Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

However, there were many, many apps that also did the same. A number of dating apps, companies like Zynga, business networks like BranchOut etc. They were just inhaling data wholesale, especially Likes which were fully exposed to all friends in your graph.

I could totally see how you could use that data circa 2014 to build psych profiles and resell it for sophisticated targeting years later.

There is an enormous risk of companies who rose and fell during the Zynga era to have resold or improperly disposed of FB profile data during their final liquidation. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

'Fake news' takes advantage of something much more simple. People believe what they want to believe. In other words the people led on by fake news tend to already want to believe what the news is about. When we see something that confirms our biases, many of us don't question it. And this is made even worse since people tend to work as apologists for fake news from sources they like, so instead of being able to discuss the issue of fake news - it ends up dividing people into splits on the 'fake' topic at hand, which in contemporary times is most often political.

Democracy only works with an educated population. Regulating data might act as a short to medium term buffer against this issue; however, as we learn more about how our psychology works, the more often we'll be manipulated. Combined with the interesting argument that being politically uninformed could be rational:

> If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. [1]

... we have an interesting problem on our hands. I personally believe that the long term solution is within education, but instead of teaching people "what to think," we ought to be teaching people "how to think". People typically learn naively about how to think: both how to emotionally cope with struggling and with parsing and understanding information. At the minimum I think schools ought to be teaching kids strategies for both arenas.

I personally really enjoy two approaches around "how to think.":

1. The now out of print "How to Develop Your Thinking Ability," is a super old, easy read loosely based on Korzybski's controversial "Science and Sanity." It taught me how to approach my perception as gambles (i.e. to avoid universal judgment). The principles, all often obvious, as I recall, are roughly:

a. Up to a point e.g. that person is annoying, up to a point.

b. To me. That movie is awesome to me.

c. As far as I know. Warren Buffet is 92 as far as I know.

d. Indexing by time: I like John at this point in time.

e. Indexing by place: I like John when we're at the club, but not when we're at the office.

f. Indexing by subindex: Instead of: Guy_1, Guy_2, Guy_3 are all scum, therefore all men are scum, we use indices to avoid generalization.

2. The Happiness Trap: enumerates Acceptance and committance therapy. ACT roughly uses a variety of defusing techniques, mindfulness, and values oriented behavior to help a person handle their thoughts in constructive manners.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-again...

The point is this - I don't and will never trust facebook as a company. There is no way to salvage that. Once you've established yourself as untrustworthy you can't talk your way out of it, because there in no reason to believe your excuses and trust there aren't omissions.

Consider the microphone accusation (and the legalese they used in their oddly specific denials), Zuckerberg's wish to run for president, the incredibly extensive profiles they construct on their users ("Is the kind of person to look at their phone in akward situations") without justifying it to the users, and now this.

It's way too late for people like me. I've deleted my facebook.