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The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

independent.co.uk

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Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#101

Post by colordrops »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #60
fny wrote: post #36

This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…

CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors. The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called…

> The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it?

I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:

"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."

To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.

Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#102

Post by ikeyany »

zzzcpan wrote: post #100
ikeyany wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains the actions of (some of) Facebook's "rockstar" developers. That does not explain the actions of Facebook's data scientists, psychologists, product managers, and execs. Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.

You cannot really expect people who have to work for a living and do work for a vertically structured corporation to be ethical and to go against their bosses. The problem is inherent to capitalism and it can make people do far worse things than this, like killing people or promoting and making wars.

Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#103

Post by creaghpatr »

booleanbetrayal wrote: post #81
enraged_camel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, the CEO of the company openly admitted to sending Ukranian hookers to opposition candidates' houses and hotel rooms and recording the interactions...

Robert Mercer's empire is crumbling.

Then again, what’s a small agency’s implosion compared to the collateral damage to Facebook et al?

Renaissance aren’t the type to think only one step ahead.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#104

Post by lstroud »

fny wrote: post #36

This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…

“practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end”

Isn’t this the modern definition of politics?

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#105

Post by anonbloke »

my friend who works at an israeli startup otonomo was boasting about a big deal subcontracted down cambridge analytica. they were putting together profiles of people car data.

i was just enamored and amused by all the targeted adverts that will know my driving habits. i'm floored to see this. this is rather frightening.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#106

Post by partiallypro »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #60
fny wrote: post #36

This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to in…

CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors. The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called…

They aren't just scumbags they are snake oil salesmen. No one in the political world thinks of them as anything but snake oil salesmen. Their company is about tricking people into buying their service and never delivering any results. Look at their track record. A lot of people will point to them and say "see, this is how Trump won the election" but that's just not even remotely close to the truth, and honestly just melds their marketing of snake oil with their shadiness. Many political people have paid them and subsequently dropped them because they didn't deliver. This was no different.

The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#107

Post by philipodonnell »

guelo wrote: post #3

Some regulation I'd like to see for social network ads, at least for political ads: - Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people. - Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from…

I like showing the targeting demographics if it forced you to see the words that the advertiser used to find you. Part of the frustration with targetted ads is when you disagree with the targetting, when the algorithm thinks you're part of a group you don't want to be associated with.

An 'I'm not in this group' button would be powerful feedback mechanism.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#108

Post by stevenwoo »

ikeyany wrote: post #48
stevenwoo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a lot of young people fresh from college and they hear about the big five or whatever, and choose Facebook because they think of it as a social networking company and big, famous, and cool. Just an old guy's opinion - would not want to work there.

That explains the actions of (some of) Facebook's "rockstar" developers. That does not explain the actions of Facebook's data scientists, psychologists, product managers, and execs. Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.

For execs sure it's about managing the product, i.e. the users, especially in what we've seen in public statements from Zuckerberg and Sanders.

For the data scientists and psychologists, it's a chance to work on large scale data/populations and test all sort of theories and hypotheses on a large scale, probably unavailable anywhere else except Google and Amazon as postulated here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...

I imagine it's a dream job in that respect, where one gets so caught up in the work the consequences don't matter to the worker until the 2016 US election (Trump got about 25% of the vote in the Bay Area) or Brexit referendum and now these investigative reports.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#109

Post by zzzcpan »

ikeyany wrote: post #102
zzzcpan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot really expect people who have to work for a living and do work for a vertically structured corporation to be ethical and to go against their bosses. The problem is inherent to capitalism and it can make people do far worse things than this, like killing people or promoting and making wars.

Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.

The conscious and deliberate decision to put a system in place that manipulates and exploits people who have to work for a living and makes them do things with no questions asked is not created by employees themselves. But it is a decision nevertheless and it is unfair to expect employees, who are victims of such system, to do the right thing as they usually fear the consequences of the dissent. Which can literally mean not just losing a job, but life and death kind of choices, never being able to afford a medical care, lack of place to live, prison and so on.

Re: The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works

#110

Post by ikeyany »

zzzcpan wrote: post #109
ikeyany wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.

The conscious and deliberate decision to put a system in place that manipulates and exploits people who have to work for a living and makes them do things with no questions asked is not created by employees themselves. But it is a decision nevertheless and it is unfair to expect employees, who are victims of such system, to do the right thing as they usually fear the consequences of the dissent. Which can literally m…

It's disingenuous to claim that employees of Facebook are being exploited as such. Factory workers maybe, but not a lucrative position at Menlo Park.
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