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Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

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Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#151

Post by _5nni »

tmuir wrote: post #64
makomk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's really the problem. I mean, Obama's 2012 campaign scraped the data of Facebook friends of people who'd signed into the campaign website in order to figure out the most effective way to convince those friends to vote for him via microtargeting and other techniques, in particular working out which friends their volunteers could most easily convince to vote for him. We're not just talking about gene…

Ah yes, that old classic, whataboutism. You'd have us believe Cambridge Analytica was some vendor the Trump Campaign used sparingly, had very loose connections with, and saw limited success with. Yet Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon outfit. Steve Bannon, the campaign manager, and senior adviser to the president. Or at least it was during the time period in question. Steve Bannon was THE integra…

According to ABC News, the Trump campaign considered using CA as a hedge bet in-case the RNC wouldn't share its data. The campaign ultimately rejected their bid for the general election [0].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o...

As for the parent, people love to cry about whataboutism, but it is useful to see how people respond when something is done by their favored politician versus an opponent.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#152

Post by jdavis703 »

sithadmin wrote: post #6
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.

>The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach Is it even clear that there was a 'breach' of any kind that Facebook was responsible for? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like the chain of events is: 1.) Third party (Aleksandr Kogan) creates 'personality quiz' app, Facebook users opt-in to share information from their profile 2.) Aleksandr Kogan hands off data gathered by the app to Cambridge Analytica…

My understanding is the people who answered the quiz were a fraction of the 50 million people's whose data was "used." The quiz was a small sample so they could run their analytics on the larger data set.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#153

Post by swat535 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.

Can someone please explain to me what the breach is here?

As far as I can tell this was just an app using the API as intended. Except they did some additional modeling on their backend to organize/profile users.

They abused the TOS for sure, but was there an actual security breach?

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#154

Post by toufka »

darawk wrote: post #5

Why are people calling this a data breach? As I understand it, CA just scraped the data from users who authorized their app to do so. Am I missing something here?

So apparently right now a company that is not contractually bound to Facebook has 50M full profiles from Facebook's API.

From Facebook's perspective, what happens when if csv file gets released publicly. Or a government official or law-enforcement officer sees it. It apparently has >50M real-names connected with political affiliation, gender, sexuality, home town, etc. It is an email attachment away from getting released by a whistle-blower...

So even if the data was taken with scraped without unauthorized privileges, what happens when that data becomes public. Has there (yet) been a public leak of millions of private facebook-like or gmail-like profiles? Sure emails, sure PII, but ever 50M people's admitted sexuality linked to their real name leaked to The Pirate Bay?

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#155

Post by themihai »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #39
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.

Probably worth rehashing the infamous messages: > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks. A cynic would interpret the current state of the world to suggest that Zuckerberg, and by extension Facebook, considers a large segment of the world population "Dumb fucks" http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

>> A cynic would interpret the current state of the world to suggest that Zuckerberg, and by extension Facebook, considers a large segment of the world population "Dumb fucks"

I wish I could contradict you but I can't...a large majority of the world population is exactly like that.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#157

Post by cinquemb »

toufka wrote: post #154
darawk wrote: post #5

Why are people calling this a data breach? As I understand it, CA just scraped the data from users who authorized their app to do so. Am I missing something here?

So apparently right now a company that is not contractually bound to Facebook has 50M full profiles from Facebook's API. From Facebook's perspective, what happens when if csv file gets released publicly. Or a government official or law-enforcement officer sees it. It apparently has >50M real-names connected with political affiliation, gender, sexuality, home town, etc. It is an email attachment away from getting rele…

I remember when I could make unauthenticated api calls to public posts useds made for their phone numbers…

I'm wondering if I should start a seed of the ~300-500 million useds info in JSON files (I was only interested in name, sex, profile photo) I was able to get from facebook via the thousands of credentials people check in on public repos that everyone else can still do today (beyond the name, sex and profile photos)… but I've been hording it to start up in Indonesia the project I shut down in the US (seeding profiles used to crowd source fur thing information about people like geoip location graphs of people interested in them, pseudo anonymous messaging if you have their email [acting as an email forwarder], and other personality information, and having it publicly accessible by default and/with an api). I'd be willing to give it away to any who ask though as long as they build something with it.

In the past me and my friend monetized with adsense, but now were going to mine monero while people engage with the site and give up information about their friends/enemies/lovers.

We half joked about being an "open source" NSA/BND/[insert ones favorite SIGINT acronym] or what it would be like if everyone had access to the data to leverage for their own ends instead of the privileged few do today.

Thank you "open graph", oauth and the weakest link, other developers and the apathy of most people.

Either way, this genie is not going back into the bottle unless you can convince billions of useds of platforms like facebook to exercise some discretion over things they, for the most part, don't care about nor choose to understand on a technical level.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#158

Post by mda »

medyadaily wrote: post #32

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish…

"And many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish"

The ban of other languages than Turkish came after 1980 military coup and as far as I know the law abandoned in 1991. I don't think there are any cases where someone was imprisoned solely because they spoke Kurdish.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#159

Post by tmuir »

jerf wrote: post #131
tmuir wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism Claiming that Obama's campaigns were the true microtargeters, and that if we are angry at the actions of generic people, we must then be angry at Obama, because he did these very things. That is the Whataboutism, or tu quoque fallacy. In lieu of anything to back that claim up, I'll just stick with Hutchins Razor, and reply "Nuh Uh."

Accusations of "whataboutism" are becoming worse than the sin they are trying to prevent. It shouldn't be used as a way of just flushing away the fact that "your side" may also do bad things. It's especially bad when it is used like "A did this bad thing." "Well, Not-A did this bad thing too." "That's just whataboutism... what's important is that A did this bad thing." Well, it must not be that bad if it doesn't both…

I guess I've become hardened by the general principle underlying this tactic of debate. There are plenty of people who employ it as their singular or at least favored tactic to nearly every debate, and don't for one second convince me of their good faith. It is especially common to see with respect to Hillary Clinton. It is nearly universally used as discussion ender. If the whatabouter can change the subject to their debater's hypocrisy, nearly any reasonable question can be simply ignored wholesale, by repeatedly bringing up the false equivalency over and over.

So you can blame the countless people employing this tactic maliciously, including the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, for any disproportionate skepticism I apply to its use.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#160

Post by mnm1 »

medyadaily wrote: post #32

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish…

For the government we have the bill of rights amongst many protections, but for corporations like Facebook, we have literally nothing. Can't even sue them in court unless you're a millionaire. And much of the public supports their operation and exploitation in the name of money.

If only there was a way to create a bill of rights to protect us against corporations... if only there was a force more powerful than them that could keep them in check ... Maybe we'd give this force a monopoly on violence so they could protect us from the fucking assholes at Facebook... If only /s

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