Cambridge Analytica 2 - ICO Rides Forth

[Buelligan]

They're not different in any substantive way, they both highlight that the problem is Facebook and the fact it is a survellence operation disguised as a social media platform.

You're wrong here, they are different in substantive way that has to do with informed consent and control.  Facebook, though despicable and monstrous, is a smaller problem, not a bigger one.

[Johnny Yesno]

It's funny that they only give a shit about this now, because the dems and the rest of the centralist establishment are still stinging with bitterness and scrabbling for excuses as to why Trump won.

Oh, here we go.

This is called having a pleasant character, apparently.

How about some ickle puppeeees? Bear on a bear?

[Zetetic]

Facebook, though despicable and monstrous, is a smaller problem, not a bigger one.

I'm not sure that's true either! It's different, but connected, at any rate.

[marquis_de_sad]

Suffice it to say if Cambridge Analytica weren't involved in promoting Trump and Brexit, biggy's position would be different. It's pointless to engage with him on this issue.

[biggytitbo]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html?utm_term=.1295b53f882e

Nobody is arguing that CA didnt break some token guideline, the issue is that this is actually the most trivial part of the story here (only massively overblown for the aformentioned reasons), its like you're wilfully missing the forest for the trees.

Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign's data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people's relationships and preferences.

Cambridge Analytica — unlike other firms that access Facebook's user data — broke Facebook's rules by obtaining the data under the pretense of academic use. But experts familiar with Facebook's systems and policies say that the greater problem was that the rules for accessing the social network's information trove were so loose in the first place.

The question of what Facebook permitted — and how everyday users understood those permissions — is under a new spotlight in the wake of the Cambridge revelations.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2007 invited outside developers to build their businesses off Facebook's data, giving them ready access to the friend lists, "likes" and affinities that connect millions of Facebook users.

"The model was to build and grow and figure out monetization," said Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager who oversaw developers' privacy practices until 2012. "Protecting users did not fit into that." Parakilas, as well as a contractor who worked on these issues at Facebook until 2016, said that Facebook did not conduct a single audit of developers during their tenures.

David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that because the practice of collecting friend data went well beyond Cambridge, "that in itself may be a serious problem, especially given the language of the consent decrees, which differentiates between users and others."

Facebook once appeared to acknowledge that some data collection by developers ran counter to the expectations of Facebook users. In a 2014 news release announcing new restrictions to its developer policies, a Facebook executive wrote, "We've heard from people that they are often surprised when a friend shares their information with an app." That admission may indicate that people had not been given adequate understanding of how their data and their friends' data were used by third parties.

In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API.

"We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," Davidsen said in an interview. "We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all."

If you think there's any real difference between the two cases or the countless other developers who have done the same thing to make money, then I think you're massively missing the point.

[biggytitbo]

Suffice it to say if Cambridge Analytica weren't involved in promoting Trump and Brexit, biggy's position would be different. It's pointless to engage with him on this issue.

And suffice to say if Cambridge Analytica weren't involved in promoting Trump and Brexit, your position would be different. It's pointless to engage with you on this issue.


CA are a bunch of cowboys who just repackaged the old techniques Obama and countless others were already using and sprinkled them with various bullshit pseudoscience, along with all the other stupid stuff they did. The only reason anyone gives a shit about it is because it's just another excuse as to why the democrats lost and the only reason the tide has turned on facebook is because they're seen as a good way to displace blame for that loss (I mean wasnt it only last week we were told 13 Russians swung the election by shitposting memes on facebook)


Facebook deserve utmost scrutiny because of the vast surveillance grid they built by design to sell your data for money, CA is just one piffling tiny example of why that is such a problem.

[biggytitbo]

Amusing now to read this article from 2016 massively bigging up and talking in almost mystical terms about the Clinton campaigns incredibly vast and slick data analytics operation, which was so far ahead of Trump it would give them an advantage for a generation, apperently - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-data-campaign-elan-kriegel-214215

Completely failed in the most basic terms of course, but no doubt if they had won the republicans and the right wing press would be decrying the underhand sorcery of Elan Kriegel for unfairly swinging the election Clinton's way. Its pure political humbug.

[Pdine]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html?utm_term=.1295b53f882e

Nobody is arguing that CA didnt break some token guideline

It's a law, not a guideline, and you were arguing they didn't when you said there was no substantive difference between the Obama app and the CA operation.

[biggytitbo]

If you look how wooly and vague and opaque even the permissions system was, and how little users understood it, you'd see how effectively meaningless the distinction is (and its changed since 2012 more than once). The fact countless groups have been perfectly able to do the exact same harvesting shows that. The problem is the facebook platform itself and the fact it enables all sorts of data usage that is unimaginable to its users.

[Cuellar]

Fee llike I should watch this, but don't know if I can watch an hour of smug bastards doing reprehensible things with impunity.

[biggytitbo]

Some of the other stupid stuff they did sounds like the actions of a particularly shitty tabloid newspaper, or a Max Clifford type. I have no time for them and am not excusing anything they did, they are cunts. The focus on them is a distraction though.

Here's one of the people who worked on that Obama 2012 campaign:

[Buelligan]

I'm not sure that's true either! It's different, but connected, at any rate.

I'm sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear, in a hurry, what I meant was - IMO, Facebook is a disgusting vehicle for greed (amongst many other base qualities) and behaves appallingly, however, ubiquitous as it is, it is just one business.  Giving carte blanche to all businesses, everywhere, as long as they can pay, to rifle uncontrolled through everyone's private data by not regulating this area with a fist of iron, is a much greater threat, than even FB, both to individuals and to society.

