servers are often located in the US, beyond the jurisdiction of European law. However, the servers also contain data belonging to European users.

Johannes Caspar, Function: Data Protection Officer: “Considering how our views and opinions can be manipulated, users really should know much more about where the posts and ads they see are coming from, especially since these can ultimately influence them.

Facebook says it wants to provide more data protection — but would they give up the lucrative data trade?

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Questions

1. What is Facebook’s public or official purpose or mission statement?

2. Does Facebook have another side? Does it officially promote and say this?

3. Facebook knows about people’s personal information by asking them directly using questionnaires. True or false? How do they learn about users?

4. Does Facebook operate alone or does it partner with others? What happens?

5. Are US and European laws similar with regards to online privacy? Are Europeans safe from personal data collecting and analyzing?

6. Businesses and political groups value people’s personal data. Is this correct or incorrect? What can they do with it?

7. Is Facebook an extremely profitable company? How does it generate revenue?

 
 

A. My friends and I have Facebook or other social media accounts. We use social media. Yes or no?

B. Are (some or many) people engrossed with Facebook? Are some people addicted to it?

C. Our company or organization uses Facebook or other social media. Yes or no?

D. Is there something dark and sinister about Facebook?

E. What might happen in the future?

F. What, if anything, should people do?