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Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

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Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#121
post #17

> Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do Thanks for striking down the bad guys, Facebook, our ever vigilant guardian of personal information.

That's exactly what I wanted to say. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house... none of these parties--Facebook included--can be trusted with any data. They're all out to make a buck with it!

> They're all out to make a buck with it!

It's not even that though. If someone is reselling your companies data to a third party without authorization, you put both the company and it's key people on the persona non grata list. Large well run corporations and a lot of smaller companies have black lists like that and they use them.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#122
post #63

Dump facebook. Just do it. Make your final posts informing your friends how to contact you by email. Follow up with a reminder or two over the coming weeks and delete it. It will be the best feeling you ever had from doing something with your facebook account.

> It will be the best feeling you ever had from doing something with your facebook account.

I second this, deleting my Facebook account was the best decision I made in 2017

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#123
post #103

I'm curious to see what FB does to mitigate this sort of data grab in the future. Is there anything stopping them from creating a walled garden around user data? For instance, they could enforce that any code with access to user PII has to be run on their servers, and all results can only display aggregate data? It still can be manipulated, but it seems like it would be harder

There’s nothing they can do. Once you have access to the data it’s as good as copied.

FB would have to not give personally identifying info (PII) to the app in the first place. The main reason apps (from a user's perspective) need PII are 1) Display it to you or someone else in the app, or 2) perform a calculation or action on it (e.g. send a text to a phone number, or display an add to women age 20-28). If all I have is a user ID, FB can make it possible to do both without ever access PII.

For #1: PII could be embedded using an iframe and a url. You could even pass data (such as templates) in with url params

For #2: FB would expose endpoints that allow actions (such as send this email to the user). They could make it as generic as they needed, up to running arbitrary code on a VM, minus networking calls.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#125
post #120
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is GDPR retroactive? I doubt so.

Yes in that it has no consideration on when the data was captured or acquired. And there is a trickle down to anyone you have or passed the data onto.

Ok so you should take care of the data you posses now, but if you have shared the data with third party then I guess this is now their business to obey the law? I just don't see how you could possibly be forced to go and police everyone you have ever shared the data with.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#126

It's too easy for this information to get out. There's basically no penalty, you just use as you want and year's late facebook cuts you off? So you start a new company, owned by a new llc, get the lawyers to sign the 'i am not evil' doc and repeat. There's no way this will have any impact until there are criminal citations on the people involved. In this case, because it's the us, there's not going to be anything cri…

GDPR will most certainly reach into US businesses as well as EU businesses. Any business collecting data on EU users will be subject to the GDPR. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/04/ye... Though as the article points out: "There are still questions about how the EU will enforce these actions against U.S. and other multinational companies [...]"

European companies that exchange PII with US-based companies in order to provide features to their customers and value to themselves are terminating those contracts and turning to EU-based companies.

Even though many US-based companies are attempting to comply with GDPR, European companies which use their services aren't prepared to take the risk of being in breach of GDPR.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#127
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you watch the video? They claimed real results helping Ted Cruz in the primaries with this sort of hyper-targeted advertising. The access they have to online data sources would absolutely be enough to start correlating things to build an individual profile. Say you can link someone's FB, Twitter, (HN?!) account posts, likes, shares, to credit card data, maybe even search keywords from shady advertisers, to vehicl…

Wait. The very same Ted Cruz who is now president of the United States of America? Impressive.

They worked for a more successful candidate in the general.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#128
post #8

What stops them from creating a holding company and getting access from that? Seems like a rat and mouse game and feels like more a PR move because of recent bad news exposure.

This is big enough that Facebook is likely to stay on top of it. The company had become somewhat famous in its field, and they can’t easily turn that into new clients without alerting Facebook and the media.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#129
post #11

I don’t understand why it was legal for trump to hire Cambridge Analytica, which is foreign owned, to influence the presidential election. I also don’t understand why Russia gets all the news, when this foreign election tampering was so much more effective and done in the open. [edit: Downvotes. Wow. My comment is certainly on topic, so I guess “Foreign corporations shouldn’t participate in our elections” is controve…

There’s no prohibition against paying foreign companies. Just like the campaign can buy Samsung phones, they can hire South African graphic designers or British PR consultants.

Re: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is lobbying bribery?

How is it not? Campaign contributions in return for votes.

That’s not lobbying. Lobbyists don’t give money to candidates. They do events, write blueprint for complicated laws etc.

There’s a lot of shady shit going on, and PACs are basically legalized bribery. But it’s important to be a bit nuanced when you want to effectively argue against these practices.

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