Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 184 posts

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

#71

Post by theoh »

warent wrote: post #59
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably worth rehashing the infamous messages: > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks. A cynic would interpret the current state of the world to suggest that Zuckerberg, and by extension Facebook, considers a large segment of the world population "Dumb fucks" http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

That text was so long ago I don't think it's relevant anymore. Oprah Winfrey was also crack cocaine smoker in a cycle of abusive relationships in her late twenties. If people choose to change their perspectives they can, and everything indicates that Mark has matured quite a bit since then.

"Everything indicates"?

Facebook's vision for their product and the future world is appalling. Zuckerberg may be doing his best, but he continues to helm a product/service which is structurally bad for its users even before you consider the surveillance aspect. What could you possibly have in mind as evidence for Zuckerberg being any more than superficially competent for the social role he is playing?

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

#72

Post by fortythirteen »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #61
fortythirteen wrote: post #40

Just get the f### off Facebook, already. If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook. If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook. Ask the F…

>If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook. Yeah - see that's not how it works. CA and companies like them have developed far more clever ways to influence you than targeted advertising. The best of these techniques go undetected by you, and are coordinated by m…

Don't mistake my form of emphasis as overly-emotional behavior, or my statements as any indication that I see myself as significantly more rational than the average person.

There are steps you can take to make yourself less susceptible to propaganda, and it starts with disengaging from the Huxleyan, social media, dopamine machine. Until you do that it's near impossible to get a real sense of your own cognitive biases.

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

#73

Post by JoshMnem »

Klathmon wrote: post #29
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Users don't understand how data works and what can be done with it, so it isn't reasonable to expect that users will know how to protect themselves. The entire system is designed to hide what is being done to users from the users.

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

#74

Post by darawk »

tmuir wrote: post #64
makomk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's really the problem. I mean, Obama's 2012 campaign scraped the data of Facebook friends of people who'd signed into the campaign website in order to figure out the most effective way to convince those friends to vote for him via microtargeting and other techniques, in particular working out which friends their volunteers could most easily convince to vote for him. We're not just talking about gene…

Ah yes, that old classic, whataboutism. You'd have us believe Cambridge Analytica was some vendor the Trump Campaign used sparingly, had very loose connections with, and saw limited success with. Yet Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon outfit. Steve Bannon, the campaign manager, and senior adviser to the president. Or at least it was during the time period in question. Steve Bannon was THE integra…

He didn't claim it wasn't affiliated with Trump, he said they didn't rely on it that much. And the appeal to 'whataboutism' is a complete non-sequitur, as there is no whataboutism in the parent comment.

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

#75

Post by runeb »

Klathmon wrote: post #29
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Agree with your general statement, but still a bad analogy. You tell your bank to release all your info to third party, then a fourth party learns all your balances.

The problem seems to be that people do not realize what it means to agree to information access for a third party, and the question remains weather Facebook is to blame for it being release to a fourth party.

So really the problem is that people are not aware of the scope of the information aggregate of their actions on social media and how it is or may be used or abused.

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

#76

Post by maxerickson »

sithadmin wrote: post #8
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?

Your're missing a key detail (the data was collected by a third party, which then handed the data off to CA against Facebook TOS), but I agree, this doesn't seem to be a 'breach' so much as abuse of personal data by a developer.

The third party handing the data over to Cambridge Analytica is a privacy breach.

Which is what is happening. The initial headline called it a breach and it isn't all that inaccurate to call it a breach, so it stuck.

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

#77

Post by tzakrajs »

medyadaily wrote: post #32

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish…

Turkey is an embarrassment to NATO members and their will should never have influenced Facebook. Facebook is evil if they do not recognize Kurdistan.

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

#78

Post by Chaebixi »

scoggs wrote: post #51
medyadaily wrote: post #32

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish…

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

> I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way.

Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:

> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

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

#79

Post by chatmasta »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57
chatmasta wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hyperbole. He created an app, wrote in the description that it was for academic purposes, and then later amended the description / TOS to allow selling of data. Facebook is faulting him because he did not update them on the purpose of the app. There were no systemic barriers in place that Kogan had to circumvent to get access to the data; the Facebook API worked as expected and gave it to him. Regardless of t…

> the Facebook API worked as expected and gave it to him "Breach" doesn't have to involve a technical malfunction. An employee handing confidential information to an outsider is a breach. Facebook collected users' information. The information was accessed, stored, and distributed without Facebook's (nor their users') authorization. That's a breach.

By that logic does every FB app that stores collected data on non-FB servers represent a breach?

The crucial point here is that the users authorized the app to collect the data. Facebook has an extremely extensive authorization system for you to grant apps access to your data. Did Kogan use this system differently than every other FB app? What technical measures did he need to circumvent in order to get access to the data that you say constitutes a “breach?”

To me, it looks like the system worked exactly as designed and intended. The only system he really circumvented is the honor system, which is about the only limitation on what an app can do with the data FB gives to it.

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

#80

Post by scruple »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #68
allthenews wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if by matured, you mean that zuck has refined his ability to harvest and use personal data without any sort of qualms. What Facebook has become is technically brilliant, but the "dumb fuck" attitude shows no signs of having lessened.

More importantly, those views were of the early days of the company. It's very likely that the early hires and executives also shared the same views. Unless everyone in that cohort had a change of heart or the entire executive slate was turned over, the company likely reflects the same views about the "dumb fucks"

I think more importantly is that it was the prevalent attitude when potentially / probably core systems were being developed which are undoubtedly still in place, in some form, today, and that also very likely have carried forward those same biases. If you have little respect for your users outwardly then I'm sure it reflects itself in the code. I mean, isn't this how we've ended up with GDPR in the first place?
Post reply on HN