371–380 of 583 posts
So the above statement should be "...name, email address, age, ethnicity, gender and countless other things future ML systems can infer from profile pics."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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).
Fair point. But wondering if anyone asked them to delete it, and then went about verifying it later? I am guessing nobody bothered too hard because as the person in charge of the strategy said "Facebook were on our side"
https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
---
They [Facebook] 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.
---
"... 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..?
Even if CA deleted their data, what about all the other data that has been taken out as per this [1]? All our data associated with FB unique id is out there. My understanding this has stopped in 2015 but for sure? Hopefully the data that is out there becomes less relevant over time. [1] https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/what-the-f-was-facebook-th...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least at one point, you could. See the example of the person who pranked his roommate through very specifically targeted facebook ads. [1] It's even mentioned in that article how to get around the fix they put in so you couldn't target a group of less than 20 people. I'm not sure if this particular method still works, but let's take a step back and think before we make claims about what is and is not possible in a…
I concede you might be able to target a single person, but how exactly is that stealing data? It would sure take me a really long time to (one at a time with ads) get all that juicy-juicy data.
That said, since you can target specifically, if the system did allow some way to exfiltrate user data, it would make financial sense for larger analytics companies to do so to provide value-added services where they could target much more specifically than Facebook intended (or at least intended to make obvious?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you're kidding. Not sure what the rule on repeating myself is but since this is currently the top comment in this chain, I'll post it here anyway: 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 They…
I'm not sure why you keep on repeating that line, it's just a statement of fact. There were hundreds (if not thousands) of FB apps from that time period that pulled comparable social graphs before FB switched to the v2 Graph API in 2015. What CA did beyond this is that (1) they collected their political data under the guise of a personality test, without any indication to users what their data would be used for, and…
That is simply not true. Facebook rate-limited apps for exactly this reason. Additionally, although it was technically possible, the TOS did not allow mass-scraping of friend data for any purpose, much less political purposes. Facebook monitored and routinely banned apps long before they ever accessed the data of even a few million friend profiles, let alone 190 million of them. That's why, according to Obama's own campaign manager, Facebook was "surprised" but then decided not to ban them - which they would have done to any other app.
the data was used for political microtargeting (in violation of FB's TOS)
Which is precisely what Obama did.
If you know of any evidence that Obama's campaign broke either the law or FB's ToS, please let me know.
See above.
If they're serious about this, and I'm leaning toward they aren't really serious about it, this will affect a lot of startups, specifically in advertising, but probably a lot of mobile apps as well: “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 a…
I get the feeling, but you'll agree that a legally binding legal procedure that is an actual existential threat to your hundred billion dollar company that employs 25k people requires a different approach then a seduction meeting with a despot to try to loosen regulations.
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…
> That's the only hole in his statement. What about the punishment to Christopher Wylie, by closing/suspending his accounts in facebook, whatsapp, etc ?
He was part of Cambridge Analytica at the time. So they suspended his account along with the rest of them I suppose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's in Facebook's benefit for advertisers to gather all that data, because the only way they can actually use it to make money is by advertising to the users on Facebook. I find it incredibly hard to believe that this thought never crossed anybody's mind.
Have you ever looked at FB's ad platform? You don't download everyone's data and target the campaign yourself. You target, "18-25 males in these zip codes who like the yankees". I don't see how you go from that platform (hosted and controlled by facebook) to something else.
It seems that everyone just hates Facebook and we're collectively trying to nit pick any missteps that they make. I think that the whole issue is not surprising at all. Definitely not newsworthy. I'm pretty sure that everyone and everyone's mum knew that Facebook was doing stuff like this. What changed is that now we all distrust and dislike Facebook at some deep level... So we respond strongly to even the most munda…
"Everyone" knew Facebook was gathering tons of data on its users and everyone else, but we didn't understand many of the implications until now. People assumed it was just useful for banner-ad type stuff. There are probably even more implications of this data collection that we have still yet to discover.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It does seem like the Obama campaigns got preferential access to Facebook data. Data for even more people than CA got. And perhaps the Clinton campaign did as well, or at least got access to the older data. What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitte…
I've seen no hard data showing that any of this did Trump any good. Apparently not a single study has been done as to whether people either failed to vote or changed their vote based upon fake news or the use of this data.