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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#331

Post by thrillgore »

victor106 wrote: post #184

This is such a well crafted statement not from Zuck's heart but from a PR team that has been working over time. Shame on you FB and Zuck you Suck. If they are so honest or like to be honest going forward why can't they make it easy to see all my pics and posts that are public? Why can't they make it easy to see who can see what I posted? Which app or user is using my data. They have billions of dollars and can't impl…

>He used to be a well respected tech journalist.

I can't stop laughing at this remark. Robert Scoble is a shilling, sexist excuse for a "journalist."

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#332

Post by headsoup »

astro_robot wrote: post #297

I just don't get it. I don't get the enormous backlash over this. Users give away their data to a company, the company sells that data to advertisers (or sells ads and targets the ads according to data), and the users can continue using the service they enjoy for free. This was the contract you agreed to when you clicked the sign up button. I don't get why people are mad at Zuckerberg and not themselves! People act l…

You make it sound like it's just a little check box that either means data everywhere or not. There's a lot more to it than that.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#333

Post by JumpCrisscross »

daodedickinson wrote: post #315
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012 Obama's campaign said they were scraping for academic purposes, downloaded a bunch of data and then lied about deleting it? There are multiple levels of B.S. when it comes to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Only one finds comparison in the 2008 or 2012 races (on either side).

They didn't tell Facebook what they were doing and then, when they took way more than Facebook was expecting, Facebook was okay with it because of politics or being too afraid to oppose it. Then the all political opposition was powerless to complete with that efficiency of targeting and had to pull off a heist to even the playing field before the politics of social media company executives became the only relevant po…

> They didn't tell Facebook what they were doing

Source?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#334

Post by anonnel »

xkjkls wrote: post #106
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's not really selling it's user data for money; it's selling access to it's users for money. Sure, user data allows some advanced targeting, but the reason they make the profit they do is that people are buying ads for people to see, not data about them. That's an important distinction.

Most people are buying ads for people to see. Some others, however, are using the platform as access to user’s extensive 3P data, once they click and are shuffled through multiple shady ad exchanges gathering and selling data, including the social graph.

Some others, like CA and ilk, also get easy access to user’s psychometric data, by embedding the psychometrics into A/B tested ad content.

The adage “you are the product” has only become more true as FB has advanced, whether by their intended or explicit policies or not.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#335

Post by downandout »

detaro wrote: post #325
downandout wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're framing this improperly. Prior to 2014, anybody could create an app, and if people authorized it to, it could access some friend data. Your comment reads as if they went and made some special arrangement with Facebook and lied to them saying it was for "academic purposes". That just isn't the case. Every single Facebook user with the ability to write code could do this easily and automatically for the 7 years…

> No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph Source? All I can find is a scheme where they prompted people to sign in to a campaign site and grabbed the friend data that way. Icky as hell, but it's not obvious why that's "even worse" than CA.

For starters, they accessed 4X the number of profiles that CA did. I have edited my comment, however, because it appears that they did (just like CA) have an app that they used. Except they used it, as one Obama campaign manager put it, to "suck out the whole social graph" of voters in the US, and Facebook "was surprised, but didn't stop [them] once they realized they were doing it".

By the way, this is something that would have been stopped on any other app long before they ever accessed 190 million profiles. So Facebook essentially gave them the entire US social graph, that they wouldn't have allowed any other app with only 1 million users to have.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#336

Post by arca_vorago »

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…

"They're not a product company, they're a distraction company."

Correction, they are a surveillance company. Need I remind everyone of Google and FB's In-Q-Tel CIA partners in crime? They just figured out a way for everyone to willingly report on themselves, but not just on themselves, on others too! FB is bad and should collapse like every other dotcom boom-bust that uses and abuses it's users... but the difference is the level of monopoly on non-technical users that didn't exist in the 90's. Back then the technical community could have dropped a product like hotcakes and watched it bust... but due to the increase of non-technical users who sign any EULA/TOS and don't give a crap about privacy... I expect nothing will happen until something really bad and at a massive scale happens.

For those who are younger, consider this the slashdot/digg/reddit cycle. Reddit will die next the closer it gets to IPO too.

It's the beauty of computing though. Every market is ripe for disruption if someone has a good vision and follow-through. The problem is that so many of them use the exact same model and a few years later are the ones dying due to lack of integrity.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#337

Post by Symbiote »

downandout wrote: post #220
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 What, exactly, are you claiming about this that was “illegal”? When you singup for Facebook, you agree that anything you post might be shared with others on the platform. The Facebook developer platform became so limited in 2014 that most developers (including me) left. There was no point in developing apps for the social graph that had no ability to be use the social graph. But even prior to…

It's not clear to me how much, if any, of the work was done in the United Kingdom or by British companies.

If the are companies in the UK, or people working in the UK, the sharing or retention of data may have been illegal under British law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#338

Post by downandout »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #333
daodedickinson wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't tell Facebook what they were doing and then, when they took way more than Facebook was expecting, Facebook was okay with it because of politics or being too afraid to oppose it. Then the all political opposition was powerless to complete with that efficiency of targeting and had to pull off a heist to even the playing field before the politics of social media company executives became the only relevant po…

> They didn't tell Facebook what they were doing Source?

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

"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." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campaign Director

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#339

Post by neuronexmachina »

downandout wrote: post #281
gordon_freeman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So FB opened up their platform to 3rd party Devs in 2007 and this CA incident happened in 2013. FB changed their policy of not allowing broad data access to these Devs in 2014. So my question is: Why they admit that they'd audit the pre-2014 apps now when NYT and Guardian/Observer broke the news? And what policy is in place now that makes sure that these 3rd party Devs won't sell whatever info they do collect as per…

Why they admit that they'd audit the pre-2014 apps now when NYT and Guardian/Observer broke the news? I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012. I guess when you have Chris Hughes working for your campaign, it's easier to keep things under wraps and spin what does become public as a positive. It was only after Trump won that this kind of use o…

> I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012.

I know a lot of folks have been desperate to make a false equivalence with the Obama campaign's social media use, but it doesn't pass the sniff test:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#340

Post by makmanalp »

downandout wrote: post #220
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 What, exactly, are you claiming about this that was “illegal”? When you singup for Facebook, you agree that anything you post might be shared with others on the platform. The Facebook developer platform became so limited in 2014 that most developers (including me) left. There was no point in developing apps for the social graph that had no ability to be use the social graph. But even prior to…

> Even the idea that developers were supposed to delete the information they had before was just a civil agreement between the company and themselves - it wasn't illegal. Facebook can certainly sue them over it, but there are no violations of the law occurring here

Perhaps not in the US, but I'd like to point out that it's not the same way everywhere: I think the EU is moving towards another direction. There's a whole thing around whether a company has a responsibility to do due diligence around preserving the personal information of its users. Just because you gave them your data doesn't always mean that they can now do whatever they want with it (e.g. give access to detailed information in large amounts to third parties). Even if you sign an agreement, in many jurisdictions there are certain rights a company can't just make you sign away.

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