> The main priority here is to enable "Show ads to people who own an Oculus" level targeting.

From the article:

> Your photos and related content like captions, likes and comments if you use the “share photos” feature to share photos from VR to your Facebook Timeline

But don't worry! An engineer has told me I can just ignore that part of privacy policy because Facebook doesn't even care about my photos. They're utterly irrelevant.

It really takes a load off my chest. Sure, Facebook is collecting info about what apps people use, what people message, and what photos people take, but that's just going into a database somewhere that will never be monetized or read or used against them. And I can definitely trust that, because when Facebook says its going to silo data, it always keeps that promise, and definitely doesn't change its privacy policy to remove that silo 4-5 years down the road.

> FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago

I'm relieved to hear it, because its very concerning to hear about a technical team building infrastructure to collect individual app usage when all that anyone at the company cares about is whether or not I own an Oculus. It's wasted effort. Y'all need to learn to tighten your sprint scope, why are you building all these features that aren't being used anywhere?

> it just took us a while to clean up short-sighted product decisions made a decade ago.

And don't worry, the CEOs that made those decisions have all retired, and they definitely won't make them again in the future. It's just old, outdated stories that keep resurfacing. Like in 2017 when Facebook experimented on how depressed teenagers would respond to ads[0], or like in 2016 when Facebook started trying to intuit people's race based on their behavior[1]. See? Decades ago!

----

In actual seriousness, I don't have any reason to doubt the author's intention, but I think this is a type of gaslighting, whether purposeful or not. I've brought this issue up before in regards to privacy debates -- but the conversations around surveillance have a habit of suddenly shifting.

Before Snowden, people who worried about the NSA were paranoid, and the response was, 'we're not doing any of that, and we don't care about your data anyway.' After Snowden, the comments became 'why is anyone surprised, and it's not even a big deal anyway because it's just metadata and metadata has always been fine to collect.'

Before the Alexa/Google Home contractor scandals, it would not have been hard to find people on HN that argued that 'the controls are perfect, and it's just a computer listening to you, and people who worry about this are just paranoid.' After the scandals broke, it was 'of course you need human reviewers to train AI, this is a nothingburger that everyone already knew about.'

So try to remember adgineer's comment, because a few years from now when it turns out Facebook is doing microtargeting based on really invasive Oculus data, the story is suddenly going to be, 'this was consistent with our privacy policy, of course everyone knew what they were getting into, it's not a big deal.'

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/faceb...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/faceb...