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Cambridge Analytica 2 - ICO Rides Forth

Started by Zetetic, March 19, 2018, 09:10:12 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Zetetic

Or "Do You Know Who Knows What Political Messages Your Daughter Might Be Susceptible To Tonight?"

Previous thread.

Channel 4 investigation [20 minutes]

Guardian summary, quoted below.
Quote
Cambridge Analytica is a company that offers services to businesses and political parties who want to "change audience behaviour".

It claims to be able to analyse huge amounts of consumer data and combine that with behavioural science to identify people who organisations can target with marketing material. It collects data from a wide range of sources, including social media platforms such as Facebook, and its own polling.

...

Over the weekend, the Observer revealed that in 2014, 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by a UK-based academic, Aleksandre Kogan, and his company Global Science Research.

Kogan assembled the information through an app on the site – it collected details of Americans who were paid to take a personality test, but also gathered data on those people's Facebook friends.

Kogan had a deal to share this information with Cambridge Analytica. But according to a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, most of this personal information had been taken without authorisation.

Some notes:
- The bolded bit above - along with some boasting about 'dirty tricks' - looks to be a major fuckup.
- Off the back of the above, it looks as though ICO, armed with a court order, are about to raid their UK offices.

- We still have no idea if any of their stuff actually works - the only people that marketeers actually have to be able to  market to are their clients...
- 'Microcampaigns' or whatever aren't new in themselves. As biggy has pointed out, Obama's campaign emphasised - and were praised for - targeting individuals. What's different in this case is the method used to obtain information and the lack of transparency around it.

This is now turning into a wider issue about what the fuck are we trusting Facebook (etc.?) with so much information for, with so little protection in law and so little oversight in practice. I think we're at a point where almost everyone doesn't really understand what information about them, their habits and their company is used for and who it's shared with and feels helpless to do anything to better understand this or change this - mostly this doesn't really matter, but there are occasions where it does and it's currently hard to differentiate the two.

Worse, the current state of helplessness is used to justify ever more intimate and complete sharing - I have heard depressingly often the argument that people are prepared to use Tesco Clubcards, so they must expect that information about their suffering, beliefs and so on are fair game to be sold onto by whoever, to whoever for whatever purpose.

(Hope the replies are better than this cobbled together OP.)

biggytitbo

Yes I think the focus on CA (for obvious reasons - excuse No 454 why the dems lost) is a bit of a red herring. The problem is the most sophisticated data harvesting and surveillance operation in history has disguised itself as a social media website and people are voluntarily submitting their entire lives to.


Log out of facebook - delete account. It's the only way.

Zetetic

It's not a red herring in the sense that it appears that they may have actually broken the law - not a bad place to start - and serve as a neat example of what a bad outcome might look like.

QuoteLog out of facebook - delete account. It's the only way.
Arguably it's no way whatsoever. Network effects, inability of technical measures to resolve the issue without changing the actual utility to users, etc. People want social networks, and they're now essential parts of communication for many. You've banged on about people's rights to publicity via YouTube or what-have-you elsewhere - this much more practically impacts on many more people's ability to talk to one another.

We can and should regulate social networks so that people can have them but, that we publicly address the externalities.

bgmnts

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 09:14:29 PM
Yes I think the focus on CA (for obvious reasons - excuse No 454 why the dems lost) is a bit of a red herring. The problem is the most sophisticated data harvesting and surveillance operation in history has disguised itself as a social media website and people are voluntarily submitting their entire lives to.


Log out of facebook - delete account. It's the only way.

How else are you meant to find out what your mum's mate was up to on the weekend?

biggytitbo

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 09:21:01 PM
It's not a red herring in the sense that it appears that they may have actually broken the law - not a bad place to start - and serve as a neat example of what a bad outcome might look like.


It's a red herring in that it's not really what the problem is with facebook, its a platform that by design exists to harvest user data, they don't need to overtly steal anything to effectively infer every piece of information about you they need to make money. They are a thief in the night.

Buelligan

I have never been on FB, never even had a loyalty card, for these fucking reasons. 

biggytitbo

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-campaign-connected-with-young-voters/

QuoteFor a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. "I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign," says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign's digital director.

That's because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What's more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. "People don't trust campaigns. They don't even trust media organizations," says Goff. "Who do they trust? Their friends."

Odd how the two stories are so radically different framed - one is basically a giant boast about how amazing and sophisticated their campaign is, the other is a pearl clutching scandal, when they're basically the same.


