Python at Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e <comment><USER2> > "Python is the industry standard for all of the major applications we use to > create Animated and VFX content, so it goes without saying that we are using > it very heavily..."

Interesting... very curious to see Netflix using tools in the VFX industry, Shotgun & Nuke to name a few, I wish they can expand more on this.

<comment><USER3> Netflix produces content too

<comment><USER4> A lot of it, which needs compositing, post-production, encoding, etc. Python is great for pipeline code to script the compiled libraries that do the number crunching.

Some of it is licensed/farmed out to places like DreamWorks however (new Voltron/She-ra), which is mostly a Java/Spring shop, to my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you know what the Netflix culture is regarding remote work ?

I've been looking for a job for the first time in 10 years of Python, and Netflix is one of the rare big companies that I still have respect for.

[https://jobs.netflix.com/](https://jobs.netflix.com/) has several offers I would be a good fit for, but I'm not ready to relocate to the US.

<comment><USER6> As someone who has worked on fully remote game dev volunteer projects for nearly 10 years, it's unbelievable how much the cultural inertia of physical presence has prevented companies from making the rational move of eliminating all possible office space in favor of remote work and skype meetings. So much money wasted on rent, security, and upkeep and so much time (and even lives) lost to commuting when there isn't a single compelling reason programmers need to cohabitate a physical office to get their job done.

<comment><USER7> Communication between team members is a huge issue in remote work.

It works if everyone is on site. It also works if everyone is remote.

But when some are at the office and some aren't, communication and information sharing becomes a lot harder. Mostly it's a process and tool issue, but still humans will rather just turn around and ask the team than spend a minute writing their issue on Slack/whatever.

<comment><USER8> It's true. I worked at a company that was 100% remote when it started and kept the remote culture as it grew from 4 to 25 people, but one city in particular ended up having enough people that they decided to rent space in a big shared office, coworking-style. Ultimately, people who worked in that space ended up being more connected to what's going on, due to physical proximity. You wander past a hallway conversation and you end up joining, or at least knowing about it. You go to lunch with your coworkers and happen to get a little work talk in. You ask questions more easily from someone who's right across the desk from you because you can read social cues about how "interruptible" they are. Jokes come across better in person than via messaging. There are lots of subtle ways in which in-person interaction is just inherently different than remote, and the office people end up tighter.

<comment><USER9> It's not even remote vs non-remote. My employer had many medium sized offices of 100-200 people, and we merged with a company that had one single 5000+ person campus. That was a major culture clash for sure in terms of documentation and processes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. I had it in my head that Netflix was a pure Java shop. Was I wrong in the first place, or has something changed?

<comment><USER11> From what I understand from their talk on how they (don't) do devops they adopt a polygot architecture and teams use different languages.

<comment><USER12> Different teams using different languages doesn't mean they don't do DevOps.

<comment><USER13> I read that as "in a talk on how they don't do devops they also happened to talk about how their teams are polyglots".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At Cloudflare we use their Python-based Lemur ([https://github.com/Netflix/lemur](https://github.com/Netflix/lemur)) application to issue (on some days) 1M SSL certificates.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am wondering if PyPy is used somewhere for workloads that need performance.

<comment><USER4> Probably not, more likely to call out to their numerous Java projects and C/C++ video tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have more info about this or know of similar projects?

 _We lean on the many of the statistical and mathematical libraries (numpy, scipy, ruptures, pandas) to help automate the analysis of 1000s of related signals when our alerting systems indicate problems. We've developed a time series correlation system..._

<comment><USER17> What would you like to know?

<comment><USER16> The correlations part specifically, what does it do, what's the modelling approach, and is there more info about it anywhere?

<comment><USER18> Initially we wrote the library to help us answer the question about what change may be causing impact to our customers' experiences. Out of the billions of time series metrics we have we knew there were about 10,000 or so likely (for this initial use case), possible candidates and we wanted to reduce that set as far as possible and either (1) find /the/ candidate for problem or (2) produce a short list of things for the humans to look into. In order to get to the point where we could ensure high likelihood of apropos correlations, we needed to do some work on the signals first.

First we detect if any of the possible candidate signals were born or died in the interesting time period. We use these time points to reduce the window we'll use to pass to the correlation functions. We can also detect any changepoints in the time series and apply similar logic. Once we've determined the best window bounds for each candidate signal, we use pearson and spearman correlation functions to get a score for the pair of signals -- the initial signal that started the inquiry and the candidate signal using the determined time window.

The code is about 98% data preparation, signal analysis, and window determination and about 2% correlation work.

(I've tried to summarize quite a bit, let me know if you'd like clarifications or have other questions.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I fail to understand the use of python in a distributed environment while the language has such poor concurrency support (on top of the lack of a type system). You can make your application HA, but they are obviously not trying to squeeze out every CPU cycle.

<comment><USER20> > I fail to understand the use of python in a distributed environment while > the language has such poor concurrency support

Because it's a distributed environment probably is exactly why. Python has (arguably) great concurrency support apart from Multi-threading.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4)

So if you need concurrency in the context of a single thread, then Python's GIL is a non-starter. But a distributed environment is not likely one of those.

Edit: I should amend concurrency in a single thread to: concurrency in a single thread that is compute gated...since coroutines can give you pseudo concurrency in a single thread provided you're workload has blocking steps like IO or TCP calls.

<comment><USER21> Even if your app is IO bound, Python's concurrency is painful. Because it's not statically typed, it's too easy to forget an `await` (causing your program to get a Promise[Foo] when you meant to get a Foo) or to overburden your event loop and such things are difficult to debug (we've had several production outages because of these class of bugs). Never mind the papercuts that come about from dealing with the sync/async dichotomy.

<comment><USER22> Both problems have built-in debug solutions in recent versions of python. The event loop will literally print out all the un-awaited coroutines when it exits, and you can enable debug on the event loop and have it print out every time a coroutine takes longer than a configurable amount of time.

<comment><USER21> > The event loop will literally print out all the un-awaited coroutines when > it exits

IIRC, I've only ever seen "unawaited coroutine found" (or similar) errors; I've never seen anything that points to a specific unawaited coroutine. In either case, a bug in prod is still many times worse than compile time type error.

> you can enable debug on the event loop and have it print out every time a > coroutine takes longer than a configurable amount of time

I don't run my production servers in debug mode, and even when I do manage to find the problem, I have limited options for solving it. Usually it amounts to refactoring out the offending code into a separate process or service.

An extreme counterpoint is a language like Go which

1) Is roughly 100X faster in single-threaded, CPU-bound execution anyway

2) Allows for additional optimizations that simply aren't possible in Python (mostly involving reduced allocations and improved cache coherence)

3) Has a runtime that balances CPU load across all available cores

This isn't a "shit on Python" post; only that concurrency really isn't Python's strong suit (yet).

<comment><USER4> These are not really an issue in vfx production and other things Python is used for.

<comment><USER21> It's a problem for lots of things Python is used for, but maybe not vfx (whatever that is).

<comment><USER4> They are using it for things it's good at, for others they use java. So this subthread is largely a waste of time.

<comment><USER21> Who is "they"? What is your point?

<comment><USER4> They is Netflix, and other post-production oriented users. You know, what this article and discussion is about?

<comment><USER21> It's not at all obvious that "they" refers to "netflix and other post- production oriented users", and your argument is a tautology "Python is good at the things that Python is good at". Obviously. The rest of us are debating what those things are or are not.

<comment><USER4> The subject is well-trodden, there's not much to debate. Python is not good at threading, but works well in multiprocessing situations. Netflix is using it in the later situation, and not the former. Async is unlikely to be a use case either.

<comment><USER21> > The subject is well-trodden, there's not much to debate

And yet we see the same incorrect information trotted out over and over again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting to see a touch of Flask used for some internal APIs.

<comment><USER24> People talk a lot about complicated stacks but Python Flask + some basic HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS can solve a LOT of problems.

This is especially true inside big orgs that have lots of silos and need "Rosetta Stones" that translate between the silos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had actually looked at Flask-RESTPlus for a relatively recent project before deciding to use FastAPI.

<comment><USER26> Surprised they use Flask.

I'm working on my first larger, industrial-strength REST API in Python and I've found the Django Rest Framework to be more suited once you get to that level of complexity.

<comment><USER25> Probably whoever made it just preferred Flask.

django-rest-framework is nice because it's maintained well and it's consistent with the rest of Django, but plenty of people just prefer the Flask way of doing things, even if it's a scrappier set of tools in some ways.

