The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz • Hacker News Board

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#91

Post by hedora » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #58

Friendly reminder: don't use Facebook and block any advertisement and trackers online using ublock. It helps to keep some mental ecology.

I did that too. Look where it got us.

Anyway, I eventually set up a placholder Facebook account. Once I typed my name into the setup form, they provided a frighteningly detailed list of friends and acquaintances. Since then, due to "do you know" emails, I get the impression they slurp other people's call and sms logs (or maybe just contacts, if FB types are more OCD about address books than me) into their social network graph.

Anyway, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that facebook gets more metadata to sell every time you make a phone call, regardless of whether you have an account.

(Of course, I don't have their software installed on any of my devices. However, I did give them my phone number for 2FA purposes. How naive I was. Assuming the phone app grabs people's address books and/or call logs, they probably had it before I gave it to them)

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#92

Post by dagw » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

pavelrub wrote: post #90

dagw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless of arguments about how their methodology was wrong and what could be improved, all over the internet. Could you link to a couple of your favourites? Non of the ones I've seen felt very convincing.

Sure: [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-ele... While it will take more time to figure out the precise reasons for the failure of the polls, the consensus is that such a failure indeed happen, and there are a number of competing hypotheses for why it happened. Other than on HN, nobody claims that the errors were due to some…

I think everybody agrees that something went wrong and many people think that something should be done (although I personally think that medias inability to interpret and report on polling errors and uncertainty did greatly exasperate the situation). I just haven't seen any good articles making a strong argument about what went wrong and how to fix it

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#93

Post by dominotw » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

>shocked by an election upset.

NYTimes never strays from its own 'Secret agenda'. Half the population is always "upset" after an election. Only ones "shocked" by this are moronic NYTimes readers who still don't have the clue to get their heads out of their asses.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#94

Post by pavelrub » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #92

pavelrub wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-ele... While it will take more time to figure out the precise reasons for the failure of the polls, the consensus is that such a failure indeed happen, and there are a number of competing hypotheses for why it happened. Other than on HN, nobody claims that the errors were due to some…

I think everybody agrees that something went wrong and many people think that something should be done (although I personally think that medias inability to interpret and report on polling errors and uncertainty did greatly exasperate the situation). I just haven't seen any good articles making a strong argument about what went wrong and how to fix it

I don’t know, I’m under the impression that people here think that winning with a 20% predicted chance of winning isn’t indicative of anything wrong with the polls, because it’s like predicting the outcome of a die, and therefore nothing should be done at all. This false analogy is precisely what I’m trying to disprove.

I agree that there are currently no strong arguments about what were wrong and how to fix it, but I think it's because it takes time to investigate those things. According to Pew, the American Association for Public Opinion Research has a committee investigating it, and they should release their report in May. It took a 6-months investigation to come up with a report about what went wrong with the Brexit polls, so it will probably take a similar amount of time with this.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#95

Post by arrel » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

gareim wrote: post #57

fovc wrote: post #56

And yet for all their magic, they were just as wrong about the outcome of the election: You might think from a casual reading of the Cambridge Analytica press release that they predicted the outcome of the election. They did not. A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning. Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...

I'm not sure I get this logic. If I told someone they had a 16.6% chance of rolling a die and getting a 6, and then they proceed to roll the die and get a 6, would you laugh and tell me that I was wrong?

The difference is that the roll of a die is random, but the outcome of an election gets more deterministic as it approaches. Election prediction is figuring out what people have already decided they are going to do.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#96

Post by drinkjuice » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

mjfl wrote: post #10

I'm not impressed. Did anyone notice that Cambridge Analytics did not work for Ted Cruz? I mean he did win Texas and the great plains states, but those were his most-winnable locations from the beginning due to his consistent conservatism and other nominees dropping out. He even lost the south, which should have been his other target, presumably due to being off-wavelength with southern voters, something the analytic…

> Cambridge Analytics and their Facebook questionnaires don't seem to be very effective.

So, nothing speaks against nipping that in the bud, right?

It's like a tiny person with no tools sneaking around your house to murder your whole family; sure you could ignore them, at least at the moment, but why would you?

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#97

Post by johansch » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

angry-hacker wrote: post #37

ChuckMcM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially quizzes like "where was your first job?" or "what's your favorite movie?" all sounded like phishing for security question answers.

It is much harder nowadays, but around 2000 every Hotmail account was protected only by these easy one sentence questions. It was trivial to open accounts if you wanted to. Favorite football club, pets name - - just ask the target. I remember I was young and was wondering why is it so easy to 'hack' Hotmail.

There was also that time when it was trivial to login to every single Hotmail account by only knowing the username.

And it was left like this for at least 12 hours after it was first reported in media...

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9908/30/hotmail.03/

https://slashdot.org/story/99/08/30/1324206/hotmail-cracked-...

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#98

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

potatosoup wrote: post #51

IshKebab wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most poll models gave him a small chance of success. How bad is your memory?

Interestingly enough, the same pollsters are now saying that Trump has a 37% or something approval rating. And Obama went out with a 60%+ approval rating. Until they find a way to poll a significant slice of the population truly representative of the electorate, I'm surprised people can take them seriously. Since we're on HN, there is a startup idea here somewhere. (Edited to remove an electoral hypothesis, so that w…

Approval ratings are different from chance of winning election. Both candidates were generally disliked. That's consistent with his low approval ratings now.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#99

Post by wtbob » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

> In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “super predator” line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

How is this suppressing the vote? It's giving potential voters accurate information about your opponent. Frankly, how is it any different from Mr. Biden shouting, 'they're gonna put y'all back in chains!' — other than the former being true and probably in good taste?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

Re: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

#100

Post by wtbob » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

sean_patel wrote: post #2

> If Mr. Zuckerberg takes seriously his oft-stated commitments to diversity and openness, he must grapple honestly with the fact that Facebook is no longer just a social network. It’s an advertising medium that’s now dangerously easy to weaponize. The story is chilling. It more or less proves that Trump campaign and the Billionaire Republican donor who owns the Data Analytics site used Facebook to profile people and…

How is that chilling? Were those ads false?

Swaying votes away from one's opponents is the definition of running for office.

Back in 2008 the Obama campaign ran a very successful information shop and was widely lauded for it; why is it now chilling when a different candidate does the same thing?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.