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Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

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Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#21

Post by cryptoz »

darawk wrote: post #17
IAmEveryone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook did not authorize data retention. CA’s actions were therefore unauthorized use of data, which is the textbook definition of a data breach.

...you mean facebook said "don't keep this" and then they kept it? And people are calling that a breach?

Yes, that's what Facebook said. And yes, people are calling it a breach because of that. Because it is.

If you pay a company for a service, and then use the service against the terms of use, putting millions of people into danger, you have created a massive data breach of unauthorized data access that has massive real-world physical consequences.

This was a data breach of the highest order.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#22

Post by JumpCrisscross »

darawk wrote: post #18
cycrutchfield wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CA also scraped the data of friends of those users, meaning that many millions of people had their info exposed instead of a few hundred thousand.

Right, but that was a privilege that the users authorized them to grant, no? As in, the people who signed up for CA's app had access to those profiles, and they explicitly granted CA's app access to those profiles. And then CA scraped them and saved them. Am I understanding correctly?

> that was a privilege that the users authorized them to grant

Kogan was granted permission to ephemerally use, for academic purposes, the data of a quarter of a million people who authorized the access. Kogan got fifty million peoples' data (i.e. Facebook let him scrape the data of people who had not given authorization, some of whom had explicitly gone into their privacy settings to turn off the sharing of their data with third parties), kept it, and then forwarded a copy to CA.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#23

Post by IBM »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.

The political momentum is building for America to import GDPR. Feels good.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#24

Post by bdcravens »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #12
darawk wrote: post #5

Why are people calling this a data breach? As I understand it, CA just scraped the data from users who authorized their app to do so. Am I missing something here?

Facebook did not authorize data retention. CA’s actions were therefore unauthorized use of data, which is the textbook definition of a data breach.

So you're saying that every company that is screen scraped in violation of their TOS has experienced a data breach?

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#25

Post by ggg9990 »

IBM wrote: post #23
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.

The political momentum is building for America to import GDPR. Feels good.

America has already basically imported GDPR because all of the companies building GDPR tools are not going to restrict them to the EU for fear of accidentally blocking a genuine EU citizen.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#27

Post by msrpotus »

Bartweiss wrote: post #13
cycrutchfield wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app was allowed to scrape friend data as well, meaning that many more people’s information got exposed. That is on facebook.

I keep seeing it listed just as "friend data", and no one clarifying that. Does it mean "friends lists", or "the data of the app user's friends profiles"? And in that second case, "the data of the app user's friends visible to the app user", or "as much data as if the friends had installed the app themselves"? Unless it's that final situation, it's exactly how I assumed Facebook scraping worked already.

It's something closer to the latter--presumably, it was scraping what friends posted publicly.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#28

Post by RandallBrown »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10
sithadmin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach Is it even clear that there was a 'breach' of any kind that Facebook was responsible for? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like the chain of events is: 1.) Third party (Aleksandr Kogan) creates 'personality quiz' app, Facebook users opt-in to share information from their profile 2.) Aleksandr Kogan hands off data gathered by the app to Cambridge Analytica…

> It really seems like Aleksandr Kogan, not Facebook, is the problem here Kogan probably breached the terms he agreed to with Facebook. But fifty million people trusted Facebook with their data and, when asked in their privacy settings, said they didn't want it shared with third parties. That information was then shared with third parties. If someone calls my bank and convinces customer service they are me, it would…

Everyone sets up their own account's privacy settings though, and as far as I know, this information didn't include anything that wasn't already publicly available.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#29

Post by Klathmon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10
sithadmin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach Is it even clear that there was a 'breach' of any kind that Facebook was responsible for? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like the chain of events is: 1.) Third party (Aleksandr Kogan) creates 'personality quiz' app, Facebook users opt-in to share information from their profile 2.) Aleksandr Kogan hands off data gathered by the app to Cambridge Analytica…

> It really seems like Aleksandr Kogan, not Facebook, is the problem here Kogan probably breached the terms he agreed to with Facebook. But fifty million people trusted Facebook with their data and, when asked in their privacy settings, said they didn't want it shared with third parties. That information was then shared with third parties. If someone calls my bank and convinces customer service they are me, it would…

>If someone calls my bank and convinces customer service they are me, it would be reasonable to say the bank was breached. Not electronically. But breached nonetheless.

That's a bad analogy. A more appropriate one would be if you called your bank and told them to allow a 3rd party to have access to all of your accounts, then blamed your bank when the 3rd party drained all your accounts.

Facebook has no obligation to protect your data from yourself any more than your bank has the obligation to control what you spend your money on.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#30

Post by garblegarble »

mlamat wrote: post #14

In about 20 minutes, an explosive documentary about this will be airing on Channel 4 BBC.

>Channel 4 BBC

Just a side-note, Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster, whereas the BBC is publicly funded via a license that's required to watch live TV

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