Zetetic

They're not the same - one involved sharing information for a purpose other than the purpose for which people were consented for. (There may also have been issues about declaring campaigning in this country to the Electoral Commission.)

By contrast, the Obama campaign - even if you don't like the idea of limited information on friends being shared - gave the people who signed up for an Obama-backers app information based on what it knew about them.

There's a clear difference there both in law and in most people's moral expectations - don't be obtuse.

biggytitbo

You say it's not the same thing but its a fag paper difference in effect, and they both highlight the same insidious way facebook worms its way into every nook and cranny of people's lives then spreads like a cancer in a million different directions from there. All this talk of stolen data and permission is a red herring - facebook's platform needs neither to be effectively a surveillance grid with unimaginable power to mine our data for profit and like the terminator it simply will not stop ever until we are dead sliced up, sorted, packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

Switch it off and delete your account, if not for this then the increasing warnings about how bad it is for people's mental health.

Cuellar

The day that humanity decides to switch the internet off forever gets closer!

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 09:21:01 PM
Network effects, inability of technical measures to resolve the issue without changing the actual utility to users, etc. People want social networks, and they're now essential parts of communication for many. You've banged on about people's rights to publicity via YouTube or what-have-you elsewhere - this much more practically impacts on many more people's ability to talk to one another.

We can and should regulate social networks so that people can have them but, that we publicly address the externalities.

It should be nationalised.

Zetetic

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 10:16:30 PM
You say it's not the same thing but its a fag paper difference in effect
No, it's fucking not.

Sending campaign messages to people on the basis of information that they've shared with you for the extremely express purpose of having you send those messages to them isn't the same thing as taking information that didn't need to be shared in the first place and then using it for a completely different purpose that it was shared for.

QuoteAll this talk of stolen data and permission is a red herring
No, it isn't because it emphasises that we are allowed to regulate how people use our data and seek to convict them if they break those rules.

Yes, our rules should be better, but they're not worthless and the Obama-campaign distraction is overwhelmingly different example even if you are particularly taken with the issue of sharing broad information about friends-lists. We could have a sensible discussion about the spectrum of issues here around consent and what rights you have to share what information about your friends - we're not going to because you're going to insist on trying to bury any discussion about these issues by parroting a false equivalency.

Not everything is about how everyone is as bad as each other. Not every issue has to be responded to by regurgitating whatever tweets confirm your worldview. Stop it.

Zetetic

Incidentally, I cannot think of a better way to make the population at large feel more helpless about controlling their own information than insisting:
1. "Choosing to share information for a particular express purpose to benefit you" is identical to "information being shared about you without your for someone else's purposes".
2. The only way to assert control is to cut yourself off from everyone around you.

Cuellar

Yeah in terms of data protection legislation it's not a negligible difference. If you use someone's data for something that you explicitly told them you were going to use it for, it's not a problem (if they choose to give you their data knowing how it's going to be used). If you use it for something you never made them aware of, then you're in trouble.

Permission isn't a red herring, it's pretty much the cornerstone of the law here.

biggytitbo

You're wrong. In both cases people's information is been used without them ever having given any permission and in many cases without them even knowing. And even that is a red herring because its so pervasive and insidious that even the concept of permission becomes meaningless. Data mining has consequences beyond what one person can ever meaningfully understand or make choices about. It's the same thing, you're just making an irrelevant distinction between someone sneaking in whilst your door is open and stealing stuff and someone breaking in and stealing stuff. You still got burgled either way. The whole theft of user data faux outrage is a complete distraction from the real problem.

Switch facebook off and delete your account!

Cuellar

Well yeah I agree with you there.

Everyone should be a lot more concerned with how much sensitive personal data we entrust to huge corporations to do with as they please.

bgmnts

Quote from: Cuellar on March 19, 2018, 10:44:35 PM
Well yeah I agree with you there.

Everyone should be a lot more concerned with how much sensitive personal data we entrust to huge corporations to do with as they please.

What's done is done.

We can't close that door.

Zetetic

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 10:41:37 PM
It's the same thing, you're just making an irrelevant distinction between someone sneaking in whilst your door is open and stealing stuff and someone breaking in and stealing stuff.
What? Which one of those describes the Obama campaign app?

Cuellar

Until we turn off the internet. Come on, we can do it! Turn that twat off!

