How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked

I think that's a fair point, but I question if it's an apt comparison to the situation with some big players of the surveillance economy.

Let me make that a bit more convoluted for you:

Let's say, very hypothetically, that you, like most of the general population suck at things technological and just switch off mentally when someone mentions phrases like "social graph" or "Javascript", and I'm a semi-psychopath who plans to make a fortune by scamming dumb fucks like you. I take on my mask of sanity and most endearing nerd T-shirt and appear at your door to give you a FREE robot servant. Except to keep it FREE the robot servant is going to pause what it's doing sometimes and whisper subliminal messages to you from my sponsors. But you're not afraid of stuff like that are you? And all you have to do is sign my brick of legal documents in complexified Legalese, which of course you don't have mental stamina to read through. "But, hey", you think "people are nice and trustworthy and if there was something really bad going on here that would be illegal and punished, and besides what's the worst thing that could happen", and I get your signature and you got your FREE robot.

If you had bothered to learn complexified Legalese and do your reading you'd have noticed you also just approved that the robot spends it's spare computation cycles surreptitiously watching you and getting to know you, and one of the many things it does is it glances over your shoulder when you get your porn fix, and in collaboration with my team of highly trained robot masters it concludes not only that you're into furry porn but also which particular furries really push your buttons. We catalogue this away for future use. Years later, in spite of your technical ineptitude, but maybe let's say because you're really a good people person, you've risen to become the highly respected mayor of your town. Then a business partner of mine who used to work covert operations over at CI6 but now has switched to lucrative private contracting, comes to me asking for the files collected from your robot for a influence gig he's taken on from Toxico, and I sell them to him the data for a suitably juicy sum for a man of you stature. Ex-CI6-guy studies the file with interest and uses it to select two skilled furries he can tell you'll be incapable of resisting and sends them to cross your path at a representation dinner. They very convincingly persuade you to have them over the next weekend your wife's away, and it's WILD(!).

And of course "your" robot is carefully documenting the whole thing, which I also sell to my partner, for an additional cut of the profits from the Toxico job. While you still wrestle with your conscience about whether last weekend was really a Good Thing, someone appears at your office door to propose you use your influence to switch the city energy supply over to a 90-year contract on Toxico's patented owl-burning power plant (with levels of carcinogen emissions they'll never be able to get us for!). Incidentally that someone at your office door has probably also been chosen according to your robot file to be a kind of person you'd have a harder-than-usual time to say no to for one reason or the other, but in the end you still refuse because despite some personal weaknesses you're a decent man, who values and protects your town, it's people and it's environmental surroundings. And then you're informed that someone may have videos you'd really rather not become public. Unless you agree to the Toxico proposal and do so generously, your comfy little life may meet with a sudden and radical change of fortune.

So who's to "blame" in this scenario? I'm sure there's a point where ignorance should be illegal, but I think generally society looks with some leniency on getting deceived. And winding back to the early parts, what does this do for your moral rights to have me remove your data? It was right there on page 200 in crisp, clear letters that you allowed me to watch your porn surfing habits and share that data and derived works with selected partners. You agreed to this! We haven't done anything that we're not allowed to do according to the contract.

...

There's an occasional thing in UK politics where some public figure X has a go at another figure Y for having offensive ads on their website, without realising about the targeting which means the ads are driven by their own search results.

We can freely infer things just from reading his own Twitter feed. Such as the silence of the Salisbury poisoning vs. the instant reaction to other UK terrorist incidents.

And we can't blame the companies because we agreed our data to be monitored when we installed the apps and granted permissions. Facebook and Google has taken so much of our data and knows more about our behavior than we ourselves. Even if I demand my data to be removed I don't know if they will 'actually' delete it.

I find it hard to believe that the American public is up in arms about someone violating Facebook's terms of use.