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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#491

Post by heretoo »

nine_k wrote: post #486
eftychis wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That depends on the law in each individual legal region (most probably country). For example, I believe Euthanasia is legal in some European countries.

Even the opposite can be true. Life saving medication may be illegal in one country but another provides it without restriction.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#492

Post by austinjp »

joering2 wrote: post #276
munk-a wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, actually selling their user data would put them out of business... Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

You meant: why sell the cow once, if you can continue to sell milk indefinitely :)

Sell the premuim quality cow to buy two crappy cows. Sell their crappy milk dirt cheap to undercut the premium quality milk market. Invest, repeat, and race to the bottom.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#493

Post by munk-a »

sorokod wrote: post #449
joering2 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You meant: why sell the cow once, if you can continue to sell milk indefinitely :)

Because cows don't provide milk indefinitely? Because you get more money for a cow than milk over a long time period and can use the cash to expand the cow-selling business?

I think this thread has jumped over the moon...

(And that original metaphor was a bit mismatched, actually.)

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#494

Post by eftychis »

heretoo wrote: post #491
nine_k wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That depends on the law in each individual legal region (most probably country). For example, I believe Euthanasia is legal in some European countries. Even the opposite can be true. Life saving medication may be illegal in one country but another provides it without restriction.

Kind of sums up my reply. Generally, if you know or there is enough suspicion the cure is going to harm or kill one and euthanasia is out of the picture then you are liable. That's why the whole process exists about medical trials. One nice window here is that you can in general experiment on yourself (people have and are doing that). Depends on the framework, but good point.

Anyways, my point here is you can not override law (or you shouldn't be able to).

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#495

Post by anonnel »

product50 wrote: post #483
anonnel wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are well aware there is no way to assure they haven’t copied data 5 years ago. Pointing that out with rightful indigence is not “being a hater”. (which isn’t a trope that belongs in reasonable conversation)

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#496

Post by adamiscool8 »

weaksauce wrote: post #490
adamiscool8 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Again, you're missing the point. The people who SIGNED UP for the Cambridge Analytica app, or the Obama For America app agreed to share their own information with the app. In doing so, they ALSO agreed to share data on their entire friends list with the app -- Facebook had no restrictions in place on this at the time.

Those people who were opted-in by proxy, i.e. the friends you sold out, may not have wanted the Obama campaign or Cambridge Analytica to get that info, but they never had a choice!

Both apps (well, OFA for sure, CA allegedly) took data legitimately provided to them, used it to feed predictive models, and then actioned marketing around exploiting those learnings.

>We released this tool for the Obama Campaign in August 2012. Over the next 3 months, we had over a million supporters authorize our app, giving us potential access to over 200 million unique people in their social network. For each campaign activity (persuasion, volunteering, voter registration, get-out-the-vote), we ran predictive models on this friend network to determine who to target. We then constructed an “influence graph” that matched existing supporters with potential targets. For each supporter, we provided a customized list of key friends with whom to share different types of content. [0]

Literally the ONLY difference, other than the political leanings, is Koger's app was then "acquired" by CA, in breach of Facebook's TOS. Which again, is something that happened probably ALL THE TIME in the pre-2014 wild west of Facebook app mining.

[0] http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-so...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#497

Post by [deleted] »

stuntkite wrote: post #229
radicaldreamer wrote: post #35

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 worked on an app eight years ago for a woman that went to Harvard with zuck. I only mention that because she did. Every. Day. Eventually they had me do a Facebook integration and when I saw how easy it was to escalate the permissions I was horrified. I was an inexperienced developer at the time and wasn’t calling the shots. We saved everything. The lead devs laughed about the policy that straight up said it was our…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#498

Post by belltaco »

downandout wrote: post #436
codezero wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collec…

the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? No. An independent developer had an app many years ago, recorded data from that app, and then sold that data to CA years after the fact. That developer did in fact violate Facebook's developer platform policies by selling the data, but CA had nothing to do with the app or what was represented to the people using it when they installed it…

Didn't CA report to fb that the data was deleted when in fact it was not?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#499

Post by BookmarkSaver »

downandout wrote: post #475
illumin8 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Citation needed. Sure....coming right up! How about a statement from Obama's former campaign director saying that they "sucked out the whole of the social graph" with Facebook's blessings? https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

...

That doesn't prove what you are saying. "sucked out the whole of the social graph" is a non-technical statement that doesn't have an explicit meaning, nor is it specified what user data they were scraping.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#500

Post by downandout »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #499
downandout wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Sure....coming right up! How about a statement from Obama's former campaign director saying that they "sucked out the whole of the social graph" with Facebook's blessings? https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

... That doesn't prove what you are saying. "sucked out the whole of the social graph" is a non-technical statement that doesn't have an explicit meaning, nor is it specified what user data they were scraping.

Look later in the thread. The estimate is that Obama took data from about 190 million profiles, about 189 million of which gave his campaign no explicit access to their data, and about half of whom would have explicitly objected to Obama’s use of their data had they known about it.

You might think “well that’s egregious, but the rules at the time allowed it”. Unfortunately, even that isn’t true. Obama’s app did not play by the rules. The Facebook developer platform rules at the time stated, essentially, that you could not use the data you gained access to through your apps for any purpose outside of the operation of your apps. In other words, you weren’t allowed to create an app that claims it just sends a message to your friends about how wonderful Obama is, and then take the friend data you gain access to through that app and use it for the targeting of political advertising and/or campaign strategy, which is by all accounts precisely what they did. So they broke the same rules that Kogan did, just on a much larger scale, and with Facebook’s tacit approval.

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