<comment><USER27> I'm using DRF in a project and don't really like the code/magic I end up with. IIRC I was happier with Flask and SQL... (But of course, for the bits that maps properly into its model, DRF its awesome)

<comment><USER25> Yeah. You can always get into what you do/don't like about a framework, but the same can be said of Flask.

FWIW, I don't like DRF's reliance on serializers that do more than serialization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Metaflow looks like a superhero solution for ML/DL. Hope they open source it one day

</comment><comment><USER29> > _The ability to drop into a bpython shell and improvise has saved the day > more than once._

what do you really do here - connect to the flask instance and route requests manually ?

<comment><USER17> Our python code does _not_ handle user requests directly. Our team uses python to control the control plane of traffic — we flip dns records, control cross- region proxying, re-steer cdn-based reverse proxying and scaling of the hundreds of micro services that power the Netflix experience. We've improvised various custom traffic distribution patterns, operated outside of our normal traffic-shifting workflows, and written/run quick scripts to modify scaling fleetwide.

<comment><USER29> hi - so im actually curious about the infrastructure that allows you to connect bpython to it. Is it a rq process that you connect to, etc ?

I would love to setup an architecture like this that lets me connect to stuff through a CLI. Also, I'm assuming you are on kubernetes (or something). How does this bpython business work through all those layers ?

<comment><USER17> We ssh into a box in production, run bpython and import the libraries ( some environmental stuff, boto3, our own code, etc). At that point, there isn't much difference from a bpython session and the regular application code... Ssh'ing into a production box does involve connecting through a bastion, and knowing which box you want to connect to, but that isn't too hard with spinnaker.

<comment><USER29> pretty cool. We have struggled with doing this in Flask, because the whole codebase starts getting peppered with flask_context everywhere. So importing some libraries and code starts spawning flask.

Not sure if you use different frameworks that dont have this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wasn't Netflix a Node.JS shop two years ago when Node was popular and now when Python is the most popular they are a Python shop ? :P (sarcasm) It's good to use many languages as it favors a micro-service architecture.

<comment><USER31> Is Python the most popular language now? I'm not trying to argue, I'm trying to see how out-of-the-loop I am nowadays.

<comment><USER32> I've been resisting Python for years, but it just keeps getting more popular (and support and more/better libraries come along with that), so I might just stop fighting using it for local scripts and small GUI projects.

<comment><USER33> Why would you resist it?

<comment><USER34> It would be nice if the language was typed. Easier for overall maintenance, and refactoring for big projects.

<comment><USER35> Python 3 is typed. Not strongly typed but the point remains. Python is used in a lot of domains and I feel the strides the language has made over the past decade have made it very competitive and a worthy addition to any programmer's toolbox.

<comment><USER36> Python is strongly typed. It is not statically typed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> now to get the apple tv app to use more than the bottom third of screen for letterbox sized navigation by making the massive "thumbnail"/trailer at the top a third of the screen, so i can actually find something good to watch...

</comment><comment><USER38> Id like to contribute to the netflix code base by offering what is obviously a missing but much needed piece of code:

def enableAutoPlay( flag ): annoyingAutoPlay = flag return

<comment><USER39> Afaik you can disable autoplay in the options?

<comment><USER40> At least with the web UI, you can mute the auto-playing video and subsequent auto-playing videos will remain muted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "You've read 11 stories this months, lets make things official".

Medium is trying to look like NY Times, minus any kind of effort to actually write the stories.

<comment><USER42> Why can't I read their articles through Pocket?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Reason #8,201 not to model your org after FAANG: writing custom software just to operate your site is like building your own tools to till your farm. I suppose if you hire world-class toolmakers you'll have some very good tools, but that's not quite the point of the farm, is it?

<comment><USER44> If you hire world class tool makers to make the best tools for your farm then your farm has a strategic advantage.

Really good tools can make a big difference.

You really do need world class though - the trade off of custom means your tools really do need to be a lot better than the standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Most of these use cases would be better served with a type safe language.

<comment><USER46> You think you're being downvoted because people like dynamic typing very much.

You're being downvoted because:

A) You left a comment with a strong opinion without expressing it while dismissing other peoples' experience B) Python is in fact a type safe language for a while now [https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html) \- you have pluggable "a la bracha" types.

<comment><USER47> Python's type annotation mechanism is somewhere between afterthought and joke. Nobody uses it and nothing is built with it in mind; it can be anywhere from needlessly complicated to utterly impossible for code that interacts with third-party libraries to successfully discover and import class names for type annotations. Making matters worse, you need to use even more extra libraries for the type annotations to actually do anything.

<comment><USER46> I beg to differ, I've seen it adopted in quite a few places by large companies. I've rarely seen it used in startups though. My evidence is anecdotal (so is yours though).

I definitely agree that it's not seeing nearly as much adoption as let's say... TypeScript in the JavaScript ecosystem though.

Facebook even wrote a package to generate types automatically for existing code [https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType](https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType) .

<comment><USER4> Re: startups, it's more useful in a large, mature code-base rather than smaller projects still in the design-churn phase.

<comment><USER48> FWIW, we use mypy in Cirq ([https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq](https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq)) and we haven't reached version 1.0 yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Invited by Facebook for privacy roundtable. What questions should I ask? - <AUTHOR> This Thursday I'm invited to a privacy roundtable with Facebook Legal and Privacy Policy teams in Amsterdam. The round table will be with other entrepreneurs and experts in the privacy field. I'm invited because I'm the founder of Simple Analytics - a privacy friendly analytics SaaS business [1] - and critical about Facebook on Twitter [2].
Some people advised me not to go there because it would only do harm to my name and brand, but I think I should. The Facebook teams are going to give a presentation with some new plans where they want feedback on. For internal push back they need critical people from outside Facebook, which I'm happy to contribute for.
To make it more interesting for the outside world I'm going to ask a few questions for Facebook in general (privacy wise). And that's where I need some help. What questions do you want answers for from Facebook?
Facebook agreed I could use the answers outside of the meeting (with the exception of sharing from non-Facebook attendances).
[1] https://simpleanalytics.com
[2] https://twitter.com/adriaanvrossum <comment><USER3> Well, The big one would be nice: Facebook makes her money from harvesting and selling privacy sensitive data, or at least that is the perception shared by nation states, the EU and the wider audience. For any claim Facebook makes about respecting privacy to have at least face validity she need to show how she is going to make money without violating her users privacy. So how is Facebook going to make money if they need to respect users privacy?

Somewhat more constructive: Facebook seems to have an unhealthy appetite to collect _all_ user data including privacy sensitive information. But lets be fair: She is definitely not the only company on the quest for the Big Data insights, that seem to always be at least one data point away. Does Facebook have information on which data points they really need to make a commercial viable user profile? What data points are privacy sensitive? Is Facebook looking into alternatives for those privacy sensitive data points? If not: can Facebook enumerate those and ask their users for explicit consent to collect those points and ask for explicit consent in the future for any new data points?

Good luck this afternoon. I hope you get some insights.

<comment><USER4> It is not true that Facebook makes its money by selling private data, as you can verify by reading its publicly available earnings reports. It makes its money by selling ads, which it uses private data to target — a completely different thing.

<comment><USER3> I was really careful enough in my wording: Facebook sells privacy sensitive data as in very, very specific target groups for among other things ad targeting for their customers to use. I did not refer to the selling of private data.

<comment><USER4> I genuinely don't understand the distinction you're making.

Facebook does not make its money from "selling data" _at all_ , whether "private data" or "privacy-sensitive data".

<comment><USER5> Not the OP, but I am guessing they are trying to say that the distinction between "you pay facebook and they give you a database full of private data" and "you pay facebook and they give you API access to a database of private data and allow you to query it in myriad ways leading to you creating your own database of highly accurate private data" is not as important a distinction as Facebook would have you believe. Or something along those lines.

<comment><USER4> But Facebook _doesn't_ let advertisers query their database of private data. I agree that if they did, it would not be very different from selling data, but they don't.

<comment><USER6> But.. they do, though. You can (and people do) make a very targeted ad, then query what users matched with it, and so on until you've sufficient data for your purposes. Plus you can use their public APIs to then match their ad data with the users public information. Facebook knows this, and does not prevent it (by hiding user identifiers for instance) because it's part of their strategy.

<comment><USER7> Ah now this is sneaky. Is this widespread? Any sources?

<comment><USER8> Here's a guy targeting his roommate[0]. Previous discussion[1].

