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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

#241

Post by Retra »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #142
oh_sigh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure do. This kind of double speak is rampant. One that bubbles to the top of my head is that when some people were targeted for anti-HRC messages(I think specifically it was Haitian Americans on the gulf coast), then that was labeled as "voter suppression", but targeting likely voters for Trump and spreading negative information about him, say the access Hollywood tapes, is "informing the voters"

Yes, it's funny. Titles for two articles, both are easy to google: 1. How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters (MIT Technology Review, 2012) 2. How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions (NYT, 2018) No bias here.

The bias there is largely do to the differences in behaviors and histories of the parties involved. It's one thing for a charity group to run a donation center, and a wholly different thing for a life-long con artist to do it.

It is a rationally induced bias.

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

#242

Post by dstroot »

RpFLCL wrote: post #92
fooey wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the "breaches" and "abuses" aren't breaches or abuses, it's Facebook's business model working as intended.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

This was covered over a year ago: https://danstroot.com/2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-suc...

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

#243

Post by colordrops »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #199
RpFLCL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

> Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. Minor nit: Years ago. The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1]. Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears. Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't under…

What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo.

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

#244

Post by colordrops »

8ytecoder wrote: post #134
RpFLCL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

There are always different levels of privacy. Everybody knew Google was "reading" their emails. The understand of that was never that Google will expose your individual email to a company. Similarly people understood that Facebook used the data about them to monetize and advertise to them. I don't think anyone assumed they'd let someone else literally take that data.

> I don't think anyone assumed

Everyone who worked at Facebook or on 3rd party integrations knew this for years.

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

#245

Post by phy6 »

arca_vorago wrote: post #230
rhizome wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, CA wasn't Facebook's customer. CA bought the data from a researcher who was authorized to slurp the data.

Interesting, do you have a source on that. I would like to see the agreement researchers have to agree to to use fb data. I'm guessing this includes private profile information not public? Or is it a platform level EULA or something like that? I wonder how FB views public scraping. Shades of webcrawlers.

NY Time article "The technique had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing.

Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr...

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

#246

Post by zilchers »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #199
RpFLCL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

> Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. Minor nit: Years ago. The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1]. Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears. Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't under…

That’s a great statement on the issue almost always faced by security professionals. Almost impossible to impress upon people the stakes when you can do something, almost impossible to do anything once it’s too late.

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

#247

Post by bduerst »

downandout wrote: post #108
mattnewton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to flip the voters, just get them to not show up, and get more republicans to show up. This isn’t about politics, this is about buisiness interests, and professional reputation. Some examples of ads using this technique: http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/11/03/text-vote-hillary-... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...

Hillary Clinton had a $1.2 billion campaign budget, along with the vast majority of active social media users, the whole of Silicon Valley, and most of the press on her side. If Democrats didn’t show up to vote for her, the root cause wasn’t less than $1 million worth of ads for fake news stories.

The current investigation into the Russian meddling of the U.S. presidential election is still underway. It's still too soon to assume that the interference was "less than $1 million worth of ads".

For example, the Russians have been funnelling money to Trump's family for a decade. Trump sold a FL mansion for 240% of it's value ($100M) to a Russian oligarch:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-sold-40-million-estate-russian...

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

#248

Post by magnusss »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #199
RpFLCL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? The interest in that data by political entities should have been especially obvious. Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. I remember first hearing about it on a podcast that was mostly focused on the personality…

> Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. Minor nit: Years ago. The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1]. Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears. Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't under…

Nothing changed. What happened in many of these cases (Weinstein, Facebook) is that the story was thoroughly researched and reported in depth by a team of professional journalists working for the New York Times.

My only point (if there is one) is that, despite the massive proliferation of blogs and amateur media, it often takes a professional, salaried reporter to bring an important story into the public eye.

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

#250

Post by rtpg »

fooey wrote: post #42
zilchers wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the "breaches" and "abuses" aren't breaches or abuses, it's Facebook's business model working as intended.

I get that this is most definitely the likely side effect of a business model of collecting info.

There's still the fact that FB _did_ close off the info that CA was holding onto, and they saw it as something they no longer want to offer to its ad clients.

The simplest explanation is that FB is trying to do damage control for being way too liberal about its data sharing in the past, because it will generate more scrutiny for their present policies (even if they are "better" than before). Even if they're improving, many might not think they've improved enough.

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