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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#421

Post by jlmorton »

heretoo wrote: post #347
downandout wrote: post #220

Earlier 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…

That's a different issue, though, and unrelated to this thread.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#422

Post by alexanderdmitri »

mrlala wrote: post #348
downandout wrote: post #220

Earlier 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…

Yeah this is one of the worst part about this whole situation. Everyone screaming ILLEGAL!! and also somehow acting like Facebook is the only one doing this? Almost EVERY free site is trying their damn best to collect as much info and link everything together to sell it so they can- you know.. make money. I guess those people are instead willing to pay for virtually every site they use on the internet, right? Right?…

it's not a binary equation though, if data collection were illegal, content and service providers would be much more likely to try other solutions

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#424

Post by prostoalex »

hendzen wrote: post #207
aylmao wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were some computation, aggregation or analysis this work, but a lot (I'd guess, most) applications might not fall into this category. How are you gonna present the data in a UI to users, if no data is supposed to leave the server?

The UI could be a web page, mobile app, etc just like FB.com. But to see any user data you would actually have to be authorized as that specific user. I.E. a developer could test their app by logging in with their own FB account and using their own data but would have no capability to look at the raw DB entries of other users. Or perhaps their could be a limited capability for developers to log in to their app as ano…

> But to see any user data you would actually have to be authorized as that specific user. I.E. a developer could test their app by logging in with their own FB account and using their own data but would have no capability to look at the raw DB entries of other users.

This is the status quo as of the 2014 platform policy changes.

The entire debacle is around the data retrieved (and saved) prior to that, which is what Cambridge Analytics has done.

> Or perhaps their could be a limited capability for developers to log in to their app as another user of it

FB Developer app has support for test users, who are marked as such.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#425

Post by sunir »

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…

Facebook did not intend for this to happen. That is such nonsense.

They intended for cool apps to go viral across their social graph so Facebook could be a “social utility” and the operating system of human relationships and other airy fantasies they spouted in 2012, 2013, 2014 when they built the app platform.

Their hopes of a beautiful future of joy and freedom were dashed when they discovered humans are capable of garbage behaviour.

Ironically they believed the walled garden of Facebook would clean up the cesspool of blog comments. Oops.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#427

Post by codezero »

downandout wrote: post #416
weaksauce wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to a Time magazine account just after Obama won re-election, "the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button." you are doing the old classic false equivalence... the deliberate use of an obama sanctioned facebook app that asks you to press a button to share the get out to vote (probably for obam…

The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 18…

I'm not taking sides here, and I could be very wrong – my assumption here is that Cambridge didn't have a "Trump Campaign App" they had some other app, then sold that data to a third party. Obama's campaign had a "campaign" app, and used the data collected from that app.

We can all argue about whether facebook should even allow apps the kind of data they do, but the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? This is where the two aren't the same, as far as I'm aware, but like I said, I'm not super in the know.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#428

Post by dontreact »

harryh wrote: post #100
__jal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but refuses to appear before the US Congress and sends the company counsel instead. This strikes me as especially interesting. I mean, I'd personally theoretically have my reservations about this congress over and above the average congress, but FaceMark refusing strikes me as a deeply telling datum about how he's thinking about this.

Basically no CEOs ever want to testify in front of a congressional committee. There is only downside to such a situation for the company. There is zero upside. This is not a deeply telling datum. It is a boring an standard one.

In this case there is user trust to be gained. By refusing to appear in front of congress, mark and facebook has lost a little of my trust.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#429

Post by shripadk »

dustingetz wrote: post #290
shripadk wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the GAAP has all but ensured that this happens. You want companies to have values? Then measure values! (alongside profit, not inspite of) How do you record company/moral values into Books of Accounts? How does one audit those morals? What category do you assign it under: Asset, Liability or Owners Equity? And moreover, what would happen if morals change and some are deemed obsolete? Also, if you start to measure c…

Yes we all know that. To even start thinking about how to quantify values — and if you follow macro like i do, you know a modern economist can probably quantify anything — first we must inject values into the conversation. Right now, the world doesn't have any values. Except profit, competition, winning, domination and control. It's not even efficient — it's a prisoner's dilemma stuck at backstab/backstab. How do you…

Yes you are right that from an economic standpoint you will be able to quantify anything. However, GAAP/IFRS was specifically created to handle only a subset of that whole gamut viz. recordation into Books of Accounts and generation of Balance Sheet, Income Statements and Cash Flow statements. There are commissions in place to handle fraud and deceptive practices for things that cannot be codified into the Books of Accounts. For instance, the Anti-Monopoly Acts enacted in various countries have safeguards that prevent a single entity from monopolising the market. However, if you try to codify this into the Books you are going to have a tough time when the law changes. You can't go back in time and retrospectively change your ledger transactions (which is static) to reflect changes in law (which is dynamic) or values/morals (which is also dynamic).

Please note that I am only replying in the context of GAAP (which you mentioned). If not, I agree with all the ideas you presented and only disagree on the one aspect of it being added to the GAAP/IFRS standards as the purpose of it's creation was to precisely steer away from unknowns and only record the knowns.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#430

Post by cmurf »

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…

Possibly referring to a violation of their 2011 consent degree with the FTC.
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