Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#81

Post by dustingetz » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

propman wrote: post #39

The trusting developers not to sell any data but putting zero safeguards in place to prevent this and extremely punitive repercussions despite being repeatedly told by the public, media, and even high level employees tells me Facebook can't plead ignorance to this and they not only knew this was happening, but they probably intended for it to happen. They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies n…

> They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies not to follow the rules.

Offtopic but i cant help it. You get what you measure. Which is why economies that only measure profit optimize for nothing but profit. When a nationstate says "It's illegal to do X" but has mandatory accounting practices that do not measure X but only measure profit, we should not be surprised that companies like Facebook do awful things. the GAAP has all but ensured that this happens. You want companies to have values? Then measure values! (alongside profit, not inspite of) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_Accepted_Accounting_...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#82

Post by ProAm » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #47

ProAm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "trusts them" [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

Please don't; that just leads to the same discussion over and over, which makes it off topic for HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616988 ). There's tons of substance to be discussed here without reaching for the global hash table ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096 ). Fortunately the community has mostly been doing that, but let's not spoil it.

@dang - Normally I agree with you, but I do feel in this instance, especially in regards to him trusting (or once trusting) a third party with his data that the quote is appropriate. It wasn't a troll comment to any HN'er but more of an observation of the pot calling the kettle black. Zuckerberg is absolutely 'trusting' that CA has deleted the data that they gained from FB. While it may be often brought up on HN, its one of Zuckerberg more profound quotes (especially in regards to privacy of information) and speaks to how he sees the world, the difference now is he's on the other side of the coin and we are getting to watch him deal with it.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#83

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

hvass wrote: post #32

Is it clear exactly what 'data' was actually obtained by CA on those millions of people? (I am referring specifically to the millions, not the original subset of 200,000 or so). Is it all public and friends-visible activity? Or it is basics such as name, email, profile photo, etc.? I cannot find so far addressed in the coverage exactly what kind of information CA have had on a per-person basis. If someone can share c…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#84

Post by nabla9 » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

gwicks56 wrote: post #54

1000 word statement. Number of times the word "advertising" was mentioned: 0 Facebook continues to pretend it's business model is unicorns and kittens, not selling user data for money.

It was standard crisis management PR sermon.

"learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together".

You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#85

Post by antocv » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

bluetwo wrote: post #26

ddavis wrote: post #7

The 2007 and 2013 paragraphs are pretty scary. Your friend takes a personality quiz from a random app developer and then that developer gets access to _your_ personal data. Obviously Zuckerberg doesn't go into detail about what kind of data that was, but if they needed to rein that in in 2014... I imagine it was potentially pretty personal.

I created an app so I could grant myself access to the API with it. It was an embarrassing amount of data on all your friends.

I created an app back in 2009, to grant myself access and look around.

Saw too much information about friends, realized some friends began "using" my app, just because it was made by me. Realized all the quizzes and dumb polls are data-gathering apps for the developers.

Realized, all the awkward "friend requests" from other side of the world, are fake profiles, to gather more data.

Made a fake profile, to seem from a different part of the continent, with such an awkward for us name. Facebook recommended me to befriend people from that area. Some accepted the friend request. Soon I had 30+ friends on a fake profile, all within the same "web" of friends, within same region.

Then I made more of those fake profiles, and made more fake apps with same theme, since this soo easy, for this and other regions which I suspected had hot women, and I was 25ish single at the time. My devious plan was to get outside my own social network and cast my net to catch the women who my algorithm would say - they are not on the edge of their own social network - they are a hub a popular and single etc. But that was too much work to complete. Later facebook gave me the graph search query where one could say "friend of my friends and single in this city", but that was still meh compared to what I had planned - since I would be doing the data gathering and analysis.

I wanted to catch the woman who had good privacy settings, those not show up on fb own searches, those not installing my app, but appearing in friend list of those who do accept fake friend requests or use dumb quizz apps. Those who appear to be recommended by many fake profiles.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#86

Post by bobthepanda » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

prostoalex wrote: post #65

propman wrote: post #39

The trusting developers not to sell any data but putting zero safeguards in place to prevent this and extremely punitive repercussions despite being repeatedly told by the public, media, and even high level employees tells me Facebook can't plead ignorance to this and they not only knew this was happening, but they probably intended for it to happen. They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies n…

What kind of safeguards would you introduce? At the very start of Facebook platform the API would anonymize the user's email address, the app would get an app-specific hash, e.g. abcdefg-app123456@facebook.net It was a working email address with Facebook handling the forwarding. This proved futile as the very first thing that apps then did was to ask users for their real email address.

Then make "no requests for users email" part of the terms of using the API?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#87

Post by deskamess » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

Once the toothpaste (data) is out of the tube (FB data center) its hard to put back (manage). An option would be to remove or hash (different nonce for every share of data) identifying information and add noise to the various metrics gathered. That way, the results of an analysis cannot be used to target individuals.

Short of some breakthrough in homomorphic encryption sharing data for analysis is problematic. Penalties can be enforced but the data is out at that point.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#88

Post by __jal » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #75

Meta: Zuckerberg's statement is, unsurprisingly, hosted at "facebook.com" and uses JavaScript to render. My browser is configured to not execute JavaScript from facebook.com because that site has a reputation for undermining privacy. Therefore, I cannot read the statement that I assume at least has some tangential relationship to the way facebook.com handles privacy. Alas.

Heh. I didn't even try because my machines blackhole their address space.

A decision that looks better every day.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#89

Post by humanrebar » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #70

joelrunyon wrote: post #19

Anyone else remember Beacon? This was how FB has always designed to work from the beginning. They've just been toying with the PR ways to say it to make people accept it without thinking. The election woke people up. I found this from 2011 when they shut it down as a "mistake." ( https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2011/11/our-commitment-to-the-f... ). Unfortunately, it looks like they removed the launch release - but it wo…

This was how FB has always designed to work from the beginning Not exactly. In all fairness, as Zuck points out, this is a key part of the story, and in theory, why this is different: In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent. This raises the question of what Fa…

> It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent.

Not to mention that it's arguable that "consent" was really given for facebook to share the data in the first place. I'd be interested to see some polling results asking if facebook users knew what facebook was up to and whether they feel OK with it.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#90

Post by faramarz » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

Will do, should do, going to do. Lots of promises not a single action.

Since Friday, or earlier of knowing about the incident, they could have conducted the audit and closed any lose ends and used this opportunity to say we have already done x and y.

Instead, it's just announcements. Not good enough.