Thats not relevant of what they could do. This laws covers what you are doing and applies to entities selling your data. Big ad players don't sell their data because that is their secret sauce in ad targeting.
Companies selling your data are your bank(credit card purchases), mobile carriers(location), your DMV(photos, driving record, misc PII including address, dob etc), state/county government(public records like marriage licenses). Its weird everyone bashes on google and FB for something they don't even do.
Two of the largest American global corporations (Google/FB) would have a much smaller bottom line if there were laws prohibiting the interchange of user data for marketing purposes.
There aren't any laws about that for the same reason that there aren't any laws addressing corporate tax loopholes.
This is technically true, but only in a pointlessly narrow sense. They do not sell your data; they hoard it, and sell ad targeting services that use it. They also provide it to the government, for free, as required by law.
But does anybody actually care about this distinction?
People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.
You have no idea what you're talking about lol... Facebook or Google does not sell your data.
It's literally against their own interests to, even if you think they're completely evil... Them and Google have a data monopoly, why the heck would they ever sell that monopoly? They'll charge to have access through their ad platforms, but would never sell it, even if it were legal...
There's FTC, and EU regulations that govern big tech... I'd except better from Hacker News Readers...
That’s one misconception (or misnomer) about Facebook and Google. They don’t “sell or give away your data”. They sell access to you based on your data. The distinction is important if we want to pass laws limiting what they can do with your data. If there was a law passed saying they couldn’t “share your data” they would just shrug.
Google and Facebook don't really sell personal data, and least not directly. They might buy some, and advertisers happily give them data, but I rarely hear about them actually selling it. They do let advertisers run ads that are targeted using this data, but that's not the same as "felling personal data." It's more like selling user attention.
They actually don't, unless you define selling as they allow advertisers to select what demographics/attributes their ads target. But the actual data stays on the Facebook servers. If you're referring to the apps having access to user data, that was not selling at all, but instead a permission originally granted by users by probably forgotten about. Basically, unless you contort the definition of selling to a very different meaning, that's simply not true.
And if you do use that definition of selling, then everyone is selling your data. All the politicians who decry tech companies are selling your data using the same definition. Every advertiser, retail store, bank, basically every large business offers other businesses a way to access a specific subset of their users.
One thing we want to combat against as well as direct selling of data which as you note is normally illegal is the use of your data within the company for other purposes (Google comes up as an obvious choice in selling advertisements against the information in your personal email, contacts and documents).
Google and Facebook typically work by allowing advertisers to pick customer traits, and then Google/Facebook shows ads based on their knowledge of who fits those traits. It looks like the definition of sale[1] means companies must actually transfer the consumers info for them to count as a data broker. This means Google and Facebook likely don't have to register.
None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.
Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.
What does "sell your personal data" mean? Facebook (and Google) doesn't do that - it's much more profitable to keep it guarded so you can charge for services based on it (like ads) again and again.
Do Google and Facebook really sell data? From my understanding, they keep the data for ad targeting, feature/content recommendations. Like if I place an ad on Facebook I could put 18 to 35, who likes travel, etc to promote a hotel booking site as an example. Even if you do retarget with Facebook advertising, they don't even show you the names of the people. You have like a retargeting list, it tells you how many people but not much information on them.
Even third party developers get an ID number per user associated to that app only(think of it as a proxy to your real id number). It seems like Facebook and Google cares a lot more about privacy than people think. If they just sold me the data, I could run off with it but by keeping the data to themselves and letting marketers pay them to make use of it they make recurring revenue.
From my understanding, LexisNexis and other data brokers were the ones that are selling the data. Here's a 60 minutes clip on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAT_ina93NY
I don't have any relationship with LexisNexis, I never agreed to anything yet they have information on me. Another example is I was looking at my credit report, and it even lists addresses from childhood. I never had a credit card back then, why do they have information on me? At least with Google and Facebook, I gave consent and I see a benefit. You can even buy lists of people and their medications(sounds like a HIPPA violation but the data brokers know this stuff)
"Companies selling your data is nothing new—Facebook and Google have been doing it for decades."
Is there any evidence for this? I'm pretty sure that in the case of Google, at least, it's a flat-out lie. In fact, they state in massive letters: "We do not sell your personal information to anyone." (https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html) Who would they even sell it to? They're at an advantage having that data themselves.
An advertiser, in the 2nd to last paragraph. I'm only assuming the facts in evidence -- that FB and Google aren't selling user data. They sell advertisements, which use user data for targeting via generally broad mechanisms or 1st party data.
Re-reading my comment, I don't think I said anything about companies in general.
Selling targeting information about me is a form of “selling my data”.
Out of $160b in revenue in 2019, $134b of Google’s revenue came from ads. Most of the ad revenue is in the form of targeted ads, so if they stopped selling people’s information, they’d immediately go under.
Similar numbers apply to Facebook.
I honestly don’t understand where this argument that those companies don’t sell people’s information comes from. I hear it often enough to wonder if people are intentionally being disingenuous, astroturfing, etc...
That doesn't make any sense. They're not some supervillian who wants your data just to have it; they want to sell it (or products derived from it) to their real customers, which are big ad-buyers.
Google and Facebook want customers, ad-buying customers.
Selling your data = "pay us $$$ and we'll give you the name, email, phone number, DoB, SSN, interests, credit score of a million users". Plenty of companies do this today (both legal and illegal), but Facebook isn't one of them.
Selling targeted ads = "pay us $$$ and we'll show your ads to people who match the criteria you select". This is very different from the former.
Companies selling your data are your bank(credit card purchases), mobile carriers(location), your DMV(photos, driving record, misc PII including address, dob etc), state/county government(public records like marriage licenses). Its weird everyone bashes on google and FB for something they don't even do.
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