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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#481

Post by Diederich »

leggomylibro wrote: post #435
astro_robot wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He honestly isn't wrong. People use Google and Facebook everyday for free in exchange for their privacy and they are ok with that. You can ask most people and they'll say they didn't really care about Snowden's leaks. They are happy to use free software and to be under government supervision (I don't care about the inefficacy of it). Privacy really is a social norm of the past.

I understand your intention and don't mean to criticize, but please consider avoiding the term 'free software' when referring to businesses like Facebook and Google. https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

The parent said: 'use free software'

How does that in conflict with your FSF link?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#482

Post by adamiscool8 »

weaksauce wrote: post #434
downandout wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. permission for one. > The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, 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 butt…

You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#483

Post by product50 »

anonnel wrote: post #437
product50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, Cambridge Analytica still maintains that they don't have any copy of FB data and are open to do a forensic test by a FB appointed team.

A “forensic test” to check that they didn’t copy and hang on to some data in 2013 ... well I’m reassured.

Do you have a better idea? Be productive with your comments vs. just being a hater.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#484

Post by product50 »

wavefunction wrote: post #328
product50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, Cambridge Analytica still maintains that they don't have any copy of FB data and are open to do a forensic test by a FB appointed team.

Given their CEO's bragging about extortion, blackmail and prostitution/pandering I'd give their assurances almost no value at all.

Hopefully the tests will prove that clearly.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#486

Post by nine_k »

eftychis wrote: post #473
mrlala wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

A bit of a nitpick, but the Hackernews post history and comments are publicly available. Most of, if not all, privacy law treats public data differently. Now the majority of Facebook data, which is visible only to a selected group of individuals, can not contradict privacy laws of a country. Despite whatever agreement you signed. Law trumps user agreements. As an extreme example I can sign that I give you the right t…

> I can sign that I give you the right to kill me, but if you do that you have still committed pre-meditated homicide

This sounds as if nobody can agree to voluntarily take part in a potentially fatal experiment, like testing a potent medicine or be a test pilot. I believe legal provisions exist here.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#487

Post by heretoo »

jlmorton wrote: post #421
heretoo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is relevant and related to their track record regarding how they treat user privacy, what data they have previously released to third parties, and what their current legal standing is with regards to the same issue, especially in light of Cambridge Analytica.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#488

Post by AndrewKemendo »

illumin8 wrote: post #438
downandout wrote: post #281

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…

> I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012. Citation needed. Everything I've seen indicates Obama's campaign didn't violate the rules: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 "I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA v…

That was different than what they did in 2012 - which was a facebook hoover.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#489

Post by anonnel »

xkjkls wrote: post #477
anonnel wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with their data policies, FB (and any ad platform) enables massive data-mining by the third parties which host the ad exchanges and destinations. And microtargeting can be abused (or just plain used, depending on your perspective) to infer only additional data by incorporating it into the 3P analysis once users click and start loading non-FB content. Microtargeting by its nature leaks information about the targe…

I think there are some pretty large differences in scale between "buying ads to target people with specific attributes and saving the situations where they interact with your ad" and "enabling any application to view all of the information about any friend who has connected with the app user". I wouldn't argue that micro-targeting can't end up with very specific privacy concerns, but I don't think it's nearly the sam…

It’s a different scale only in the timeframe of a single campaign. 3P trackers have an *ongoing central vantage over many campaigns, giving them data which they accumulate and sell to each other, causing leaked “private” data to accrete and spread in essentially a viral fashion.

The resulting dataset over even short periods (< 1 yr) time is comparable to a total datadump, including an accurate social graph. A “very specific pivacy concern” it is not.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#490

Post by weaksauce »

adamiscool8 wrote: post #482
weaksauce wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. permission for one. > The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, 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 butt…

You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

> You're missing the point.

I think you are the one missing the point.

> The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models.

Yes, this was a political app, downloaded by people motivated to get obama to be the president. They shared that info willingly to the obama campaign. The obama campaign used that information to suggest "hey man, we need help in texas and you know someone that might be able to help us. Can you do us a solid and send them some of this info?" Nothing I have seen suggests that they did anything untoward with the information voluntarily and directly shared with the campaign. They used it to suggest people to share the message to. And they did any action with the direct permission of the people using the political app.

> It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

Not even a little bit. The Koger fellow used the data he harvested from those psych profiles and also got the friends information that the people taking those "tests" doubtfully wanted them to have. If I take a silly test that is a facebook app I would not expect them to datamine my friends to later sell that information off to a political campaigning firm to later use for a political campaign that they may not have wanted it to have. If trump had used an app that did the same as obama I would have had no issue with it. he didn't, and I do.

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