Gadgetory

hello and welcome to inside scoop I'm Sumi das joining me is executive editor for cnet Paul Sloane Paul thanks for being with us so let's talk about Facebook and privacy tooth to terms that when they're mentioned in the same sentence people pay attention or get their knickers in a twist there was an email that supposedly Facebook sent out recently asking users to vote about something not just privacy but other stuff as well can you tell us about that yeah yesterday voting began on a whole series of proposed changes that facebook wants to make to how it handles your data back to some of your obscure settings that most people will never even understand or try to understand and to whether they even continue to have this voting process in the place in to continue having it in the first place so they've got this voting process and in order for things to be voted up they need to reach a sort of a critical number of votes they need to get thirty percent is that right right thirty percent so when this all started in 2009 it came from some backlash about some privacy issue facebook sort of became this nation right they said we're going to have this democracy and we're going to if we make changes to how we govern our site we're going to put it to the people and so we'll put out a post and say here's what we want to do you need 7,000 comments on it or so rough roughly and then that will trigger a vote that has to then clear have seven days to vote which the period were in now and then you have thirty percent of the full Facebook population which is now a billion plus users have to vote on it that means 300 million people vote on have to vote on this in order for it not to happen and that means it will definitely happen because that's not going to happen 300 million people will not turn out to vote it's highly unlikely that 300 million people will vote on this right yeah it's pretty much not going to happen okay so it's a foregone conclusion then that Facebook is probably going to end up doing whatever they want right okay so what what are we talking about here by the way if you are interested in voting you should vote by December tens that correct yes okay so if you are interested in how to get the word out lobby whenever you know look it up on Google it's all over the place okay but so what does that mean then after December 10th when this is like we voted down and Facebook starts doing whatever they want are we going to see some major changes in the way privacy as him you know the privacy concerned at ax the privacy concern on this one that has led to some letters from various privacy advocates is that they're going what they want to do is start incorporating and looking at your data from other businesses don't sort of pull them all together they call this unified data the biggest one being Instagram which they now own so right now they keep Instagram data separate from data on you on your other activity on Facebook they want to put that all together bundle it up in a nice be you know package and sell it to advertisers not to sell it to advertisers but use it to target ads and use it to to you know make your to make it make it richer and more valuable the concern is that that that's just sort of too much an invasion in privacy and that there's risks if you get hacked on one thing mate someone will know that much more information about you so the average user is this going to be a noticeable change for them no okay the average user is not going to see know anything that's going on they're not going to see any difference i mean this is all really about facebook's ability to do more with data so that it can be a smarter advertising platform yeah and that's what it's all about in the end right for facebook and you know if you don't like that don't use facebook yeah that's what it comes to me he doesn't cost to use it you've agreed to use it if you agree to use it and share things you know or you should know that that's what they do they share your they use your data to target you with ads in their view hopefully ads that are meaningful to you if you're a music fan they want to show you ads of concerts nearby that you might want to see I mean you know does not all hateful stuff this is how the media works I get a lot of ads for shoes I don't know what that says about me Paul slow an executive editor for Cena thank you very much for helping us trying to make sense of this you're welcome for inside scoop I'm cemitas thanks for watching you