[0] [https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation- pranking...](https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my- roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Some people advised me not to go there because it would only do harm to my > name and brand, but I think I should

We need more people who are willing to try and solve problems, not just be critical. Thanks for being willing to have a conversation with them. You're making the right call whether you are able to have an impact or not.

<comment><USER10> > We need more people who are willing to try and solve problems, not just be > critical.

New Sincerity is exactly the reactionary politics in which Facebook thrives.

<comment><USER11> Can you rephrase that without grabbing a pair of buzzwords out of the air?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When politicians do focus groups to fine tune their speeches, they are not looking to change their platform, their opinion, or their actions.

They are just looking to fine tune for optics. The knowledge they gain from the focus groups just helps them make their message more palatable.

I think of fb that way because they are masters of double speak, weasel words, etc. which is the common behaviour of dishonest politicians.

Imo many of the questions posted here can be easily deflected, handled with conversation techniques that any politician or lawyer would know well.

You want an airtight position, built on a detailed understanding of how they typically deflect in the past. And because you are asking, you are probably the right person to do this.

Harari tried, and despite being brilliant and knowledgeable, he was simply talked over: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj9eD0Wug8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj9eD0Wug8) Though I suspect he is aiming for a softer approach.

Instead of a pile of disconnected questions, I would suggest developing a clear list of requirements, statements which must be true as a set, in order for a social system to have an acceptable level of privacy.

The list should be iterated upon, and not sent to them prematurely. It should be built on best practices and knowledge of privacy experts from leading institutions. Then it could be broadly endorsed. Then it could not be as easily weaselled-around.

<comment><USER13> Also, not just tuning, but, in some forums, the participation of experts itself can legitimize, and be something the powerful entity (organization or individual) can point to as outreach on their part, and validation.

This can be a mutually-beneficial transaction -- the powerful entity that needs to manage perceptions gets a boost, and the participants get a reputation boost for being seen involved in powerful circles. Witness that the HN poster's business is being promoted, just by being invited. (Which is a potential conflict of interest for the experts, if they're supposed to be representing some truth or public interest, but they probably have to play along for this personal boost.)

One thing that can possibly upset this transaction is if there's a channel for uncontrolled speaking out around it. Say, the format is a televised/streamed roundtable, and an expert with the mic decides to burn bridges with the organization and others like them, while saying things the organization really doesn't want them to say. (The motivation could be altruistic/duty, or calculated career grandstanding.) Or, in a tightly-controlled format, the expert who wants to never be invited to that kind of thing again could attend and then immediately bite the hand that just fed it, by ripping it on Twitter/YouTube/Medium/news/op-eds/etc.

I've seen a lot of experts play-along for their careers (in this kind of thing and analogous transactions elsewhere), and sometimes you see modest amounts of pushback by people who are still playing a political game, but rarely you notice a person who won't get on the slippery slope of game-playing at all yet who manages to have impact there.

(Personally, I'd be a terrible politician even if I wanted to be, and I just want to quietly solve technical and societal problems, while someone else fronts the band.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You should go. But be aware that they're likely using you to look like they legitimately care about their user's privacy. So just don't let yourself be used in that way unless you want to be.

The question I've always wanted to ask Facebook is how much is their data worth? No discussion of privacy at Facebook is interesting unless the discussion concerns money and their bottom line. They undoubtably have people inside Facebook calculating how much spcecific bits of PII are worth to them, and what it would to their bottom line if they stopped collecting them. IMO any discussion of privacy that doesn't quantify it in terms of money is basically a waste of time. They're a company and money is all they care about.

As a corollary to value ask them about risk. How much do they calculate the risk of holding all that PII to be? How much would their bottom line be hurt if they lost it in a breach?

<comment><USER15> 80% of their money will come from big advertisers like Unilever and Coke who target everyone and anyone.

It's only the small advertisers who want their adverts targeted at people in their country and topic, thats it.

That sort of targeting can be done simply by what country is their ip from whats the topic of the content Im sending them.

The whole targeted advertising thing is 100% a gimmick that advertisers don't care about.

<comment><USER16> This is simply untrue. Large advertisers are often the most demanding about ensuring that their ads reach the specific audience that they are targeting. Giant companies are the only ones who can afford to hire someone whose entire job is "drive engagement with millennials in the American Southwest" (and yes, I personally know someone whose first job was basically that). Small businesses are much less active in managing targeted ads beyond location, as their marketing is usually done in the spare time of the business owner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 1\. Do your apps upload metadata and/or thumbnails from photos to which they're permissions to access, but which aren't explicitly selected by the user for posting/uploading?

2\. Do your apps "skim" the contents of device clipboards and send this info off device without user intent to do so?

And one open-ended question to try to gauge how open they're being about the whole process:

3\. What information do you collect that would surprise or upset privacy- conscious individuals?

<comment><USER18> > "skim"

I feel like if you ask questions where you have to quote your own words like this, you're basically begging them to be interpreted differently than you intend. I'd be crystal clear about what is being asked.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. It's almost impossible to construct a question that can't be talked around if their intent is to deceive. But if that's their intent then the whole exercise is pointless.

How's this?

"Do your apps access the contents of device clipboards and send this information or any modified version of this information off the device without explicit user consent to do-so?"

<comment><USER18> I'd imagine they'd just say "no" to that because almost certainly somewhere in their ToS/PP they got "explicit" consent from you to sell your soul and everything that goes with it.

Remember, all you need to know from them is what they do and when they do it. You don't need or want them to make a judgment call on the legalities or morality or anything else when responding; you can do that yourself later.

To that end, I'd word it like this:

"What are _all_ the situations in which your apps read clipboard contents, and why is it necessary in each case?" (Obviously pasting would be one scenario, to which you'll just nod and move on...)

(And I would ask the same about microphone data, location data, etc. too, not just clipboard contents.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Before you decide to go, I'd evaluate exactly what you want out of the engagement and keep that in mind during the whole process. It's so easy to get used in this sort of scenario. Facebook obviously has an agenda of some kind and so should you. If those two agendas don't mesh then you should probably disengage or else be open to a one-sided benefit in their favour.

Be aware that their PR guys could use your name to dilute your previous critical commentary once you have gotten involved and are part of their 'consulted expert' club. This could potentially leave you fighting their PR which will likely just end up with a muddy mess.

Be prepared is what I'd say, a reputation is on the line for you and not much for them.

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. How can one find out about their shadow profiles that have been created by FB?

2\. How can they delete the data associated with the above?

3\. Info on how they group personal data from WhatsApp, FB and Instagram

4\. Who do they share such data with?

5\. Who within FB is responsible for privacy policies, etc.?

<comment><USER18> > 1\. How can one find out about their shadow profiles that have been created > by FB?

I feel like this is a misguided notion. Facebook doesn't need to create "shadow profiles" for anybody to achieve the same effect: they can just pull together the data on-demand (e.g. say when you create an account, they could scan others' contact lists for a match for your name), without aggregating them together into a 'profile' beforehand. Unless you really intend to ignore that possibility (which I doubt, given the effect would be exactly the same), you probably want to approach it differently than talking about 'shadow profiles'.

<comment><USER21> For some data, this might be true. But, for example, where is my browsing history stored, which is undoubtedly collected by FB through their social sharing buttons even if I don't have an account? Or any other drive-by data that is collected through third-party apps, websites or whatever and send back to FB. It wouldn't make any sense to store my browsing history somewhere else than in a shadow profile.

<comment><USER22> No, it actually doesn't make sense to store it in any kind of profile.

You are right that some fly by data might end up in a server log somewhere but those aren't kept around for long...if they are kept at all at Facebook scales

Storing and computing data is very expensive and risky at FB scale so they will only keep around what they actually need for as long as they need it. Meaning that data gets send to the server, gets aggregated and then deleted.

An exception of course is content generated by users such as a newsfeed post, as is the nature of the product that content stays around until users delete it

<comment><USER21> I have my doubts that storing compressed plaintext is expensive for a company that makes, what, 13 billion a year in profit or something like that? Their business is data. The more data they have, the more profit they can generate. The browsing history reveals a lot about humans. Storing it makes sense imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Try to investigate the background to this privacy roundtable initiative.

* Which part of Facebook did the initiative come from - privacy policy, or (maybe) PR? How many of the people in the room are from (communications/PR/crisis management/some other related team)

* Is it genuinely an attempt to listen to critics and try to improve? (Can they point to examples of improvements they've already implemented?)

