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Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

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Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#471

Post by headsoup »

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…

Thanks for the explanations. On the transaction front, what about share trading activity based on Value statements or actions that impact Brand/Goodwill etc? Though the sale of shares is a future transaction, a company could reasonably conclude something like:

We will make X and Y the value statements of our company/brand. If our actions reduce the value of X and Y statements, what will that cost us? This at least would provide a 'rough' starting value, to be reviewed/measured against market response. Do companies already do this? I'd think it important for service/advertising based companies (but I am guessing, I have only couch-potato knowledge).

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#472

Post by __jal »

sigstoat wrote: post #190
__jal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but refuses to appear before the US Congress and sends the company counsel instead. This strikes me as especially interesting. I mean, I'd personally theoretically have my reservations about this congress over and above the average congress, but FaceMark refusing strikes me as a deeply telling datum about how he's thinking about this.

testifying in front of congress is just an opportunity for politicians to win points by kicking you around like a ball. very few people (let alone CEOs) stand to gain anything from it, and corporate counsel is paid to put up with abuse. > ...my reservations about this congress over and above the average congress... ugh, come on. it's not like the whole congress votes on how you're to be treated, and the questions you…

> are free to harangue you all they want

Any exec hauled on the carpet is going to want a drink afterwards. That's not the concern.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#473

Post by eftychis »

mrlala wrote: post #352
heretoo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was about tracking and informed consent, then the illegal ity is there https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-... There was no consent because tracking was not opt-in but opt out. More recently regarding user personal details and lack of consent, again deemed illegal in Germany https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/12/facebook-... The pattern I see is that europe considers faceb…

>There was no consent Voluntarily putting your info on a free site is the consent. Would you also cry "illegal" if HN sold your post history, which they have tied to your IP address, which they can easily link to who you are?

A bit of a nitpick, but the Hackernews post history and comments are publicly available. Most of, if not all, privacy law treats public data differently.

Now the majority of Facebook data, which is visible only to a selected group of individuals, can not contradict privacy laws of a country. Despite whatever agreement you signed. Law trumps user agreements.

As an extreme example I can sign that I give you the right to kill me, but if you do that you have still committed pre-meditated homicide. So it does not matter what Facebook made you sign it is likely they committed (and still do) a crime in most European countries. For the U.S. the waters appear extremely blurry from what I understand... But I can not offer an opinion. If there is a lawyer/ privacy expert to pitch in this discussion that would be nice.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#474

Post by downandout »

Gaelan wrote: post #459
downandout wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CA didn't represent anything to Facebook. They never created an app. They bought data, years later, from Kogan, who had created an app. Kogan violated Facebook policies, but there again, he didn't "misrepresent his identity [or] intentions" to Facebook. You didn't (and still don't) have to represent any intentions to Facebook to create an app. You simply create the app and agree to the platform terms and conditions.…

The "false intentions" here are about the user agreeing to use the app. Obama: "Give us a list of your Facebook friends, and we'll help you contact them about voting for Obama." While the Obama campaign did collect data about friends, this data was voluntarily given to them by users. If the Obama campaign had your Facebook data, it was because one of your friends knowingly and voluntarily gave it to the Obama campaig…

this data was voluntarily given to them by users

It was given to them by the 1 million users that authorized the app. Not the other 189 million (or more) users.

Also, that 190 million figure is probably inaccurate, because there is probably significant overlap in people's friends lists.

According to their own campaign manager, they "sucked out the whole of the social graph" with Facebook's blessings. So they may have actually had more than 190 million, since there are more US users that on Facebook.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#475

Post by downandout »

illumin8 wrote: post #438
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…

> I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012. Citation needed. Everything I've seen indicates Obama's campaign didn't violate the rules: 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 v…

Citation needed.

Sure....coming right up! How about a statement from Obama's former campaign director saying that they "sucked out the whole of the social graph" with Facebook's blessings?

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

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#476

Post by jameslk »

Scraping likes and friend lists is still very easy to do today on Facebook. All of that is pretty out there in the open as long as you have a Facebook account. They can limit their API, but that's really not very consequential with bots and the lax privacy settings most have. But I guess all of this "sounds good".

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#477

Post by xkjkls »

anonnel wrote: post #368
xkjkls wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has cut down more and more on that as they've decided to be an advertising company instead of a platform. The vast majority of their data issues come from pre-2015 when they were still experimenting with their business model. Honestly, at the moment, Facebook has huge economic incentives to keep as much data to itself as possible. Facebook being the only place where you can microtarget to such an extent is a…

Even with their data policies, FB (and any ad platform) enables massive data-mining by the third parties which host the ad exchanges and destinations. And microtargeting can be abused (or just plain used, depending on your perspective) to infer only additional data by incorporating it into the 3P analysis once users click and start loading non-FB content. Microtargeting by its nature leaks information about the targe…

I think there are some pretty large differences in scale between "buying ads to target people with specific attributes and saving the situations where they interact with your ad" and "enabling any application to view all of the information about any friend who has connected with the app user".

I wouldn't argue that micro-targeting can't end up with very specific privacy concerns, but I don't think it's nearly the same scale as "you should probably assume that if you signed up to enable the Graph API on Facebook all information about you prior to 2015 is available to people you probably don't trust".

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#478

Post by quadrangle »

Mahn wrote: post #456

Does no one realize that this a bed that we have made ourselves? That the sea of data that the large five swim in is product of the modern deal that society has with tech, which no one forced us to make? Why is everyone happy to blame Facebook for what is fundamentally modern society's fault? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Everyone realizes that, and it's irrelevant. You know, all the Trump voters who were swayed by propaganda campaigns actually voted for Trump. All the depressed kids who get convinced to buy some product by crafty advertising actually go and buy the product.

> No one forced us

A totally useless sentiment. People weren't generated all this data with benefit of hindsight and understanding. Effectively ZERO users EVER read the terms-of-service even, let alone understand the ramifications of giving up all this personal data.

It's hard enough to get people to save enough buffer to get through predictable crises that come up. Get them to be thoughtful and responsible in the face of a system designed to hide every aspect of concern and hesitation??

Facebook is one of several actors here, but it's complete nonsense to suggest that they are just a normal, innocent player in a internet world where people just do things a certain way because of culture. Facebook actively designed things for certain results.

It's not like Facebook is solely to blame, but the situation is NOTHING like you describe. Facebook wasn't just a neutral tool like email protocol and people just used it.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#479

Post by krick »

I know that it's unreasonable to hope that Facebook will die because of such minor nuisance, but I still hate how soothing it sounds.

Anyways, what really makes me wonder is that it's such a huge scandal right now, every newspaper does updates twice a day, society is "alert", Facebook loses 60B in capitalization over night. It's a big deal! And yet it seems there's nothing new here, nothing we didn't know a year ago. In fact, I remember hearing about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and USA presidential elections/brexit voting a year ago from Jordan Peterson, and psychology professors aren't typically the ones to hear tech-related news first.

So what gives? Why now?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#480

Post by manigandham »

There seem to be two very different issues:

1) Data acquisition. 2) Using such fine-grained psychographic data to politically influence voters at massive scale.

Cambridge Analytica was clearly outside the lines for #1, but they clearly are not the only organization that does such precise campaigns to influence people.

I think #2 is much more important as data is not just available from facebook (although it's an easy source) and working in adtech, this is basically the pitch for all the modern advertising companies that use psychographic and intent targeting. It really goes back to the wider ad industry having very little oversight while selling mass influence to anyone with a credit card... perhaps we should solve that first.

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