Bloomberg News
As Mark Zuckerberg prepares to swap his signature $300 T-shirt for a hair shirt of congressional design, testifying on Capitol Hill about how Cambridge Analytica and others may have broken Facebook’s policies about the use of data the social-networking giant lets advertisers amass, let me express a contrarian view.
The big deal here is, exactly, what?
Oh, sure. Get angry. Growl. My privacy is at stake! But let’s explain a long-standing exaggeration about online advertising in general, and let’s talk about what happened when I asked Facebook FB, +1.39% for a complete download of my data profile. Then you can look at yours — it’s easy to get — and you can explain what the fuss is to me.
Facebook’s privacy scandalette is a nothing-burger.
Because when I think about privacy, and things I don’t want careening around the Web, I think about exactly what my Facebook data doesn’t mention at all.
It contains not a whiff of financial information — how much I have, where I bank, where my investments are. There’s nothing like a hint of my Social Security number, my bank account number, or anything you could readily use to hack into anything I have. The Target TGT, +1.26% breach exposed me far more. There’s also zero about my credit history or balance sheet.
It contains barely a whiff of health information — as with money, much less than I’ve written about publicly. You might figure out I’m a cancer survivor — big deal, since I wrote about that while still in chemo. From my MarketWatch columns, you could figure out that I had hepatitis C for 52 years, until Gilead Sciences’ GILD, +1.84% $84,000 drug sofosbuvir wiped it out in 12 weeks.
Zero about sex. Nothing you could use to infer anything about my marriage.
Read: Here are the changes Facebook has announced ahead of Zuckerberg testimony
Cat videos, etc.
Here’s mostly what’s in your Facebook data file: The comments and pictures you post, the information in your cleverly named “public profile” that you think is private only if you don’t pay attention, and information about when you use Facebook and where.
The vaunted ability of Facebook to compose digital profiles that lay you bare before the world seems a tad lacking. My file contains 43 “ads topics” I’m supposedly interested in, for example. They include “harp” and “fiddle.” I play neither. Advertisers may figure out for themselves that my late sister and still-with-us-brother owned an Irish pub called Mullaney’s Harp and Fiddle — a secret to everyone but readers of every entertainment publication in Pittsburgh, plus The Wall Street Journal, which wrote about the pub on its front page in 1993.
Fiddle is also the name of my dog. Facebook tells advertisers I like cats.
Advertisers can get my “Friends” list, which seemed daunting until I read the list myself and was amused to realize how many of these people I’ve never met. Plus, a solid half of the total haven’t laid eyes on me in decade. You want to know I went to high school with Marie DeVenezia and Pat Donnelly? Knock yourself out. They’re in old columns too.
My list of Facebook-reported interests includes the United Methodist Church (I’ve written about that), that I like football and basketball, and that I read newspapers. I’m supposed to be interested in recording studios (wrong), whisky (never — hep C, silly), the Harley-Davidson HOG, +2.13% Knucklehead engine (a word I generally use only to describe Donald Trump), and, yes, Nashville, Tenn., whose real-estate market I’m boning up on in anticipation of retirement. They got basically one non-obvious thing right.
Read: Largest — and unverified — Black Lives Matter Facebook page exposed as a money-making fraud
Neither should you assume that a decade of my Facebook posts has let advertisers do much to anticipate, let alone manipulate, my politics. Even though I post about politics all the time.
I’m a wing nut?
The 200-ish advertisers who have gotten my contact info from Facebook, drawing on their insidious knowledge of what I post and “like” there, include no fewer than 27 state chapters of the right-wing, Koch-Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, plus AFP’s nationwide mothership. It includes the Trump campaign but not Hillary Clinton’s. By my count, 30 of the 50 politicians Facebook gave my contact info are Republicans, mostly conservatives in states I’ve rarely visited. This for a customer who ranted about Trump all through 2016.
If these advertisers think they are getting sophisticated analysis of me, they should come back from Mars. And read my column, or my posts. I’m yuuuge on Earth. Like my Donny.
What can consumers learn from my experience?
Lessons learned
First, there’s so little interesting in my Facebook file because I know Facebook is a public forum. I live there, as elsewhere, by the notion that I should live like my business could be on tomorrow’s front page. You should too. No pictures of yourself puking in college, please. Even those 200 advertisers who asked for my contact information got an empty file, according to my Facebook download. Apparently I’ve never given Facebook my Gmail address, and I know I’ve blown off entreaties for my cell phone number.
Second, the one unpleasant surprise in my file was that my direct messages are in it. I use DMs on the rare occasions when I want to say something to someone that’s not for everyone’s consumption, let alone wing nuts who’d like to be Texas judges. I can delete them, and now will. Check. Know the privacy policy, and let it guide your actions if you care about unwanted ads, or the idea that more-private info about you is lurking, half-understood, on a server somewhere.
What can an investor learn?
That Facebook’s privacy scandalette is a nothing-burger. The 15%-plus drop in the shares since the February peak boils down to a handful of consultants, some working for Trump, breaking the rules to spray ads with the precision of “true conservative” candidates in the boonies who hope I’ll give them money. If that’s all it is, I’m not offended, or deleting my account. Neither will most people. Facebook’s ad business will chug along all but unmolested, unless regulators screw things up.
I mean, come on. More than 80% of Facebook’s political advertisers think I’m a Republican? People don’t realize that internet companies have exaggerated their ad-targeting capabilities forever. They’re not that precise, let alone threatening. They’re just better than what they replaced. But, boo hoo: No one has understood me as poorly as Facebook’s advertisers since my mother-in-law.
The difference is that my mother-in-law knows I’m kidding.