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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#441

Post by mhaymo »

nabla9 wrote: post #84
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.

It was standard crisis management PR sermon. "learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together". You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

He laid out what happened, and several concrete actions they're taking to prevent it from recurring. That's not boilerplate.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#442

Post by illumin8 »

mirimir wrote: post #362
detaro wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph Source? All I can find is a scheme where they prompted people to sign in to a campaign site and grabbed the friend data that way. Icky as hell, but it's not obvious why that's "even worse" than CA.

It does seem like the Obama campaigns got preferential access to Facebook data. Data for even more people than CA got. And perhaps the Clinton campaign did as well, or at least got access to the older data. What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitte…

There's a lot of bad information in this thread.

https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

"I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work."

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#443

Post by zjaffee »

dalbasal wrote: post #273
plusbryan wrote: post #186

"It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data... this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data." I wonder why the Facebook of pre-2014 thought that this was an acceptable level of data sharing to developers? Did they trust that all platform developers would forever have good intentions? Or perhaps they felt the data being collecte…

At a guess, I think they didn't really realize how serious this data is at scale. After all this was (I think, anyone know the actual details?) fairly mundane data. Name, age, last check-in date, pages you like, public figures you follow, posts you liked, friends, stuff you're interested in. MySpace/LinkedIn/etc made this stuff public, on FB it was mostly semi-private. The reason this whole thing became a scandal is…

That last point is super critical, the real finding from this is that zuckerberg could very easily leverage his power to massively shape global politics in a way no person has ever come close to doing before. People talk about the dangers of fox news, but Murdock doesn't even come close to the level of power that Zuckerberg has.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#444

Post by Gaelan »

IMO, what CA did was more of a phishing attack than anything. People voluntarily gave the "personality quiz" access to their data, and that was abused. The reaction to the data being given to CA wasn't big enough, but beyond that I'm not sure I see what Facebook did wrong.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#445

Post by dustingetz »

shripadk wrote: post #415
headsoup wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't intangibles exactly that, though perhaps a little broader than specifying particular moral behaviours? Goodwill, Brand (which contains value statements), IP, etc, they're given financial value. Perhaps these don't influence shareholder/public actions as much as they could, but the measures are there at least.

> Aren't intangibles exactly that, though perhaps a little broader than specifying particular moral behaviours? Intangibles can be bought and sold as they aren't attached to anything emotional. Moral behaviours/values, if embedded into the books, have to be through a transaction. How do you transact moral behaviour/values? That is the question I have. > Goodwill, Brand (which contains value statements), IP, etc, they…

This is a good post. 1/ I am not sure if it matters that social good is hard to value. Even a sloppy metric, even just a boolean – e.g. environment neutral vs negative – serves the purpose, because by simply existing, people can point at it, tweet about it, start to ask questions, apply peer pressure. A couple good catch phrases is enough to get elected. 2/ I think we probably will figure out how to value things like this in the future. A friend of mine suggested that applying options pricing theory might be interesting - air pollution doesn't have a value today, but it could have a very high value someday in a future worst-case scenario. But that's all above my head and I see that you are much better versed on accounting than me.

(I see now our replies crossed so will leave this and stop posting :)

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#446

Post by downandout »

weaksauce wrote: post #434
downandout wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 18…

> That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. permission for one. > The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a butt…

permission for one.

Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people.

Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit

According to their own campaign manager, they obtained the entire US social graph, and Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. The 190 million number may actually be low.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#447

Post by philipodonnell »

mhaymo wrote: post #441
nabla9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was standard crisis management PR sermon. "learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together". You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

He laid out what happened, and several concrete actions they're taking to prevent it from recurring. That's not boilerplate.

I think people are sort of doubtful they will really follow through whole-heartedly with what Zuck wrote, because that's sort of their MO.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#448

Post by downandout »

illumin8 wrote: post #440
downandout wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 18…

You're completely wrong about this: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 "I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work."

See above quote from their own campaign manager. Here's a link to her own tweet on this issue if you don't believe me or the publication I linked to above:

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#449

Post by sorokod »

joering2 wrote: post #276
munk-a wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, actually selling their user data would put them out of business... Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

You meant: why sell the cow once, if you can continue to sell milk indefinitely :)

Because cows don't provide milk indefinitely?

Because you get more money for a cow than milk over a long time period and can use the cash to expand the cow-selling business?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#450

Post by jseliger »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #35

If they're serious about this, and I'm leaning toward they aren't really serious about it, this will affect a lot of startups, specifically in advertising, but probably a lot of mobile apps as well: “First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious a…

I'm leaning toward they aren't really serious about it

I've said variations on this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438362, but FB will get serious about it when users stop using it.

Until that time, everyone can complain, but the concept of "revealed preferences" is relevant. Do people actually care? If so, they'll change their behavior, FB will likely notice, and changes will happen.

People have been complaining about FB and privacy since practically day 0. Throughout that entire period, FB has only become more popular.

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