Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 150

and that would require another investment. In this case, it was Atlas Solu-
tions, which Facebook bought from Microsoft. Through this purchase,
the social-media irm expanded its ability to measure the eficiency of ads
because Atlas compares advertising and purchasing across a range of com-
panies that display an ad, as well as across different platforms, including
computers, smart phones, and tablets (Dembosky 2013a). Atlas provides
Facebook with an assessment of the relative strength of the site and of the
range of devices that carry Facebook ads. Nevertheless, questions arose
about the accuracy of this research, particularly when hacking schemes
like the March 2013 “botnet” attack hijacked 120,000 personal computers
and falsely added 9 billion ad views a month to over two hundred sites
(Bradshaw and Steel 2013). With or without mischief like this, audience
analysis is becoming more and more dificult, leading one media industry
analyst to decry “the measurement mess” (Winslow 2013).
There is no guarantee that any or all of Facebook's strategy will work.
In fact, it can become painfully counterproductive, as when it led Face-
book to place ads for major brands next to deeply offensive content, which
prompted companies to cancel campaigns on the social-media site (Budden
2013). Through the irst half of 2013, the company's share price remained
mired considerably below that of its initial public offering, a signal that
Wall Street at least was not optimistic. Nevertheless, some research sug-
gests that Facebook advertising pays off for most sponsors, a point that
contributed to the turnaround in its share price in the last half of 2013
(Manjoo 2013). Whatever the outcome, Facebook is a prime example of a
major cloud company whose business model fundamentally derives from
using information provided by members about themselves and others to
sell advertising. In essence, in return for using the social-media site, par-
ticipants give up their privacy. They lose it not because of deviant acts by
domestic or foreign hackers but because Facebook, like Google, Twitter,
and most other companies that use the cloud, take it from them in the
normal course of doing business.
It is not just corporations whose normal practice makes privacy in any
form increasingly dificult to secure. Citizens lose privacy through the
ordinary practices of governments whose security concerns often outweigh
the protection of privacy rights. On this subject, ingers typically point
toward China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Middle East, which prac-
tice surveillance widely and legally constrict privacy. China's surveillance