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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#311

Post by spike021 »

victor106 wrote: post #184

This is such a well crafted statement not from Zuck's heart but from a PR team that has been working over time. Shame on you FB and Zuck you Suck. If they are so honest or like to be honest going forward why can't they make it easy to see all my pics and posts that are public? Why can't they make it easy to see who can see what I posted? Which app or user is using my data. They have billions of dollars and can't impl…

>If they are so honest or like to be honest going forward why can't they make it easy to see all my pics and posts that are public? Why can't they make it easy to see who can see what I posted? Which app or user is using my data. They have billions of dollars and can't implement simple features?

It's fairly simple to do any of those things? You can even view your profile as certain friends to make sure everybody can see what you want them to see, or vice versa.

There's also always been an app list in the privacy settings, IIRC, where you can revoke their permissions and whatnot. I know this because I've had to delete permissions for dumb apps I installed when I didn't know any better.

It's not difficult at all.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#312

Post by netsharc »

taurath wrote: post #56
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…

Yeah it’s like “oh gosh, they violated our terms of service by pulling 50 million users info! We must send them a sternly worded email with a checkbox to confirm they they won’t do it again!”. It’s inconceivable that there aren’t larger exfiltrations of user data that have taken place - how would they even know?

I'm guessing teenaged Mark always left a porn site saying "aw shucks, I'm not 18 yet, it tells me here I can't enter.".

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#315

Post by daodedickinson »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #303
downandout wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why they admit that they'd audit the pre-2014 apps now when NYT and Guardian/Observer broke the news? I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012. I guess when you have Chris Hughes working for your campaign, it's easier to keep things under wraps and spin what does become public as a positive. It was only after Trump won that this kind of use o…

> when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012 Obama's campaign said they were scraping for academic purposes, downloaded a bunch of data and then lied about deleting it? There are multiple levels of B.S. when it comes to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Only one finds comparison in the 2008 or 2012 races (on either side).

They didn't tell Facebook what they were doing and then, when they took way more than Facebook was expecting, Facebook was okay with it because of politics or being too afraid to oppose it. Then the all political opposition was powerless to complete with that efficiency of targeting and had to pull off a heist to even the playing field before the politics of social media company executives became the only relevant politics.

It's not like academics are any morally superior to anyone else anyway so I don't think Facebook should be handing that stuff out to anyone.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#316

Post by mudil »

The whole operating model of the company based on invasion of privacy. Blatant invasion of privacy and data collection by Google and FB is a national security issue. No entity should be allowed to snoop on free citizens more than KGB has ever dreamed about. Orwellian!

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#317

Post by seem_2211 »

gwicks56 wrote: post #54

1000 word statement. Number of times the word "advertising" was mentioned: 0 Facebook continues to pretend it's business model is unicorns and kittens, not selling user data for money.

All I want is Mark Zuckerberg to say is "this isn't a community, we're a multi billion dollar company. We have a pretty cool website where you can do a bunch of stuff, and we mine your personal data (and sell it) to pay for it. Sound like a good deal? We think so."

But no, we've got to pretend Facebook is a touchy-feely community. I get the feeling that Facebook is ashamed of the way they make their billions.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#318

Post by downandout »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #303
downandout wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why they admit that they'd audit the pre-2014 apps now when NYT and Guardian/Observer broke the news? I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012. I guess when you have Chris Hughes working for your campaign, it's easier to keep things under wraps and spin what does become public as a positive. It was only after Trump won that this kind of use o…

> when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012 Obama's campaign said they were scraping for academic purposes, downloaded a bunch of data and then lied about deleting it? There are multiple levels of B.S. when it comes to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Only one finds comparison in the 2008 or 2012 races (on either side).

You're framing this improperly. Prior to 2014, anybody could create an app, and if people authorized it to, it could access some friend data. Your comment reads as if they went and made some special arrangement with Facebook and lied to them saying it was for "academic purposes". That just isn't the case. Every single Facebook user with the ability to write code could do this easily and automatically for the 7 years leading up to the change in 2014.

What Facebook did with the Obama campaign was far worse. No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph. Didn't like Obama and didn't authorize an app to access your and your friends' info? Too bad, your information was still given to them and used to help get him elected. That wasn't a problem for anyone in the press though, because of course, Obama was a Democrat.

edit: I misspoke. There was an app required, but the Obama campaign accessed 190 MILLION profiles, versus 50 million involved in CA. According to [1]:

"The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent...A former [Obama] campaign director, Carol Davidsen, tweeted that Facebook "was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.""

[1] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#319

Post by neuronexmachina »

hvass wrote: post #32

Is it clear exactly what 'data' was actually obtained by CA on those millions of people? (I am referring specifically to the millions, not the original subset of 200,000 or so). Is it all public and friends-visible activity? Or it is basics such as name, email, profile photo, etc.? I cannot find so far addressed in the coverage exactly what kind of information CA have had on a per-person basis. If someone can share c…

The pre-2015 (FB Graph v1.0) API gave apps access to not only all of a user's own data, but also all the friends-only data of their FB friends. This archive.org link shows the sort of information that the Friends API used to provide: https://web.archive.org/web/20130911191323/https:/developers...

This TechCrunch piece from 2015 talks about the reaction to the API access going away: https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

> It was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps. While this let developers build powerful, personalized products, the privacy concerns led Facebook to announce at F8 2014 that it would shut down the Friends data API in a year. Now that time has come, with the forced migration to Graph API v2.0 leading to the friends’ data API shutting down, and a few other changes happening on April 30.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#320

Post by prostoalex »

hendzen wrote: post #219
prostoalex wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most apps that do "Login with Facebook" also support "Login with Google" and sometimes "Login with LinkedIn". The backend ownership issue becomes a bit more complicated. This is even before we get into trust issues most developers would have with Facebook having access to their user data.

The portion of the app that deals with FB data would be hosted at FB, the portion of the app that deals with Google would be hosted at Google, etc. And this is only a problem for applications that pull user data from FB itself, if it was merely using FB for authorization but wasn't actually using any FB profile data, photos, friend lists, etc, than it could all be hosted on a 3rd party server.

So most developers would say "But my FB backend is just a simple proxy / transformation layer that parses the data and sends that to the front end".

Most would be correct - some flows like inviting friends to an app, or showing friends who also happen to use this app (for games, etc.) are so common that they're integrated into the Facebook SDK.

For performance reasons (both on Facebook's end and for the sake of user's experience, just in case his phone moved into a zone with inferior coverage) a fat network request was preferred to multitude of thin small ones - you couldn't really predict when the user would fancy inviting their friends, saving their score, looking at their achievements, or checking out friends who are in same town as them - so a 24-hour cache policy was instituted.

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