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Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#211

Post by danso »

makomk wrote: post #197
jdminhbg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work. But isn't the bigger problem sucking up the entire social graph from a small seed of users, not how those users signed up in the first place? If…

Precisely! From what I cant tell, that tweet (which went rather viral) is misleading at best; based on the public information, the 2012 Obama campaign wasn't using that access to target people who volunteered access to their Facebook data, they were using that access to get info about their non-consenting friends and figure out how to get them to vote for Obama. (I commented about this in one of the other threads: ht…

More specifically, based on the NYT story that you linked to, Obama's campaign did things like match the mined user and user-friends' data with voter registration and donor lists, and also attempt to calculate who a user's "real-life friends" were, versus their casual FB acquaintances, which involved an analysis of photo-tagging, among other things:

> Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall”

In the next paragraph, FB said it was "satisfied" that this met their data and privacy standards. Which is a bit curious because IIRC, it was not kosher to cache data scraped from FB for any reason beyond having a reasonable cache (to prevent unneeded API requests), nevermind for independent data collation and analysis. I would bet that the users who did knowingly sign up for the Obama app did not think the app would be scraping the walls and photo albums of their friends and attempting to do friendship-strength analyses.

CA still has an extra level of subterfuge, but I agree, what the Obama campaign is reported to have done is definitely not as innocent as the Obama campaign staffer claims in the aforementioned tweet.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#212

Post by Camillo »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

Stamos had been actively engaging with security researchers on Twitter over the past few days about CA with heated discussions: > I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975069709140877312 Archive of those deleted tweets: https://twitter.com/aprilaser/status/975078309930311…

In the deleted tweets, he was using "breach" in the narrow sense of computer security, basically saying "my team didn't mess up, we didn't get hacked".

There are two problems with that:

1) That view is already too narrow for practical security engineering. It's not enough to have a technically correct solution, you need to consider the entire product to ensure that it has the expected security properties in the way it's actually used.

2) Worse, it ignores how the message is going to be interpreted outside of the computer security field, which is especially important when the company is under political scrutiny.

For a C-level executive, it seems like an unfortunate lapse.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#213

Post by ionforce »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #207
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #206

People have been openly complaining about sexual impropriety in Hollywood for decades. There were comedic references to Harvey Weinstein [1] and Kevin Spacey [2] in shows like 30 Rock and Family Guy. Suddenly people started caring. What changed was the cultural moment of the 2016 election. Specifically with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the Mueller investigation may have taken a turn towards them in recent months…

> Suddenly people started caring. Yes, but why? And why now, rather than years/decades ago? There's another layer to these stories that I'm very interested in.

Probably a critical mass. It's just like technological adoption: there's an early adopters group and then the masses come in waves.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#214

Post by opportune »

ekianjo wrote: post #205
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way. People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.

> Propaganda is not received in the same way. Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.

I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#215

Post by TAForObvReasons »

ionforce wrote: post #213
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suddenly people started caring. Yes, but why? And why now, rather than years/decades ago? There's another layer to these stories that I'm very interested in.

Probably a critical mass. It's just like technological adoption: there's an early adopters group and then the masses come in waves.

A bunch of individual scattered movements were under attack at once. Women's movements were crushed by this overt misogynist who bragged about sexual harassment. Minority movements were crushed by the overt racist who started his campaign on the idea that the overwhelming majority of Mexican-Americans were murderers and rapists.

Many people believed that America as a whole would reject the regressiveness of Trump. When that didn't happen, it was a wake-up call for a bunch of different groups.

Post-election, we had the white nationalist rally and death at Charlottesville, which was eerily similar to Nazi rallies.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#216

Post by sandworm101 »

zilchers wrote: post #37
fooey wrote: post #17

There's breaking reporting that Facebook just had personnel in the Cambridge Analytica offices before the UK authorities could get there with warrants. https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975844154361221121 > BREAKING: Facebook WAS inside Cambridge Analytica's office but have now "stood down" following dramatic intervention by UK Information Commissioner's Office.. https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/9758…

I seriously feel like I’m missing something here, why isn’t Facebook fully behind getting to the bottom of this? Going back even further, why was it so difficult for them to even admit they had a problem during the election? I don’t think it’s as simple as “more money,” but maybe as simple as people too close to the problem and too enamored by what they’ve created?

The higher-ups at facebook, and the other big techs, drink some special koolaid. They might not see facebook altering society, creating a new media landscape, as a bad thing. We assume that what happened over the last couple years, the disinformation campaign, was some sort of embarrassment for facebook. They might not see it as a problem. They might see it as a natural an inevitable outcome of technology, something not to be restrained.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#217

Post by DoreenMichele »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #215
ionforce wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a critical mass. It's just like technological adoption: there's an early adopters group and then the masses come in waves.

A bunch of individual scattered movements were under attack at once. Women's movements were crushed by this overt misogynist who bragged about sexual harassment. Minority movements were crushed by the overt racist who started his campaign on the idea that the overwhelming majority of Mexican-Americans were murderers and rapists. Many people believed that America as a whole would reject the regressiveness of Trump. Wh…

What you are saying doesn't really add up. If the environment is really that hostile because Trump was elected, it should not be fostering movements like #MeToo. It should have crushed dissent. A wake up call doesn't lead to something like that. There has to be some positive factor being overlooked.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#219

Post by skywhopper »

zilchers wrote: post #37
fooey wrote: post #17

There's breaking reporting that Facebook just had personnel in the Cambridge Analytica offices before the UK authorities could get there with warrants. https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975844154361221121 > BREAKING: Facebook WAS inside Cambridge Analytica's office but have now "stood down" following dramatic intervention by UK Information Commissioner's Office.. https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/9758…

I seriously feel like I’m missing something here, why isn’t Facebook fully behind getting to the bottom of this? Going back even further, why was it so difficult for them to even admit they had a problem during the election? I don’t think it’s as simple as “more money,” but maybe as simple as people too close to the problem and too enamored by what they’ve created?

Because they profited from this firm and likely actively worked with them to enable what’s now being characterized as a “breach”. And this is one of many hundreds of other companies doing the same thing. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg. If they are pushing back they are afraid we will find out how deep it goes.

Re: Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation

#220

Post by eganist »

tptacek wrote: post #146
Mahn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes you wonder why are they running this story now then. Hell of an interesting timing, almost as if to fit a narrative.

Probably because they just learned about it? Doesn't seem all that complicated.

If anything, it wouldn't surprise me if the CA revelations led current staff to speak out to the press to make the internal division known. Alex is pretty effective as a leader; I'd be shocked if the vast majority of his team, if not his entire team, did not have his back on this.
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