* What will the outcomes of this initiative be? How will they summarise and communicate their action points; how will any such points be followed up?

</comment><comment><USER24> Ask which one person at FB is held ultimately accountable for privacy, by whom, and how they measure it.

<comment><USER25> Thanks. That would be interesting to know. One thing; what do you mean with measure it?

<comment><USER26> > One thing; what do you mean with measure it?

Come PSC (Performance Summary Cycle) time, how do they justify a "Meets All" or "Exceeds" evaluation?

<comment><USER27> Only aiding and abetting _one_ genocide this year would be a 50% improvement over last year!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You're being invited to Facebook Amsterdam. That's like speaking at a Walmart in Kentucky. They won't have any answers to any questions.

<comment><USER29> I'm about 70% sure someone from fb will notice this thread and construct non- answers for all questions here. Hi!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How can I completely delete a messenger conversation? Is it even possible? If I'm talking to someone on messenger, and we both decide we want to delete the entire conversation, that should be possible with two button clicks.

I talk to my significant other on messenger. It gives me nightmares that any employee at Facebook could access that conversation at any time in the next thirty years.

It's going to be really interesting when people from my generation start running for office. It's conceivable a Facebook employee might think it's "worth it" to check a candidate's private messages, since he's a racist Nazi and deserves it, or whatever.

<comment><USER31> Conceivable? It just happened. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-found-shawn- brooks-the-guy-...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-found-shawn-brooks-the- guy-behind-the-viral-drunk-pelosi-video)

edit: not a candidate though, would be harder to punch down on someone with political clout and a legal team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have one.

1\. How can someone who does _not_ have an account prevent themselves from being tagged and/or identified in uploaded photos? Corollary: why isn't the tagging and identification of a person an opt-in feature only?

<comment><USER33> I'd like to add to the above question: how does (or _can_ ) a person who never had an FB account request deletion of (possibly illegally collected) private data about them, without having to register to the very platform they're not a member of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The one privacy control that everybody is waiting for is: automatically delete all my activity data older than N days, where N can be specified by the user.

Why isn't it implemented yet?

<comment><USER35> While allowing them to specify a minimum and/or incremental value for N. They're a business after all, and our data is their value. I'd be happy with that compromise.

<comment><USER36> I expect minimal value of N to be either sky high, or decent..with plenty of exceptions written in ToS so that it dosen't do anything - just like most 'out out' forms in other sites that always 'fail' to deliver your opt out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Why have you argued in court that your users have no 'reasonable expectation of privacy'?"

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure how to phrase this in a non-combative, constructive way, but I do think it's a really good question.

Facebook's PR team and legal team are arguing two completely separate things right now, and I'd like management to explain how they reconcile those views.

I'd like to know whether their lawyers are right that users have no expectation of privacy, or whether Zuckerburg is right that privacy is the future of Facebook. If Facebook's lawyers aren't misrepresenting the company, then I'd like to know why Zuckerburg and management are so hesitant to make the same arguments in public press releases.

<comment><USER39> No matter how you phrase it I would guess the response would be something along the lines of "cannot comment on matters relating to ongoing litigation." They'll have a clever way to sidestep every issue they haven't explicitly decided in advance to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Assuming you won't get actual answers to any of the critical questions, maybe take the opportunity to make the employees more self-conscious about their jobs at FB through questions. Maybe something like: If you decide on a privacy policy as a team here in Amsterdam, does it have any effect on the overall way how FB handles privacy? Do you, as a team and individuals, feel empowered enough to have actual influence over privacy questions and concerns? Especially in the light of FB saying one thing and then doing things completely different.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd take a different approach to your preparation:

Try to find videos of FB officers (Zuck, Sandburg) who have already been publicly grilled.

Most likely on a corporate level, FB employees already know how to answer and respond to most of these privacy questions.

That means you need to figure out their initial canned responses, what assumptions they're building on, and prepare a line of questioning/reasoning to chip away at their logic in follow-ups.

</comment><comment><USER41> This one: If you don't use Whatsapp but a friend of yours does, he has to give Whatsapp access to his address book which includes your name as well (although you don't use Whatsapp). So the question is: Does Facebook/Whatsapp have information about such passive users (e.g. the name or phone number)?

<comment><USER42> This is already known, yes, and they're called shadow profiles.

<comment><USER41> Ok, good to know. But then I would like to know if these show (Whatsapp) profiles are used to match with existing Facebook profiles (based on phone number or name).

<comment><USER43> The European Commission has fined Facebook €110 million for providing incorrect or misleading information during the Commission's 2014 investigation under the EU Merger Regulation of Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp... When Facebook notified the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, it informed the Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook users' accounts and WhatsApp users' accounts. It stated this both in the notification form and in a reply to a request of information from the Commission. However, in August 2016, WhatsApp announced updates to its terms of service and privacy policy, including the possibility of linking WhatsApp users' phone numbers with Facebook users' identities.

Facebook using the phone number they requested "for security purposes" to improve ad targeting and let people identify you from your phone number: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2019/03/04/facebook-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2019/03/04/facebook- lets-people-find-you-by-your-two-factor-phone-number-and-you-cant-stop- it/#e472bbb6b755)

<comment><USER41> Thanks for the detailed information. However, this seems to refer to a match between your own whatsapp number and your own facebook account. What I find even more interesting is that the entire address book can be matched, also if most of your address book contact don't have a whatsapp account but a facebook account!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Start with them defining, "What is privacy?" \- Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves, or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. - <USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy)

\- How does the average customer know they have achieved "privacy". I have a feeling that they have many privacy features, but turned off by default.

\- If you start with the end in mind. What does success look like?

</comment><comment><USER45> Not really privacy related but I would ask them why they allowed a fucking lunatic to livestream a mass killing spree, why they didn't do anything to shut down the stream despite numerous people alerting them to what was going on, why their systems couldn't detect near duplicates of said content in the days, weeks and months that followed and finally, why they would allow absolutely anyone to start live streaming to audiences of potential tens of thousands to begin with. This was a disaster waiting to happen and I'm betting Facebook knew _damn_ well that their technology, processes and culture were in no way equipped to deal with it. This is a rant but as someone who grew up in Christchurch I can't help but feel that they've learned _nothing_ and done even less.

<comment><USER46> Why does the phone company let drug dealers take phone calls on their cellphone!? How could this happen!?!? Why don't they have a ML global on demand censorship system while also being under privacy scandals!? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Ask them if they agree the like and view count next to every post/image/vid has a psychological effects on individuals and groups.

If they agree, ask them if there is anything blocking them from studying the cases where the effects are negative on individuals and groups.

If it is possible to list the kind of content where likes and views are having negative consequences to society that data(counts not content) should not be stored on Facebook server or shown to Facebook users.

Right now there is too much emphasis during privacy debates on all data.

There is no distinction being made between the like and view counts that cause the ALS challenge funding to be produced - a positive to society, and like and view counts that reinforce my antivax aunt's beliefs,

Some of these counts are harmful, some are harmless and some are useful. Why store or display the harmful stuff?

<comment><USER15> The problem with this argument is who decides whats harmful and whats legitimate society vs fringe society.

We might both agree that your aunt's beliefs are harmful but the anti-vax society that your aunt is a part of will argue that us blindly following experts is harmful.

Should facebook be the ones to decide whats harmful to society? If yes don't be surprised if they consider what they are doing not harmful.

<comment><USER47> Do Like and View counts have effects on Individuals and Groups outside of whatever their designed purpose is? Its a simple question Facebook needs to answer.

Those counts don't just effect my Aunt, they effect me too. If both the left and the right can agree that the numbers are having an effect, then the narrative changes. Currently we don't even acknowledge the root cause of lot of problems is not the content but the counts.

Those counts aren't just used by Facebook mind you, they can be used by anyone to trigger a particular group or an individual. The content used to do the triggering is just a superficial piece of the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hypothetically, some businesses should not exist. For instance, although a children's-heroin-selling business might be in great demand and turn a huge profit, such a business is not in the best interests of society. Simply optimizing the delivery of things people want is not sufficient to make a good business. "Heavy equipment rental for people under the influence of narcotics" is similar. Without getting into a discussion of social good, or what's moral or not, we can all agree that at times people are willing to make trades for which they themselves would find stupid at other times.

Once data is captured it never goes away. As time passes and as it aggregates with other similar data, it actually becomes much more valuable.

So, continuing along, hypothetically, what are you going to do if capturing personal data in exchange for "free" services is not a business that should exist?

