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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#511

Post by ilkan »

prostoalex wrote: post #149
danso wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could aggressively pursue enforcement and punitive measures. It's not about preventing everything that could possibly go awry, but making it well-known in the developer community that Facebook/Platform has no problem shutting you down if you egregiously break the rules.

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…

From what I've seen, tech companies tend to be understaffed on enforcement and compliance, relative to their user reach. Was the "certification" anything more than a checkbox in an emailed Word doc? I expect that's one area where they could improve their diligence. I would argue that if you have a high volume advertiser who has already broken a TOS and continues to use the platform, that type of hands-off certification is deliberately negligent. Anyway, we'll find out more details from their FB account manager in the coming months.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#513

Post by noisy_boy »

askafriend wrote: post #432
croshan wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about the same guy who said: > Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard > Zuck: Just ask > Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS > [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks If you actually do think he means well, you're a very nice person. Or incr…

Stop repeating this meme. It's not productive and doesn't help drive the conversation forward in any way. He said those things when he was 19 years old and Facebook was still a random side project in college. And yes people were indeed "dumb fucks" to give a random college kid with a side project their personal information. If you went around Walmart and asked people for their SSNs with no value proposition, then the…

Exactly. He was 19, didn't have a army of PR/lawyers acting as filters between his mouth and brain. Now his words (especially crisis-time statements) are shaped by a team of professionals. I think I would pay more attention to the former to get an insight into his "real" thoughts.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#514

Post by branchless »

Symbiote wrote: post #337
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…

It's not clear to me how much, if any, of the work was done in the United Kingdom or by British companies. If the are companies in the UK, or people working in the UK, the sharing or retention of data may have been illegal under British law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998

The UK won't do much:

http://www.bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/20/scl-a-very-briti...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#515

Post by rsuelzer »

I am glad he said this. I developed an app that would scan your friends to see where they worked and if there was an on going union organizing campaign at their workplace, users could then message their friends with information on how to got involved. It was clear in the TOS that the information could not be stored except to enhance the application, which in my case involved caching. They obviously realized this feature was being abused and turned it off and thus broke my app. People are making a huge deal all of the sudden out of a feature that was hardly a secret for the last 7 years.

Edit: this feature was also heavily used by the Obama campaign in 2012 and I would venture to guess was designed at their request.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#516

Post by ilkan »

nappy-doo wrote: post #324
kbenson wrote: post #254

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.

There were black hat scrapers in 2013-ish that enabled affiliate marketers to enter a FB page or public group,and export all the commenters' and likers' names, handles, numeric ID's, locations, emails, ages and a few other things to a CSV.

I assume their scraper was more in depth. If you had friend-type permissions back then you could perhaps see their posts and shares. You'd need post and share content to run text analysis, figure out their hot buttons based on language and frequency, sort them into groups and then target then.

Affiliate marketers could also upload lists of unique user ID's (like the FB group members scraped above) for specific ad campaigns, y'know, disguised hookup sites, skin cream credit card rebill offers, etc.

Back then, many of the privacy options were deeply hidden, obscure, changed names a couple times a year or were unavailable.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#517

Post by vokep »

weaksauce wrote: post #508
adamiscool8 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Obam…

The point you are missing is that there was no cambridge analytica app and nobody opted into it an app that doesn't and didn't exist. They opted into a completely different app that datamined it for completely unrelated purposes and then, much later, sold off to CA which used it to target people. one was on the up and up and one was CA. Again, if trump did what obama did on the level it would have been fair game. the…

The point you're missing is most affected users didn't download anything, and were simply friends of someone who did. (OFA or Krogers app) The distinction you make of OFA being on the up and up and CA not is valid, but doesn't mean suddenly OFA is on a completely different level. There still was a massive amount of data sucked up without consent.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#518

Post by jedikv »

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…

>When you singup for Facebook, you agree that anything you post might be shared with others on the platform.

There's no consent on behalf of the friends if one shares information about their friends to an app. Consent is given directly

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#520

Post by mygo »

dfxm12 wrote: post #70
joelrunyon wrote: post #19

Anyone else remember Beacon? This was how FB has always designed to work from the beginning. They've just been toying with the PR ways to say it to make people accept it without thinking. The election woke people up. I found this from 2011 when they shut it down as a "mistake." ( https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2011/11/our-commitment-to-the-f... ). Unfortunately, it looks like they removed the launch release - but it wo…

This was how FB has always designed to work from the beginning Not exactly. In all fairness, as Zuck points out, this is a key part of the story, and in theory, why this is different: In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent. This raises the question of what Fa…

Thanks for playing into the story that Facebook created to set the conversation.

This was openly covered last year by BBC when they interviewed Trump's digital campaign manager at the time Theresa Hong [interview linked]. The campaign spent $16M on Facebook. Understandably, Facebook gave them the white glove treatment, even had their own employees embedded in Project Alamo (the headquarters of the campaign's digital arm).

But today Facebook claims they had no idea who one of their multi-million-dollar clients in 2015-2016 were. That it was just some random quiz-making hacker dude selling data to some other random company.

https://twitter.com/bbcstories/status/896752720522100742?lan...

This piece of work posted today by Facebook is what we call damage control. Don't expect the truth from it-- it will contain truths, but it will not be the truth of the matter. And don't let it set your dialogue, man.

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