[deleted]
Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
351–360 of 583 posts
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If this was about tracking and informed consent, then the illegal ity is there https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-... There was no consent because tracking was not opt-in but opt out. More recently regarding user personal details and lack of consent, again deemed illegal in Germany https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/12/facebook-... The pattern I see is that europe considers faceb…
>There was no consent
Voluntarily putting your info on a free site is the consent.
Would you also cry "illegal" if HN sold your post history, which they have tied to your IP address, which they can easily link to who you are?
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#353"... we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications." How is it at all possible to certify that data has been deleted and no copies were taken..?
This feels strange to those of us from technical spheres, but much of the world works without formal verification of facts. There are in theory severe penalties, both implicit and explicit, that ostensibly act as deterrent to bad actors. This is usually only noteworthy when it fails, but by and large it works. The friction involved if we did not generally accept someone's (signed, notarized, appropriately formalized)…
Notarization is another great example of "the real world is strange to technical folks." There are a thousand reasons that notarization is a terrible process. There are minimal requirements to be a notary. Notaries have predictable seals. Ordering a fake notary stamp is pretty easy. There's no technical deterrent to backdating requests. Notaries are frequently employed by the people they're notarizing for. Notaries are not trained to recognize fake IDs.
Even the flimsiest of technological improvements could radically improve the trustworthiness of the notarizations, but by and large the system works, so there's not much of a reason to fix it yet.
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#354Bye bye Facebook. I'm gone. Finally made it. Fear of missing out was keeping me from doing it. And for what? I was fearing to miss out on what? Being disconnected from whom? From people that I haven't met in years.
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's sorta kinda was happening with > we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications. To generalize the issue, if you were in charge of APIs at some company A and some company B (not necessarily located in your jurisdiction and not necessarily subject…
In that situation, I guess there's not much power Company A has with regards with Company B, right? Unless Company B is worried that they'll have a future relationship and thus will be willing to submit some kind of audit. Zuck's announcement seems to have a decent outline -- start with investigating apps with access to large amounts of data, audit apps with strange behavior. But after a year, after the CA (and other…
[deleted]
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#356"... we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications." How is it at all possible to certify that data has been deleted and no copies were taken..?
Along those lines, how is it possible for Facebook to demand that CA deleted the data, when CA is a third party and never had any kind of agreement with facebook(at least, relating to the information Kogan shared)? If someone leaks facebook data to a journalist, can FB demand that they delete it as well?
CA is a major customer of Facebook whose work has no free press implications. They can ask them to do whatever they want.
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#357The main problem is that users can't control their data. FB should: - Allow its users to delete their accounts as if they never existed - Show users which person and or service has accessed their data (also FB internally) - Use backend permission management instead of frontend permission management
>The main problem is that users can't control their data.
Then maybe stop putting data on a "free" site which owes you absolutely nothing?
I just don't get how everyone is on an uproar: "OMG they have my data! Which I voluntarily gave them! Which they are using for advertising/etc!"
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about additionally, 1) providing an "Advanced Feed" providing each user a log of every data field exfiltrated, date/time/who/IP addr,/ etc. 2) requiring every single advert and it's targeting parameters, that runs on the system to be made available in a fully searchable advert pool for anyone to search. This would allow people to see what is being targeted, journalists to figure out what targeting is happening (m…
What good would that do if you wanted to know what someone was doing with a profile they downloaded of you prior to 2015? FB says that any developer giving that data to another organization would violate its TOS, but given the sheer scale of apps that were on Facebook back then, it almost certainly happened many thousands of time.
True, I was only looking at regulations going forward, this wouldn't tell you at all what was exfiltrated in the past.
I'd totally support that requirement even tho it's a massive task (it's not like FB lacks the funds/resources).
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#359Re: His first "fix": > First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will…
> What happens if they find that 50 different organizations had access to and may have saved as much data as CA? Isn't this more than guaranteed? Literally any crappy quiz app or game had access to all of this data when they launch Facebook Platform. And I'm betting Kogan's app was far from the most popular on Facebook at the time -- the potential for hundreds of thousands of data harvesters to have exploited this is…
I just cleaned out my "connected" apps, and found like 4 quiz apps that I don't remember at all with full access to my personal info and friends. Back when they launched login with facebook I used it like a fool (also Spotify at launch ONLY launched with it). I knew this had happened, but its more like now the consequences are coming much more into clarity.
> I disagree that it's "the end of Facebook", though
If they do what they say and publically shame the apps in a way that people would see, it might. It would be hilarious for them to put up 100 logos of apps on the top and say oh yeah by the way all these apps have been taking your personal information, with lovely trustable names like "e-quiz" and "sofunni"
Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> 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 The extraction of Facebook's social graph is the element I agree "finds comparison in the 2008 or 2012 races" [1]. But Obama's campaign didn't mis-represent its identity nor intentions to Facebook. Kogan and Cambridge Analytica did. Obama's campaign didn't lie about deleting…
CA didn't represent anything to Facebook. They never created an app. They bought data, years later, from Kogan, who had created an app. Kogan violated Facebook policies, but there again, he didn't "misrepresent his identity [or] intentions" to Facebook. You didn't (and still don't) have to represent any intentions to Facebook to create an app. You simply create the app and agree to the platform terms and conditions. You're framing this as if CA & Kogan created some kind of special relationship with Facebook under the guise of academic research, and that just isn't the case. The only app in this situation that was granted special permissions or where Facebook knew the true intentions was the Obama app, and it's arguably worse that Facebook knew what their intentions were. That's because they knew that about half of the users involved -
95 million people out of 190 million - would never have knowingly allowed their data to be used to help Obama, but they allowed it special access anyway.
As for Obama's campaign not being asked to delete data, all apps were required to delete data that they came into possession of under the pre-2014 policy. Those were the terms they agreed to when they deployed the app - especially one that was allowed special access to the entire US social graph (where no other app would have been). So if Kogan violated the policy, so has the Obama campaign.