I understand that right now you're engaged in a long and drawn-out split-the- baby campaign, where you try to assure privacy advocates of your intentions and that's there some magic sauce involving algorithms that will solve everything, but what if that is not the case? What if your business model is built on harming people by encouraging them to make trades for personal information where, once we all figure out what we're doing, none of us would agree to fifty years from now? How will you know? Will you tell us? Do you already know? What are your plans?

If you truly want to respect privacy and are on the side of people living their lives without being constantly examined like lab rats and having every piece of their existence recorded for any hacker to see forevermore, what are your plans for knowing that it's not working out? What's your tripwire, your exit plan?

Because frankly, if you don't have one of those, then this is all just a PR exercise, right? You've already decided that you win, you just haven't figured the details out yet.

You can restate the question several different ways, but it all boils down to "How do we know you're serious about this?" Because so far it just looks like a bunch of the usual public relations BS.

</comment><comment><USER49> I would ask a more generic question.

What's the right level of control users should have over their data?

Then as a follow up I would ask what's keeping Facebook from implementing those controls.

Unless this was already covered in an acceptable way after the Cambridge Analytica f*ckup (I haven't followed what actions Facebook took afterwards to address the issue), I would also ask about what are they doing about policing bad actors, companies trawling or leaking users' private information or abusing it. How are they going to better prevent that in the future. Once it's outside of Facebook they've already lost control of the situation.

</comment><comment><USER50> Facebook and a "privacy friendly" analytics company. This roundtable will be used just for propaganda.

<comment><USER51> Huh? From a quick skim here[0], they don't collect IP addresses, respect DNT headers, and delete user agents after 90 days.

I legitly can't think of a more privacy-friendly way to do that. If you're paranoid enough to believe that no analytics is the only right solution, you probably have DNT on, and this is one of the rare cases in which it's actually respected.

[0] [https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we- collect](https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect)

<comment><USER52> It'll be propaganda for Facebook, not Simple Analytics. If anything, those fears about this roundtable tarnishing their reputation may not be so unfounded...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> 1\. What sustainable business models will Facebook pursue that respect or even facilitate user privacy?

2\. What will be simple to use mechanisms / technologies / standards employed by FB to allow users to identify and delete their private information?

3\. Will those privacy control mechanisms be standardized across Facebook products / technologies?

4\. Will there be an effort to open source technologies / standards with respect to user privacy, so they can be peer reviewed and if good implemented by others in the industry?

Thanks for your efforts!

</comment><comment><USER54> I work on the assumption that everything I do on Facebook platforms including WhatsApp is secure from random hackers but not secure from the Five Eyes.

Years ago in the Snowden docs there was a diagram of a link into Google's infrastructure where they could take the SSL off and put it back on again, fooling people into thinking everything said about SSL and HTTPS implied actual privacy.

Since this is a taboo, 'not this again' type of question, can you think of ways to ask this in such a way they can only lie?

For instance, what guarantees can Facebook offer to their users that their messages are not being mass intercepted by Five Eyes?

I am fine with police with a job to do getting someone's texts, e.g. if someone is in a road traffic accident when they were texting on WhatsApp, I would gladly have the police get access to that person's data. However, the mass surveillance and the chilling effects that go with it are not good for society. It is a breach of privacy. If the government do such things it is still illegal. Even if they write laws that say it is okay, it is not. So rather than sweep this topic under the rug, I would like the answer from Facebook as to what they are doing and what they would do if their customers were subject to mass surveillance from Five Eyes.

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask this.

</comment><comment><USER55> What prevents them from publishing an explanation of what they do with their users private data in language understandable by their average users?

<comment><USER56> What about their current privacy policy do you find hard to understand?

<comment><USER55> Bit late, but not me. The average user. I think the average user still doesn't understand how and to what extent their data is analyzed for the ultimate purpose of discovering details about the user which the user did not reveal — for the purposes of advertisements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If social media platforms do not legally provide an expectation of privacy, as Facebook has recently claimed in US court[1], why should users expect otherwise?

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/facebook-court- pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/facebook-court-privacy.html)

</comment><comment><USER58> More of a request than a question:

If they want to show respect for privacy a user ought to be able to deep- delete (meaning, from backups too) any and all information they ever posted in any form on FB. This might even include information that was the result of inference from posted data.

I would like a setting that, by default, erases all of my posts older than, say, 30 days.

I would actually pay for this. Not a lot. A nominal amount, like $10 or $20 a year for "premium" options. No problem at all with that concept.

Privacy, amongst other things, should mean the user owns their information, not the service. If I can't ensure my information is deleted I am one data breach or one disgruntled employee away from losing my privacy.

In this age of vindictive "the internet hates everything" polarization, privacy is critically important.

</comment><comment><USER12> How can a user purge all data about them on fb, including shadow accounts and backups? How can a non-user opt out of having a shadow profile about them? How can they claim to respext privacy if they dont have flawless answers for these?

</comment><comment><USER59> Tell them you want easy access to your "friends" email address and other contact information and a quick way to transfer it to other social networks if you want. That is the "privacy" they say they are protecting.

</comment><comment><USER60> Ask them if (and how) they intend to change their ad platform to sell ads to ethics and privacy conscious owners of small businesses.

I'm a small business entrepreneur and I'm frustrated that to compete well in my sector I would have to advertise on Facebook. Their ad system currently seems intractably unethical because they know and actively use so much user data that users have not knowingly given away for the purpose of advertising. I don't want to be asked in the Final Judgment why I paid into such a scheme of abuse — which is what it currently seems to be.

</comment><comment><USER61> You don't have to agree with her politics, but I think Peggy Noonan had the right answer on this one: it's a show and there's no good to be found in taking part.

Just say no and hit send.

> In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a > deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that > the company could "make a show of apologizing for its sins." A Facebook > employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at > Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with > each other. "They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn't want to > regulate the platform and partisans who would." Another goal was to leave > attendees "bored to death" by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg > spoke.

([http://peggynoonan.com/overthrow-the-prince-of- facebook/](http://peggynoonan.com/overthrow-the-prince-of-facebook/))

</comment><comment><USER62> Any info on shadow profiles you could get would be very valuable.

<comment><USER25> Yes, will definitely ask about that.

<comment><USER18> I'm not so hopeful. I explained here why: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390678)

<comment><USER62> I agree. I also don't think it's useful to use the term as Zuck explicitly evaded answering to that. What is more useful would be the answer to the question how easy for them is to aggregate information about a person not using FB and whether this information is used in any way (I have no hope of hearing any meaningful answer to that, but it can be amusing to see how they evade it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Privacy settings:

Would FB be willing to work with a neutral third party group of user experience designers? Let's call them the PWHUX Board for Privacy White Hat User Experience. (Or maybe something else, PWHUX sounds a bit rude in English.)

This PWHUX Board would create standardized user interface conventions for disclosing and controlling personal privacy settings. This same group might work with other datahoovering businesses to establish multi-vendor standards.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'd assume the Legal and Privacy Policy teams can't give you answers about strategy from their C-level other than what they've already made public through vague statements. So I wouldn't get angry if I couldn't get anything useful from them.

You could ask if they plan to let users know exactly (and be able to opt out) where their data will end up (internal only, 3rd-parties, which ones? Could you select purpose?).

And of course, GDPR globally.

</comment><comment><USER65> If you're seriously soliciting HN for questions, then make sure to record yourself asking questions you pick here so we can hear FB's response.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is a privacy roundtable that's private?

...

You see what I'm getting at? They understand privacy just fine when it's their own privacy.

I think you would just be a fig leaf.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ask them why the exposed moderators who now live in constant fear for their lives in their own countries were not offered serious compensation that could last them a significant chunk of their lifetimes (which would be on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars). [1] Facebook will most likely respond that their threat assessments didn't warrant it. To which you'd ideally respond by asking them why a reasonable victim should consider it fair or reasonable to be forced to trust Facebook's security chops when Facebook already failed him once and put his _life_ in danger.

Seriously, it's ludicrous to offer just a "home alarm system" and a ride to work (which I also assume is to their _current_ job... why the hell should they keep doing the same job?) for a moderator who's now going to be in perpetual fear of getting killed. Those people may well no longer be able to work like they used to, for _any_ employer.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/16/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/16/facebook- moderators-identity-exposed-terrorist-groups)

<comment><USER67> I really don't think this is as credible of a threat as you paint it to be.

Terrorists don't go around killing people for banning them from forums.

