Facebook ’s cash cow is its advertising byplay , and in the unconstrained pursuit of pass water that business as valuable as possible , the company has been impeach of allowing advertisers to explicitly targetwhite nationalist , orexclude immigrantsand citizenry of colouring from seeing trapping opportunities , or dodge older workers when postingjob listings . There was also that wholeRussia matter . So Facebook built an advert archive — first just forpolitical spending , then foreverything — and folk , it does exactly what it was designed to do .
Employees at Mozilla , authorities workers with Office of the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs , and data journalist the New York Times reported today that , despite using what ’s designed to be a more racy , non - public reading of the advertising program library , Facebook ’s Ad Archive does not encounter even the barest needs of these researchers , with the product failing in way that would be humiliating for a fellowship the fraction of Facebook ’s sizing .
https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-facebooks-ftc-settlement-is-a-joke-1836662330
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Per theTimes , Facebook put on the charade of make the data available , but create a physical process so unmanageable in extracting the info as to rending it useless :
With each search limited to 2,000 results , the researchers need to do 1,900 searches to collect all the information
[ Mozilla researcher managed ] to download the information they needed on only two twenty-four hour period [ worth of ads ] in a six - hebdomad yoke because of bug and expert issuance
With the comparatively lousy internet speeds in the U.S. , six hebdomad is long enough to download the intact Library of Congress — about 23 meter over .
These are not hard problems to solve for a firm with the applied science pool and mentality trust of Facebook . But the prevailing presumptuousness is that Facebook is in any way concerned in making the Ads Archive functional .
Jason Chuang , a Mozilla researcher , hire ina lengthy back - and - forthwith Facebook about a bug that doss a search after 59 pages of final result . Weeks later , a Facebook example send a message say , “ This is unfortunately a wo n’t fix for now . ” [ … ] as recently as this week , the researchers said the library still crashed when they tried to moderate if the hemipteron was fixed .
But let ’s give the benefit of the doubt to the large , awful company that ’s lie to us repeatedly : An archive of your essence business mapping ca n’t be comfortable , and all software program has matter ahead of time on . At least , as return get up , the researchers could lodge bug reports .
On two other occasion , the researchers tell Facebook blocked them from reporting fresh bugs . The intellect ? They had already reported too many .
So it has some issues . And the Ad Archive is n’t exactly anteriority # 1 at Facebook HQ . But when it returns consequence , researchers can trust that —
[ Researchers ] plant that identical searches often returned different resultant role
Oh .
So perchance its “ searchability ” was magnify , but at least it preserve this subject matter and in doing so fulfills the basic function of an archive .
The Gallic officials also found that Facebook sometimes removed ad without explanation . They said 31 percentage of the advertising in the French subroutine library were removed in the hebdomad before the European election , include at least 11 that spoil French electoral jurisprudence .
Tools — functioning tools — to harvest rich data point about these ads already exist , built by Mozilla andProPublicaamong others . Facebook made the knowing move to shut them out in January , claimingthe computer code changes that locked out these shaft were part of “ a routine update and applied to ad blocking and advertising scraping plug - ins , which can bring out people ’s information to bad histrion in ways they did not expect . ”
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