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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

#371

Post by sgustard »

mancerayder wrote: post #276
oflannabhra wrote: post #170

My greatest hope with all of the noise surrounding this, is that the engineers and employees at Facebook realize that Facebook and Zuckerberg’s vision does not line up with reality. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook will connect people and change the fabric of society and communities for good in a way that was heretofore impossible. Between Facebook’s political issues and the happiness-depressing effects of its use,…

I don't disagree with these sentiments, but the hope that engineers/IT staff will leave is wishful thinking. I speak from my own experience which my differ from others in other industries/regions/countries but, I find people who work in tech to be generally dispassionate with regards to the downstream effects of their contributions. I think that's because: a) We're often small cogs ... b) ... working on often interes…

I think the reason is (d), that most employees believe in the company's mission and do not think they are working for an unethical company, but instead that the company is being unfairly portrayed.

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

#372

Post by creato »

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've always been incredibly suspicious of the way Facebook handled it's user data. Remember back when every website on the internet had a box that showed "random" people that liked their website, and if you had any friends that liked it, they were in there?

How about all of the services using Facebook OAuth that subtly leak social graph information? For exactly this reason, Facebook OAuth is always my absolute last resort, and I'll almost always skip a service entirely if it's the only option.

Still, I always gave Facebook the benefit of the doubt and I figured that these things were handled by Facebook directly as a "plugin" to the app/website (I'm not a web developer, I don't know the details of how this would work), and the various services didn't actually see the data. It's pretty mind blowing to me that this is not actually the case. I always felt I was being absurdly paranoid about Facebook compared to most people I knenw, now it turns out I was not being even remotely paranoid enough.

Does anyone know if Google is similarly aggressive with user data sharing? I've never noticed information leakages similar to the above coming from Google (so I don't hesitate much to use Google OAuth) but me not noticing something during casual browsing is not a very high bar to clear.

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

#373

Post by smcnally »

manigandham wrote: post #222
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…

Psychographic data (personalities and traits beyond simple demographics) has long been known and used before Facebook ever existed, it's just much easier now that so many people are feeding data to a centralized system with easy access. CA's CEO is seen presenting this clearly in 2016, specifically how well it helped the Cruz campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc Worldview Standard has a podcast calle…

In the comments of the CA CEO video you linked to is a Motherboard article from Jan 2017:

"The Data That Turned the World Upside Down How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data to help the Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

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

#374

Post by lasso1 »

manigandham wrote: post #222
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…

Psychographic data (personalities and traits beyond simple demographics) has long been known and used before Facebook ever existed, it's just much easier now that so many people are feeding data to a centralized system with easy access. CA's CEO is seen presenting this clearly in 2016, specifically how well it helped the Cruz campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc Worldview Standard has a podcast calle…

Interestingly, according to the NYT Cruz campaign staffers did not think it worked:

"But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.

“When they were hired, from the outset it didn’t strike me that they had a wide breadth of experience in the American political landscape,” Mr. Tyler said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

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

#375

Post by b1daly »

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…

When you have a Facebook account, you are explicitly granting permission to FB to use your personal information and social graph to sell ads. There is nothing deceptive about this.

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

#376

Post by watwut »

mistermann wrote: post #332
mhneu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

p.s. Did you know Steve Bannon looked at tech workers as people he could bamboozle to be his political footsoldiers? That's why the Mercers completely fund Breitbart - to propagandize young, mostly tech, men and boys. From Josh Greene's book: "Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And t…

PS: And the democrats weaponize starry eyed, well-intentioned young progressive millennial and gen-xers. Why do you think the Russia-did-everything story sells so well when they were a bit player at most? Sorry to burst your bubble, but everyone is in on it .

Democrats are moving to the center (e.g. right) while conservatives move further right. Meanwhile, young progressive millennial and gen-xers are trying to move democrats to the left and are in large power struggle.

Not the same.

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

#377

Post by b1daly »

chatmasta wrote: post #203
karmelapple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you define the term breach? Is it fair to use the term breach from the perspective of the user whose data has been acquired? Or is breach only in reference to what the company that collected the data intended to do with it? There’s also seemingly two types of breaches at play: 1. The idea of a security breach, where a company gets “hacked” 2. The idea of a breach of trust, where people had given a company d…

This is the difficult question at the heart of the matter. Certainly I am accustomed to hearing "breach" in the context of a "security breach," in which a third party accesses data without authorization by circumventing technical measures restricting such access. In this case, there was no such security breach. The Facebook API worked as designed, and returned all data according to spec, TOS, and API documentation. T…

There is (or was) a “bug” in the business logic, as is now apparent. Assuming it is the case that CA gained access to this information by lying, it means there were inadequate safeguards in who could access. The data. The only reason you could say this wasn’t a “breach” is because FB had engineered virtually no safeguards against this type of deceptive use of user data.

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

#378

Post by JetSpiegel »

downandout wrote: post #361
mhneu wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling psychological data to advertisers is boring, but when you get billionaires and foreign powers involved to elect a would-be autocrat who is degrading American democracy, it suddenly gets a lot of people talking. Yup. It's not a surprise why people are interested in the role of data in modern public debate and democracy.

I have seen no evidence that the efforts of “foreign powers” were even remotely close to effective. Has anyone done a study proving that people either changed their votes or didn’t vote based upon the Russian campaign?

I think most people believe Russian hackers literally hacked voting machines to give Trump the election. Subtle manipulation of emotions it too complex for the public.

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

#379

Post by JetSpiegel »

jstalin wrote: post #105
anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly do, but I don't recall anyone seriously alleging that they were extralegal or covert.

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752

Ouch.

> Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

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

#380

Post by JetSpiegel »

dnomad wrote: post #358
DrScump wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data. But the targeted friends had no say in the matter and gave no consent to being isolated and targeted.

What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"? What does that even mean? Did they spam friends with unwanted emails and phone calls? Did they try to propagandize friends with ads targeted to certain demographics? Did they literally light up the friends with green lasers?

They targeted friends who would be on the fence about who to vote for. Easy to find out about based on Facebook information.
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