<comment><USER68> This is such a strange response. First of all, Facebook's inability to keep their moderators' identities private is an issue regardless of how the terrorists respond.

> Terrorists don't go around killing people for banning them from forums.

It seems incredibly arrogant to assume that you know what terrorists will and will not do (especially when used as a rebuttal to someone expressing concern for real people who have been put in this situation).

I don't have any experience interacting with terrorists, but growing up in a poor education system in the southeastern U.S., I've witnessed my fair share of gang activity. I have seen incredible confrontation/violence erupt as a consequence of amazingly trivial actions.

It does not seem far fetched to me that an extremist group would possess the potential to respond dispraportionately to a perceived act of disrespect or aggression. Given the circumstances, it's hard to find a charitable interpretation of why you would suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER67> >First of all, Facebook's inability to keep their moderators' identities private is an issue

Agreed, but it's not an issue because they're going to get killed by terrorists. I'm objecting to the dishonest framing, not trying to argue that this isn't an issue.

>It seems incredibly arrogant to assume that you know what terrorists will and will not do

Your assumptions seem at least as arrogant.

>I don't have any experience interacting with terrorists

I do

<comment><USER69> Why are you continuing to hammer away with the Reddit style comments? You might have a good point, but now you are acting like an argumentative ass.

This isn't some sort of internet pissing contest with people you don't know and will never meet; that is literally any other online forum that I've seen. This is a forum to discuss issues with people who are interested in them. You are purposefully diluting the conversation, and for what? The lolz?

Go somewhere else with this crap

<comment><USER70> Please don't cross into personal attack here. We ban accounts that do that, as you know, but we don't want to ban you.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Adjacent to pure "privacy" issues is a/the "data ownership" question, or maybe it should be framed as the public vs private data issue.

That is, maybe if FB own the data, advertisers buy it and states/others hack into it... the right solution is to "push the arrow through" rather than extract it. Make the data (or most of it) public. Publish it. It's not really "private" in a meaningful way. The subject (object?) does not have control of and/or knowledge of the dataset describing them. Also (this relates to my last point) data is not the sum of its part. A lot of what the data _is_ only exists at the aggregate level, and without publication users can never have control, ownership or any rights to these crucial aspects of their data..

To put it in the form of a question: _Are there ways of arriving at a better state, with less distrust and paranoia that involves opening data, rather than just better protecting it._

I'm not suggesting that it's simple or that I know exactly how it should work. But, if advertisers had the same access everyone has, I think it'd be less of an issue. If the default was "data is public," I suspect we'd find better ways of dealing with data that truly needs to stay secret.

As an aside, unconnected to privacy, data has become a new class of IP. We may legally consider it copyrighted (raw data) or patent-able (trained NNs), but as a practical matter it is a new type of IP... of rapidly growing importance. There are massive, world changing examples of what can happen when we manage to create cultures of "public IP" or sharing. The scientific revolution was (arguably) directly related to the new culture of publishing experimental results. CS was irrevocably changed by free and/or open source software, especially compilers, operating systems, libraries... The WWweb, in lots of ways. The pace of the current ML explosion is directly related to and enabled by open source, free software, scientific publishing and "open IP" generally.

Imagine how held back we would have been, if those cultures of sharing hadn't emerged. I think data sharing is probably similar in this regard to compiler code or scientific experiments. Openness creates value, potentially a lot of it.

Privacy is a meaningful reason/excuse for closed data. I think it's worth trying to solve these two together. Dunno how to phrase a question for that.

</comment><comment><USER72> Ask them what they think is their impact on the journalism and the news. We see destruction of local news, specialty journalism, etc, and lots of it is thought to be attributed to privacy violations by FB and Google. Who needs a local newspaper if a local business can target people on FB or on Candy Crush Saga? That's the bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER46> What incentives do employees & engineers have for improving privacy or preventing privacy issues & bugs?

Kind of like how FB's performance became part of annual review & promotion rubrics for employees recently?

Can other employees spike projects started by anti-privacy gordon gekkos to improve short term metrics?

</comment><comment><USER73> Ask them do they provide all the data what they store on an individual when the data is requested, and if they don't do that, ask them why.

A reference read: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959064)

</comment><comment><USER74> Why do you insist on switching to Top Stories even when the user consistently switches back to Most Recent?

Why are there not more granular privacy controls?

Why is what a user sees of their friends that which is in the audience for a post? I don't need to see what someone "commented on".

</comment><comment><USER75> Why don't they provide an API to easily use your personal data in other places? Why don't they use federation services to let Facebook talk to ActivityPub services? If they truly cared about privacy they would give you a way to use your data outside of the platform.

</comment><comment><USER76> Which teams budget is larger, privacy or legal?

If that question is deniable, then does FB take no efforts to guess at individuals budgets? (Ie household income, rent/mortgage, monthly subscriptions, etc) Does FB grant people privacy for what's in their bank accounts?

</comment><comment><USER77> I have had quite a bit of trouble registering an insta account via Tor. I get that the IPs are likely blacklisted for abuse, but I do not see a path to privacy on that platform. Would they be interested in supporting an onion url for insta?

</comment><comment><USER78> What are they doing to lobby against the age verification procedures in the UK, initially applied to porn, but which the government has clear intent to extend to all social media and is one of the biggest attacks on privacy in history?

</comment><comment><USER79> Ask how Facebook actually measures its fake accounts. See [https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html](https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html).

</comment><comment><USER80> "Given Facebook's ability to track the amount of time a user spends on any given item in their newsfeed, do you also track how long users spend reading terms and conditions, privacy policies, and so forth? If not, why not?"

</comment><comment><USER81> I think what everyone truly wants is the ability to be forgotten. "Like I was never there".

But Facebook has a strong monetary incentive to never forget anything, ever. They have an incentive to make it unclear just how much data they're keeping about their users. They have a strong incentive to be as opaque as possible. And even if they let users be forgotten, they've got a strong incentive to make that hard to do.

How can Facebook balance it's responsibility to shareholders to earn profits with their responsibility as ethical humans to allow people to be forgotten? I do presume that, as people, they want to be ethical (and I'm sure someone will say I'm naive for believing that).

And how can Facebook make it's decision on where they lie on that spectrum clear to their users, so people can make informed decisions about what they want to share and do on the platform?

The hardest decisions businesses have to make is when to give up profit by doing the right thing. And the most profitable companies are the ones run by sociopaths for whom this is not a difficult problem.

</comment><comment><USER82> > Some people advised me not to go there because it would only do harm to my > name and brand, but I think I should.

Is there anything in particular that drives your participation? The reasoning is peculiar.

</comment><comment><USER83> It's obvious to anyone that their current business models are hostile to privacy. Do they have a plan to fundamentally change the way they make money? If so, what is it?

</comment><comment><USER84> What is the motivation for improving privacy? Do they aim to do just enough to get good PR or can they demonstrate a more fundamental change to their security culture?

</comment><comment><USER85> I'd be interested in knowing if Facebook has any ties with the (Dutch) government. And if that is the case, to what extend do these collaborations go.

</comment><comment><USER86> Ask why they lied to the EU when they said they couldn't merge WhatsApp's data with Facebook's data.

When they knew they could.

<comment><USER87> What's the point in asking them what they could do, there's plenty they could do but shouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> What are being done about countries buying political ads to be displayed in a targeted country?

</comment><comment><USER89> Will they honor GDPR related requests? The last I saw, the have some checkbox they require european users to "agree" to in order to continue using FB, which basically waives their GDPR rights.

In addition, you might want to review the questions from when Zuckerberg was in front of the European parliament. The MEPs asked some good questions and Zuck basically weasled out of it. I'd love to see the same questions brought up again.

And also, info about shadow profiles.

<comment><USER90> GDPR is a good question as I'm not sure they can 'waive' the GDPR rights. There is an ongoing court case in the EU at present.

<comment><USER91> I'm fairly sure that you can't make "waiving" the rights that the GDPR grants you a condition for using a service.

<comment><USER92> Privacy lawyer here...you 100% cannot waive your GDPR rights as a condition of the service. In fact your consent can not be a precondition of using the service. Most adtech companies out there will try to rely on legitimate interest as a basis for processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> How are you redesigning your business model in order to honor user privacy?

</comment><comment><USER34> What would the most privacy aware social media company look like?

</comment><comment><USER94> A "simple" one,: Do they plan to fullfill GDPR requests?