Zetetic

Quote from: bgmnts on March 19, 2018, 10:45:40 PM
We can't close that door.
Nonsense - we can regulate if there is the will to do so.

biggytitbo

Quote from: Cuellar on March 19, 2018, 10:39:40 PM
Yeah in terms of data protection legislation it's not a negligible difference. If you use someone's data for something that you explicitly told them you were going to use it for, it's not a problem (if they choose to give you their data knowing how it's going to be used). If you use it for something you never made them aware of, then you're in trouble.

Permission isn't a red herring, it's pretty much the cornerstone of the law here.


It's a red herring when an individual user cant meaningfully understand the manifold ways Facebook can infer and make connections that nobody would even envisage, there are over a billion people on there and a near infinite way Facebook can combine their info to understand things we never 'gave them perrmission' to know. It's a  illusion, and like I say a complete red herring here.

bgmnts

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 10:47:40 PM
Nonsense - we can regulate if there is the will to do so.


So what happens to all the billions of data megs (i dont know) that has been accrued tracking our every word, Facebook status, google search, phone call, bowel movement etc and sold off?

Does it disappear into the ether?

Zetetic

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 10:48:08 PM
It's a red herring when an individual user cant meaningfully understand the manifold ways Facebook can infer and make connections that nobody would even envisage,
Even along those lines, here we have an example where it has been used opaquely and more clearly orthogonally if not against people's interests.

Even on that reading, it's a "good example" of why we should tackle this and not a "red herring".

(To be honest,  the "big data" gubbins is arguably a distraction here from getting people to fill out psychometrics under false pretences and then using that information to target them for political messaging.)

Cuellar

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 10:48:08 PM

It's a red herring when an individual user cant meaningfully understand the manifold ways Facebook can infer and make connections that nobody would even envisage, there are over a billion people on there and a near infinite way Facebook can combine their info to understand things we never 'gave them perrmission' to know. It's a  illusion, and like I say a complete red herring here.

True, I mean, who knows what permissions you give Facebook when you sign up? Probably says they 'WILL sell your data to any cunt'


biggytitbo

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 10:46:20 PM
What? Which one of those describes the Obama campaign app?


Because the people targeted never gave the Obama campaign permission to use that connection as a financial asset for them, allowing them to go from there to sort them into whatever specific groups they wanted to reach and target messaging at them through the people they'd recruited. How could anyone ever even have envisaged such a thing to give permission either way? I find the distinction meaningless, not to say the specific issue here isn't a problem just the focus on it massively missing the point. Your connections themselves are worth money to other people whether you give specific permission for anything you either know or don't know about.

biggytitbo

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 10:52:31 PM
Even along those lines, here we have an example where it has been used opaquely and more clearly orthogonally if not against people's interests.

Even on that reading, it's a "good example" of why we should tackle this and not a "red herring".

(To be honest,  the "big data" gubbins is arguably a distraction here from getting people to fill out psychometrics under false pretences and then using that information to target them for political messaging.)


Didn't CA do lots of other shitty stuff not involving Facebook aswell? The problem is the latter is unparalleled in providing opaque connective glue between different types of data harvesting, hence why it's such a menace.

Zetetic

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 11:00:09 PM
Because the people targeted never gave the Obama campaign permission to use that connection as a financial asset for them, allowing them to go from there to sort them into whatever specific groups they wanted to reach and target messaging at them through the people they'd recruited.
You're concerned specifically with the friendlists issue, as far as I can tell? Is that right?

(And so ignoring the personality inventory data completely?)

I agree that concerns me. It's not a paper-thin distinction between that and the alleged acts of CA - claiming that they are is a good way to kill any interest or sensible discussion about either of them.

Zetetic

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2018, 11:02:52 PM
The problem is the latter is unparalleled in providing opaque connective glue between different types of data harvesting, hence why it's such a menace.
Well, yes in large part.

A large part of this, in this case, is data being used for a completely different purpose for which it was ostensibly collected. That adds to the opaqueness. (Opaqueness that we, and now in particular the EU, has legislated against.)

colacentral

Quote from: Zetetic on March 19, 2018, 10:46:20 PM
What? Which one of those describes the Obama campaign app?

I think he's referring to the friends in the friends lists. They didn't give permission to be on a list for use by the Obama Campaign. I don't know if there's more to it than that (would they have been able to ask for more information on those "friends", eg their occupations, likes, etc?)