If you look how wooly and vague and opaque even the permissions system was, and how little users understood it, you'd see how effectively meaningless the distinction is (and its changed since 2012 more than once). The fact countless groups have been perfectly able to do the exact same harvesting shows that. The problem is the facebook platform itself and the fact it enables all sorts of data usage that is unimaginable to its users.

No Biggy, there is a greater morality than the law and in places where law holds no sway, individuals, if they wish to remain civilised humans, are still obliged to respect one another.  Respecting the privacy of others is not some arcane concept known only to those trained in the law.  All of us (virtually all of us) understand the sanctity of private shit, you don't wiggle out because the sign was behind a tree on this one or no one told you in the correct form of words.  We all understand that invading and exploiting someones privacy without permission is crossing a massive line.

[Paul Calf]

However, that line seems not to be as clear for some as for others. Technology and business are all about pushing the bounds of the acceptable and challenging unwritten rules, which is why the rules that we need to preserve have to be written.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Fed yer da's Facebook profile into the Cambridge Analitica software and it just spat out a load of Clarkson books.

[biggytitbo]

The only rules that can actually stop facebook are the ones where you log off and delete your account.

[Buelligan]

I've never had an account.  Facebook exists. 

I would like all companies to be regulated, not just FB.

[Neville Chamberlain]

I've never had an account.

Your stance is admirable, Buellers, but how will you ever know what your friends have eaten for dinner or when they are at the gym?!?!?

[Buelligan]

I watch them.

[Neville Chamberlain]

Madness!

[biggytitbo]

I watch them.

Through a hole you drilled in the wall though, not exactly ethical.

[Buelligan]

Madness!

If you think that's mad, I don't have gmail either or sign in to Youtube or any of that shit.  One day all of you sheeple are going to thank your lucky stars that there are people with open eyes flying under the wire for we are the ones who will plunge into the heart of the Deathstar and they won't even know what's hit them until it's too late.  Just saying this might happen. #twelvedrypowdermonkeys

[up_the_hampipe]

I think Facebook should be taken down and replaced with that old "badger badger badger" webpage.

[biggytitbo]

I love the breathless was the guardian have this splashed over their front page - Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds!!!  Its not an 'unfolding scandal', this exact thing has been going on unchecked for at least 10 years now, and even this specific thing about one firm breaking the rules isn't a new story.

[bgmnts]

It's funny that they only give a shit about this now, because the dems and the rest of the centralist establishment are still stinging with bitterness and scrabbling for excuses as to why Trump won. Its amusingly disengenious but if it means we finally tackle surveillance companies like Facebook then good.

Surely these stories give real weight to the possibility that these excuses arent unfounded right?

[Zetetic]

even this specific thing about one firm breaking the rules isn't a new story.

It clearly is, even if you don't think it should be.

Although it's odd to be obsessed with trying to dismiss the story if you're not also interested in dismissing the issue. (You could frame your posts as deepening the issue - but you're not, you're focused on dismissal.)

Surely these stories give real weight to the possibility that these excuses arent unfounded right?

Not really - we don't have good grounds for believing that CA's work did very much (or did very much that couldn't have been achieved without either breaking the law or violating your, mine or biggy's ethical standards).

[Buelligan]

Although it's odd to be obsessed with trying to dismiss the story if you're not also interested in dismissing the issue. (You could frame your posts as deepening the issue - but you're not, you're focused on dismissal.)

The company at the heart of both US and UK investigations – Cambridge Analytica – is owned by a hedgefund billionaire and Trump donor, Robert Mercer. He is a close associate of Murdoch and Cambridge Analytica's US office was previously located in Murdoch's Newscorp building.

(Christopher Wylie) At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain's EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump's election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating "Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindfuck tool".

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the "alt-right" news network Breitbart – was Wylie's boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica's investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – "information operations" – then turn it on the US electorate.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/15/sky-fox-rupert-murdoch-david-puttnam-database
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

[biggytitbo]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-sandy-parakilas

This former facebook guy explains how widespread the same technique was, tens of thousands of companies, millions of users affected, facebook turning a blind eye all the time because they were making so much money.

"Kogan's app was one of the very last to have access to friend permissions," Parakilas said, adding that many other similar apps had been harvesting similar quantities of data for years for commercial purposes. Academic research from 2010, based on an analysis of 1,800 Facebooks apps, concluded that around 11% of third-party developers requested data belonging to friends of users.

If those figures were extrapolated, tens of thousands of apps, if not more, were likely to have systematically culled "private and personally identifiable" data belonging to hundreds of millions of users, Parakilas said.

The ease with which it was possible for anyone with relatively basic coding skills to create apps and start trawling for data was a particular concern, he added

"It was well understood in the company that that presented a risk," he said. "Facebook was giving data of people who had not authorised the app themselves, and was relying on terms of service and settings that people didn't read or understand."

[biggytitbo]

Surely these stories give real weight to the possibility that these excuses arent unfounded right?

There's no reason to believe any of this stuff made a different at all to the election, clearly that was decided by the Russians anyway.


The cavalier industrial level harvesting, processing and selling of our private data by facebook is, I fear the more important issue here.

[BlodwynPig]

Can someone scrape this thread. Information overload.

[Buelligan]

Watch this (under 20 mins).

Edit to add:  Actually, this is probably a quicker, better, first step.