Here is a good story of a guy who tried to get all the data the company had on him without anything close to a real answer:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959064)

</comment><comment><USER95> Shadow profiles. Man everyone wants and answer on these

</comment><comment><USER37> "Would you object to GDPR-style legislation being passed in the United States?"

</comment><comment><USER96> How is Facebook a free speech platform if users cannot control how and to who their speech is directed?

</comment><comment><USER92> Ask them what their main basis for processing personal data under GDPR is when they collect user data. Also ask about their retention management. How can they ensure personal data is only retained so long as they have a basis for processing?

</comment><comment><USER97> You might ask if FB organization is a parasitic operation sucking down personal data any way they can and selling it to who?. Who knows who else. You know part of the answer. Watch the squirm ensue.

<comment><USER98> The squirming would be from everyone else in the room, embarrassed on your behalf.</comment></comment>


Caren and the Tangled Tentacles: A Point-And-click Adventure Game for the C64 - <AUTHOR> http://martinwendt.de/caren/ <comment><USER2> I didn't know that people are still making games for C64! That must be a great deal of hacking! I think I will spend this weekend with C64 emulator, playing this game, recalling good old times...

<comment><USER3> In fact, there is a vibrant scene still happening around pretty much all of the 8-bit machines from the 80's .. these machines are not dead - people are still making games and apps for them, even today.

Myself, as an Oric-1/Atmos fan - I'm very, very happy to be seeing this kind of enthusiasm for the old machines. In the Oric world, we're getting titles written for us in the last 15 years that we would _never_ have believed possible back in the 80's during the time that the Oric was on the market. In case you're interested, check out the top-100 listing at [http://oric.org/](http://oric.org/) \- a lot of the titles in the top 20 of that list were made recently, with much enthusiasm by Oric fans who are really squeezing amazing results out of this old machine.

EDIT: wanted to add - a great example of this is the work that Chema, of defense-force.org, is doing on his new OASIS engine for the Oric .. it includes a full-blown scripting engine, an editor, level loader/etc., and per his latest demo, is shaping up to be a game like no other made for the Oric-1 before .. check out the progress here - note, he posted new demo's this morning at the end of the thread:

[http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1273](http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1273)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <quote>\- Handpixeled graphics in MulticolorCharset Mode of the C64 (in short: 4 colors per 4x8 square, three global out of 16, one unique out of 8) (or: two colors in 8x8, one global, one out of 8 / maximum of 256 such squares)</quote>

sounds painful.

<comment><USER5> It's not so bad. You pick three colors for the whole screen, then one unique color per character square.

Sprites are handled separately (in hardware) and get their own individual color selections, which makes things a lot easier--you don't have to worry about your sprites stomping on the background elements.

(The line you quote is a bit confusing--he's describing both of the available display modes, even though the game only uses the first.)

<comment><USER6> Hi. I am the gfx artist of the game. MultiColor Charmode is a mixed mode, so it is possible to use high and low resolutions the same time. There is a limitation for the individual color that you can use the first half of the C64 palette.

I posted mockup screens on Pixeljoint from time to time. The street scene (link) uses high resolution for the roof of the shed for example. [http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/96007.htm](http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/96007.htm)

The restrictions for sprite colors are similiar. There is also only one individual color, but the whole palette can be used here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At first I read as "Tangled Testicles" and assume an S&M game. Perhaps for the sequel...</comment>


Show HN: GDXM (Global Digital Exchanges Monitor) Has Officially Launched - <AUTHOR> http://gdxm.io/ <comment><USER2> this looks interesting (although I am not to keen about cryptocurrencies myself) however I navigated your site and eventually I ended up to a link that says "Read More on Medium". I wanted to do so. but it did not send me there.</comment>


We wasted $50K on Google Search Ads and the insights we got on the way - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@AntonElfimov/we-wasted-50k-on-google-ads-so-you-don-t-have-to-af688095de <comment><USER2> Surprised that keyword selection wasn't mentioned. Any time you're dealing with programming-related keywords, you're going to catch A LOT of people who just want free answers or code samples to copy-paste.

They're going to click on the first search result automatically, and if that happens to be your ad, then you just wasted $0.50-$5.00.

Another issue is keyword match types. If you used the keywords exactly as in the spreadsheet, without any modifiers, then you're giving Google way too much leeway in how they interpret and match search queries to your target keywords. For example, your keyword might be UPLOADCARE REVIEW but your ad will show for the search "uploading review" (I'm just guessing).

You might think "well even if our ad shows for an irrelevant keyword, surely the user would see the difference and not click on it!" Wrong. People click the first X results automatically.

Case in point: A data science platform company I consult once targeted python programmers. Instead they were getting tons of clicks from snake enthusiasts, before I got involved. Oops.

Another company was selling monitoring software for mobile apps but was paying Google (inadvertently) for searchers of free mobile apps. Oops.[1]

Anyway, the other lessons mentioned are still valid, but I feel the biggest lesson (mistake?) was overlooked.

[1] Quick tip if you're running Google Ads now: Go to your Keywords Report and click on the Search Terms tab. You'll see the actual search terms people used before they saw your ad. If they vary wildly from your target keywords, you need to fix your keyword targeting.

PS - More fun "Oops" stories about Google Ads: [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/selling-software-snake- charmers/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/selling-software-snake-charmers/)

<comment><USER3> There's a subtle point here that I want to emphasize, as it's counter to their "Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests."

The best way I found to _qualify_ leads was, for things I was charging money for, to put in the price. That way people didn't click if they were looking for free. This actually worked pretty well.

The problem was that this means my ads were showing and not getting clicked. This _reduced_ my quality score (although, in my mind, it provided a better experience for the user because they weren't wasting time going to a site that they did not want).

So Google's Quality Score is "quality" as measured from _their_ point of view (high click/view), not yours nor necessarily your customers.

<comment><USER4> It's [supposed to be] quality as measured from their _users '_ point of view, which may be a large superset of your customers. If the user wanted a free code snippet to copy & paste and they get an ad with a price in it, that's a bad result, even if they never click on it; that space on the page could've been devoted to a link that they would actually visit. It's _good_ (from the users' POV) for that ad to never get shown again on that query, because it makes their results more relevant.

The right solution here is to refine your target market segmentation & keywords so that you're buying ads on searches that only people in your target market make. Then you get a good CTR & quality score _and_ a good conversion rate. Optimize the funnel all the way down to the searcher.

<comment><USER3> That might be the idea, but my quality score goes up if the user clicks, even if it's not what they want- and Google gets paid. My quality score goes down if I am forthcoming and pre-qualify the clicks. (There are probably more ways to do this than price.)

If the user doesn't use the word "free" in the search then there's no way to know a priori that they wanted free. By me putting a price in my ad, I am making the user's experience of the search page better by not leading them astray.

Here's an example: Suppose somebody searched "fix my carburetor." The likely return will have services that fix carburetor for you, youtube videos showing you how, and for-pay pdf instructions. Let's say I'm selling the for-pay pdf instructions. How am I supposed to exclude my page? I could limit my keywords to "fix my carburetor pdf for sale" and hope someone types it into the search box, but I find that unreasonable.

Maybe you can walk me through how I'm wrong. But I submit that Google is working on the hypothesis that more clicks = better user experience, and I believe that hypothesis is false.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. I always try to disqualify traffic with price.

Many people optimize for CTR but that's not usually good when you're doing leads and/or sales.

It's easy to write ads that get higher CTR. Then your CPC will usually go down but that doesn't mean you'll get a higher ROI.

So best to focus on CPA not CTR.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, we now have the target CPL we use to qualify paid ads hypotheses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I manage 6 figures a year of profitable Google Ads spend, and while this article isn't bad, it's a bit vague. Its strongest point is "don't hire an agency to scale." Its second strongest point should have been keyword selection, but that's buried at the bottom of the article.

Specifically, the things that have gotten us to profitable ad spend in the 6 figure range are:

\-- VERY tight campaigns going to tight landing pages. The more specific campaigns you can run, the better. The keywords on your ads AND landing pages need to match the keywords people type in. Most common mistake is driving traffic to a vague landing page. We have 200+ landing pages, all matched to specific keywords. I built out an entire custom framework on top of WordPress to manage this for our company.

\-- Manage negative keywords. Every 2-3 days, I log in and add negative keywords. Good ones to start out with: free, diy...I have hundreds now. Maybe thousands. It takes a while to scroll through them.

