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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you actually talked to a 19yr old recently? Serious question. Because you seem to lack serious perspective about how a 19yo acts, thinks, or behaves when adults aren’t around. Also can you explain to me how people submitting personal information to a random form from a college kid is not dumb? Facebook the product didn’t even exist at that point by the way and the information collected was more like email addres…

> Have you actually talked to a 19yr old recently?

Yes, most of my intake into the military were 18 and 19. As a society we consider them adult enough to send them into harm's way. I was the Old Man at 31.

Your defence seems to be based on the premise that 19 year olds are children. No aspect of law or society concurs with that.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#552

If he wants to know what the general public thinks or has to say, he should do a Reddit AMA. That would be the best response IMO.

have you ever looked at the demographics of reddit? hardly represents the general public in the US, let alone the world.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#553
post #59
post #7

The 2007 and 2013 paragraphs are pretty scary. Your friend takes a personality quiz from a random app developer and then that developer gets access to _your_ personal data. Obviously Zuckerberg doesn't go into detail about what kind of data that was, but if they needed to rein that in in 2014... I imagine it was potentially pretty personal.

My guess is anything your friends can see. If your friends can see your posts, the app can see your posts. If your friends can see your birthdate, the app can see your birthdate. And so on, so forth.

This was exactly the case. Any private personal information not shared with the app-connected user, was not exposed to the app.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Unless you have some sort of background in this area, I don't know why I should trust you. Your argument is - yeah sure, this is a bogus exercise, and then you are expecting people to fall in line with you. That is not how you build trust or win debates. I am hopeful they will find something useful.

On this forum you are sorrounded by people with backgrounds in data storage and networking. Any one of them will tell you there can be no reliable “forensic” assurance the data was not copied somewhere by any number of methods, even for a recent timeframe, let alone 5 years ago. It’s a ridiculous idea on its face.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not, I recommend you to create your company account in Facebook and be horrified on the amount of information that you can collect from anyone.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#556

The issue here is not some developer gaining a temporary snapshot of a few million records, it is that Facebook _itself_ is doing and productizing real-time psychological profiling on billions of people.

This was revealed years ago. Facebook was literally running experiments on people on the site, without their consent, to see how they reacted when their feed was made either more negative or more positive. Most people seemed to not care when this was revealed which is, in my opinion, just an indication of the level of addiction people have to the service. You can find a plenty of hits searching for 'facebook run psyc…

> which is, in my opinion, just an indication of the level of addiction people have to the service

I don't think that's it. I think the problem is that what was revealed was far too abstract for most people to fundamentally grasp.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually talked to a 19yr old recently? Serious question. Because you seem to lack serious perspective about how a 19yo acts, thinks, or behaves when adults aren’t around. Also can you explain to me how people submitting personal information to a random form from a college kid is not dumb? Facebook the product didn’t even exist at that point by the way and the information collected was more like email addres…

> Have you actually talked to a 19yr old recently? Yes, most of my intake into the military were 18 and 19. As a society we consider them adult enough to send them into harm's way. I was the Old Man at 31. Your defence seems to be based on the premise that 19 year olds are children. No aspect of law or society concurs with that.

Law and society at one point were ok with kids under 15 working in mines and factories. Just because we consider 19 year olds right now 'adult enough' doesn't mean that this won't change with e.g. new scientific discoveries. For example neuroscientists believe that your brain is fully developed around 25 years old: http://www.businessinsider.com/age-brain-matures-at-everythi... (random link but there is more literature on this topic)

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#558
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The distinction you make of OFA being on the up and up and CA not is valid bullshit. plain and simple. you are falsely making those two equivalent.

If my Facebook friend installed the Obama app, their campaign had access to and collected my information.

Do I have a right to be upset about this or not?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#559

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…

"They're not a product company, they're a distraction company." Correction, they are a surveillance company. Need I remind everyone of Google and FB's In-Q-Tel CIA partners in crime? They just figured out a way for everyone to willingly report on themselves, but not just on themselves, on others too! FB is bad and should collapse like every other dotcom boom-bust that uses and abuses it's users... but the difference…

> The problem is that so many of them use the exact same model and a few years later are the ones dying due to lack of integrity.

Can you substantiate this claim of tech product companies getting large/successful and then “dying due to lack of integrity”?

I haven’t noticed the pattern but if there is one I’m sure interested in the evidence. (And in what sense do they lack integrity?)

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#560

I just don't get it. I don't get the enormous backlash over this. Users give away their data to a company, the company sells that data to advertisers (or sells ads and targets the ads according to data), and the users can continue using the service they enjoy for free. This was the contract you agreed to when you clicked the sign up button. I don't get why people are mad at Zuckerberg and not themselves! People act l…

For one, I don't think most people are acutely aware that this is what is going on. The HN reading crowd is the enlightened technical elite. We know that this is the transaction which occurs whenever we do something for "free" on the internet. Regular people may wonder why something as sophisticated as this is free, but are not aware that the cost is privacy. They just think "oh, this is a cool free fun thing. Awesom…

> Regular people may wonder why something as sophisticated as this is free, but are not aware that the cost is privacy.

Precisely. Acting astonished at why people are upset just shows a disconnect from the reality of the masses.

Free, valuable products are all over the internet: Google Docs, Trello, WhatsApp, Waze, Spotify...just to barely scratch the surface.

It’s not obvious to most users that the costs of some of these includes privacy violation / spying on the user.

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