[Cambridge Analytica], [Facebook], and Data Security.
This thread is, per mod encouragement, to discuss the ongoing story regarding Cambridge Analytica's Facebook data scraping/breach and any related investigations. More broadly, it is also to discuss CA's methods in general and Facebook's response to manipulative use of user data.
This thread is not about Trump, Russia, or election outcomes. If news breaks that more directly connects CA's tactics to tge Trump/Russia investigation, please ask the mods where to post it.
I ate an engineer
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In June 2014, a Russian researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. This app was designed to collect a significant amount of data about its users in order to generate its results. Like many apps that requested user information, Facebook approved it provided Kogan agreed not to resell this data. Approximately 270,000 people used the app, and Kogan cheerfully collected data about those users... and all their friends (to what extent app-users versus friends of app-users had their data scraped is unclear from summaries I've read). Kogan, rather than deleting that data, saved it into a provide database and provided and/or sold this information to voter-profile company Cambridge Analytica, who used this data in order to make detailed voter profiles that were used for "micro-targeting", especially on social media. Facebook discovered this harvesting in 2015 and shut Kogan down, and Cambridge Analytica claimed to have deleted all data; whether that is true or not remains to be seen.
This data harvesting was bad, but potentially not atypical for Facebook apps; there are reports that Facebook executives intentionally turned a blind eye towards potential abuses of their API system in order to shield themselves from culpability. Even with stories from 2016 regarding Russian-bought ads on Facebook or the prevalence of fake news on the site, this would likely have been a blip on the radar. However, Cambridge Analytica have also worked on several successful far-right campaigns, including the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump's campaign (and also for Ted Cruz). They have even claimed to have worked as a go-between for the Trump campaign and SuperPACs; such coordination is likely illegal. The biggest bombshell, though, was an undercover recording by Channel 4 News that caught Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix promoting tactics to hurt political opponents such as staging a corrupt land deal or entrapping them with Ukranian prostitutes. This has made Cambridge Analytica's data scraping a much more prominent offense, as it was not "merely" used for advertising, but used for intentional manipulation by a company with no ethical standards whatsoever that claims to have been instrumental in recent far-right success stories.
AGAIN: This thread is not about Trump, Russia, or election outcomes. I briefly mentioned them in the summary as important context for why people care about CA's actions more than any other data breach event, but this topic should be focused on CA, Facebook, and their interaction, not the elections CA was involved in.
I don't really have much to contribute to this shit beyond that.
What they represent aren't going away anytime soon. If we burn them down something else would rise up to fill those gaps. Not sure how the hell to deal with what interconnectiveness is doing to our society.
I guess I'd keep my linkedin and tumblr...I have a personal site, maybe I'll start actually using it and blogging again.
Is the work Stamos is now doing (bolded) new, and what the COO disagreed with, or a subset of his previous efforts?
I think that answer informs whether he quit and only agreed to stay to do it, or was he forced out, but given a stay of execution to wrap up.
I can read the phrasing of his having 'lost team members to other operations' either way.
There is a real conflict of interest in whether they find it, given they're also afraid of an FTC investigation about the privacy data.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/20/ftc-reportedly-to-investigate-facebooks-use-of-personal-data.html
"Many Millions" is very conservative. $40K for 50M accounts is $2T
Then we burn down whatever grows in their place
Salt the earth
Facebook delenda est
The solution to this is, ultimately, a privacy amendment to the US Constitution. And let's not forget that this forum is Social Media, and crafting laws for Facebook also crafts them for Vanilla and for Penny Arcade!
German data privacy laws get in the way of business like whoa, but they do protect privacy better than the wild west we have here in the USA.
The GDPR is requiring tighter security for those of us who deal with the EU, but we really need a US version of it.
https://www.eugdpr.org/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Eh, that's sorta not true.
There is no enumerated right to privacy but our case law has established a right to privacy.
I'd be all for an actual amendment to spell it out though.
Edit2: Do the Channel4 reports need their own thread or do they go here or somewhere else?
I'd love to see that bit about the HIC blared across media, repeated over and over again. Even Fox viewers shouldn't be so insulated that they couldn't hear it.
I would appreciate this as well, since I mostly threw this up to save the other thread and don't have a comprehensive picture yet.
Which isn't an exploit, but a default fb settings behavior.
https://youtu.be/cy-9iciNF1A
It was more designed for marketing to you than political propaganda. Let's see if Facebook fixes that. I don't mind Facebook picking up that I have a kid and trying to sell cute little dresses to me. What I *do* mind is Facebook using the same system to send political propaganda.
CA's official statement
that's right, the CEO didn't represent the views of the company for which he was chiefly executing.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-donald-trump-data-firm-cambridge-analytica
Where do you draw the line? At the very least you can have facebook adhere to the same election laws that tv stations have to follow when displaying political ads. That would prevent the foreign entities from targeting you with political ads. VAN/VoteBuilder which is used by the DNC and democratic candidates is built off datasets like what facebook has and it is used to get people out to the polls and to send direct mailers to potential voters. I'm going to wildly guess that most people here are ok with that type of usage?
Mercer originally backed Ted Cruz and CA went to work for that campaign first. Ted Cruz touted their data as revolutionary and an important advantage only to lose very handily. It was surmised by the Pod Save crew that CA may only have been brought on board by the Trump campaign to placate the Mercers whom donate a ton of money to GOP causes.
The video directly states that the mercers saved a broke Trump campaign with a donation, and in return demanded that Steve Bannon be made campaign chair and they use CA.
The other quote that made my blood boil:
"We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding - so it's unattributable, untrackable."
This was said just after mentioned that they produced hundreds of pieces of copy and videos for the election, seeded them all over the place and watched it grow virally.
Pure speculation on my part:
Cambridge Analytica was also heavily involved in the Brexit vote, it's not just Trump's victory that they've had a hand in.
And the UK is probably not as inclined as the current US government to let things slide.
It goes here.
Actually, I mind that as well, because it's all the same thing, and can be bent to bad ends - read up on the story where a girl had her pregnancy outed to her family by Target via data mining . The reality is that personal data should be regulated in the same vein as HIPAA does for medical data.
The UK is seriously pissed off about all things Russia right now.
I've been telling a friend this since the Amazon Echo/Alexa, Siri, and the like started showing up. Our country has to have a serious conversation about what is and isn't private. Machine learning* can have really tremendous benefits for society, like in the production of goods, energy efficiency, etc. But when most of it until now has been literally just for advertising (Google's search engine is this, same with Facebook) we need to seriously rethink a lot of our concepts of privacy. I've maintained for a really long time that advertising is parasitic on our economy and society, and this whole debacle has kinda reinforced that view (recall that Facebook collects this data literally for fucking selling advertisements).
Like, I think tube in another thread mentioned that he's fine with data collection for automatic driving. And I agree with that! There are a lot of things where massive data collection and computational observation (as opposed to surveillance) can completely change the way we live. But until we have a serious conversation about our culture and the laws put in place we're gonna end up with more events like this.
*OLS with constructed regressors