\-- Track sales back and add more negative keywords. There were some items we were getting a lot of clicks on, but didn't make any sales with. I blacklisted a common keyword on one of our campaigns thanks to this insight. Google's recommendation algorithm complained that by blacklisting this keyword, I was getting fewer clicks. YUP. Tracked it for a month, 3-4 clicks per day and 1 sale that entire month. Negative keyword!

\-- Start out with 3 ads per ad group minimum. Every week, log in and pause any ad that's not getting good CTR and add a new one. Repeat. After several weeks, you'll be in the "holy ____ I didn't think that was possible" range of CTRs.

It takes a LOT of effort to get to the point where we are now (highly optimized keywords, 12-20% CTR, half the price of most of our competitors.) Still, every couple days I log in and tweak even more things. And I hired a consultant on an hourly basis to get us even better. Totally worth the $ to hire him for a few hours just to see where I could improve!

If you are technical and think you can outsource this to an agency, DON'T. Consistency is key.

One of our partners decided to take the campaigns I'd written and send them to an agency. Their sales dropped 30%. They fired the agency and went back to me. And I'm the business owner, not an agency. No one cares about your money more than you do.

And, being technical, you can do fun things like customizing landing pages based on keywords entered (something most agencies can't or won't do, even though it boosts sales.)

<comment><USER7> Negative keywords are the big thing for me. I manage a six figure campaign for an insurance company and have 3,500 negative keywords. Each ppc click costs around $20 to $40.

I would expect a professional SEM company to spend some time generating a reasonable negative keyword list first but the good news is 50k of spend is probably going to have 30k at least of wasted spend to derive negative keywords from!

<comment><USER8> Wait, 20 to 40 dollars per click of an ad on google search results? Am I understanding that correctly? If so, that seems insanely expensive even for the guarantee that you're getting a potential customer.

<comment><USER4> When I was at Google [mesothelioma] was the top-earning keyword and it cost something like $40/click.

It makes a lot of sense when you consider that mesothelioma is a type of lung cancer caused by asbestos, is legally actionable, and that there is a whole industry of lawyers who specialize in litigating asbestos cases. The LTV of a customer who goes to trial in an asbestos case can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Spending $40 for a possible lead is insanely profitable for these lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article's title and intro makes it look like it's mainly Google Ads' fault, but then actually it was more due to the landing page design + user journey (awareness ladder) + working with an agency that scaled the execution and the costs. Nonetheless, interesting insights, worth reading for any B2B advertising manager.

<comment><USER10> Traffic from Google, Bing, and Facebook is easy to buy, the failure is the company for not understanding how PPC works and letting some agency run wild. A hundred things can go wrong after the ad click yet this is trying to save face by saying we should have started small and scaled and limited keywords. That's all yada yada yada, internally they didn't ask the right questions to the agency after week 1, 2, 3, 4 and analyzing the funnel. Then stop the ads, rebuild LP's, restart ppc. If the agency doesn't want to play along, fire them. Poor planning from to start to end.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree on the bad planning issue. We should've planned for the long wait we would need to see the actual funnel changes. The issue is about our purchase cycle. It's a long one: on average, it takes users about 182 days to become paid, while the median is 23 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Uploadcare is an established SaaS product, so we've been harvesting the > low-hanging fruit from organic and direct traffic for a while now. If you're > in a similar situation, you've probably reached the same conclusion: running > paid ads is the next logical growth step for customer acquisition._

I'm no expert but this strikes me as strange. Organic and direct traffic is not a low-hanging fruit, it's the result of a product well adjusted to its target market. One would think advertising _is_ the low-hanging fruit (relatively speaking); it's what you do when your offer doesn't show up naturally at the top of the results page.

If you're already winning on SEO it's probably harder to improve traffic with ads than when you have nowhere else to go but up.

<comment><AUTHOR> SEO is a black box, we definitely try to get predictable results from it and scale it further. Our goal was to find a profitable acquisition channel, so we focused on Google Search Ads testing and failed at target market keywords segmentation. Even, we didn't have the resources needed to craft landing pages rapidly. Will focus on automating the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some key things they didn't mention doing:

-Retargeting/Remarketing - Some of your best ROI campaigns will come from these

-Discount Ladders - for customers to nudge over the edge great to use in combination with the retargeting campaigns.

-Abandoned cart email follow ups - No mention of these here. Again, these backend flows will really help profitability.

Ideally you'll break even on those leading awareness/acquisition campaigns using the things others here have said and the retargeting campaigns will be nothing but gravy.

<comment><USER13> _Abandoned cart email follow ups - No mention of these here. Again, these backend flows will really help profitability._

I know this helps you, but it doesn't help me, as a customer.

If I abandoned your cart, there's a reason for it. Hounding me after I've already decided to take my business elsewhere is only going to make me think even more negatively about your company.

What I would like to see if one of these abandoned cart e-mails genuinely ask me _why_ I abandoned the cart. Did I take my business to a specific competitor? Were the prices not competitive? Did I just get too busy and I'll finish later?

Show a little concern for your customers. Pestering them isn't good long-term business.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a drip campaign running where we ask users why they didn't activate, etc. The reply rates are pretty low on those. Any idea of a higher-reply-rate channel to ask folks why they didn't sign up/activate/purchase?

<comment><USER13> You're using the wrong metric. Think quality of data, not quantity.

People who don't reply are already done with your brand. People who do reply are willing to give you a second chance, and are 100x more valuable than any reply rate would indicate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, we do process those requests individually. I just thought you might have some hints to get higher quantities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> May want to rename to the article headline of 'We wasted $50K on Google Ads so you don't have to'. As it is, the lack of a comma implies that the insights were also wasted.

<comment><USER15> If the title of the original webpage wasn't what you suggested another alternative would be to use the oxford comma:

"We wasted $50K on Google Search Ads, and the insights we got on the way"

<comment><USER16> That's not the Oxford comma, and since there isn't a series here it wouldn't really be appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some key lessons:

\- Measure ad effectiveness before continuing to pour money into it (denial is a helluva drug).

\- Market to your customers, and know who they are. Make sure keywords are targeting the right audience before optimizing click-through.

\- All steps in the funnel are affected by the first. If you're bringing in the wrong audience, it won't matter how much traffic you drive and how many ads you place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, what you say is correct. However, our point was "even if it seems you're doing everything right, there always are mine traps to avoid." For instance, measuring the effectiveness for us funnel-based would mean waiting for 182 on average and 23 days median.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Still better than the high-schooler guy from my school in Spain (it was news around 2 years ago) who managed to blow up 100k€ or his parents money on youtube ads, and the only lesson there was, was to not give any bank account details to a kid.

</comment><comment><USER19> fascinating that an ad campaign worked for them. They appear to be selling a dev product, I always assumed all dev's first install was ublock. In facts it was natively installed on all the computers at my university.

<comment><USER13> Not all developers are averse to advertising. Some understand that the web isn't a free lunch, and without advertising or subscriptions there would be little web content.

<comment><USER20> Commercial content

I seem to remember the internet being a pretty fascinating place in the 90s before advertising became mainstream (or Google Adwords was a thing). But then it was user generated content and communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe they should have considered this:

Most people who do searches are probably tightly focussed on the answers. Ads are pretty much unwanted distractions in such an environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, that's also the case. another insight that we got is we should craft more content answering specific questions rather than advertising our landing page at every step of the Awareness Ladder

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google ads are tough. Very steep learning curve. They work for big brands with deep pockets and want to raise awareness, such as movie studios.

</comment><comment><USER23> tl;dr: before spending $50k, spend a few hours learning how to manage campaigns[1] and follow the recommendations

[1] [https://support.google.com/google- ads/answer/7539883?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google- ads/answer/7539883?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> We hired an SEM agency to set up and manage campaigns. Judging by what I read in the thread, they did a good job on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Facebook ads with strong sales follow up would probably work better for them.

<comment><USER25> Did you look at what their service is selling. I've found people are more interested in personal ads when browsing Facebook and don't regularly follow the funnel to make major purchasing decisions for the business they work at while browsing Facebook unless its a small business/entrepreneur where they are ALWAYS in business mode.

My guess is this is because people go to browse Facebook for a short break from work. Or they browse FB in off hours and making a purchase of a product like this would definitely feel like I was in work mode so I would never do it on nights/weekend.

<comment><USER24> I specialize in B2B FB ads in my consulting career, they work really well. You collect the lead on FB and nurture it by email and phone during work hours.

<comment><USER26> When you collect leads on FB, do you use a landing page as your lead magnet or a piece of content?

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 to the question, would you use an Awareness Ladder to match purchase stages to content? Like, what's the flow?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>