Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-suspended-account-whistleblower-exposed-221429183.html

by rock57 • 8 years ago

683 162 8 years ago

mtgx• 8 years ago

Watch how they say it was an error, if this blows up. Just watch.

jackhack• 8 years ago

Somewhere at Facebook is a poor Winston Smith, throwing scraps of paper down the memory hole and editing yesterday's headlines. (edit: And at google, and reddit, and youtube, and ...)

thrillgore• 8 years ago

Guys, you suspended the wrong account.

JumpCrisscross7• 8 years ago

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.

sithadmin2• 8 years ago

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, violating Facebook TOS

3.) Whistleblower (Christopher Wylie) lets world know that (2) happened

4.) Media / public gets out pitchforks and blames incident on Facebook

It really seems like Aleksandr Kogan, not Facebook, is the problem here.

cycrutchfield2• 8 years ago

The app was allowed to scrape friend data as well, meaning that many more people’s information got exposed. That is on facebook.

JumpCrisscross7• 8 years ago

It really seems like Aleksandr Kogan, not Facebook, is the problem here

Kogan probably breached the terms he agreed to with Facebook. But fifty million people trusted Facebook with their data and, when asked in their privacy settings, said they didn't want it shared with third parties. That information was then shared with third parties.

If someone calls my bank and convinces customer service they are me, it would be reasonable to say the bank was breached. Not electronically. But breached nonetheless.

sergiosgc• 8 years ago

It was a breach followed by business motivated poor handling of the breach. Facebook learned about the TOS violation, requested that CA delete the data, and did not follow up with verification that it was indeed deleted. The fail to follow up is compounded by the fact that:

a) Facebook was notified that CA did not delete the data; and

b) The CA-held profiles were used to target politically motivated advertising on Facebook.

One can't avoid linking the two facts. Facebook has no incentive to aggressively protect its user data when it hurts ad spending on the platform.

oh-kumudo3• 8 years ago

Clearly, Facebook loses hold on the users' data to some 3rd party players, and even now that they have no control that the data is actually deleted or not.

If Facebook has no means to detain such malicious usage of users' data, they should be more careful to open the access of it in the first place.

colordrops• 8 years ago

Using an "honor system" doesn't work for privacy, considering thousands of apps have access to the data. The problem is not Aleksandr Kogan.

mc32• 8 years ago

People are going to call it a breach because it fits their PoV. When this happened with Craigslist people were calling Newmark all kinds of names and quibbling about ownership of the data, etc. [that since it was user generated Craigslist didn't really own it, so that all those *pad companies were not in breach, etc.

That is all it is.

bogomipz• 8 years ago

"Is it even clear that there was a 'breach' of any kind that Facebook was responsible for?"

How about a breach of basic responsibility to inform users that their data has been used inappropriately and transferred to a third party. FB knew about this as far back as 2015[1]. Did they let users know at any point? No.

Further FB's Chief Security Officers's tweets on Friday failed to show any concern for FB users who were used as pawns. His main concern was to point out that this wasn't actually a FB problem.

And let's not forget that Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the US elections as "a pretty crazy idea."[2]

So the "pitchforks" are a culmination of a significantly longer time frame and not just a reaction to this single news story.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-...

matthewcford• 8 years ago

The issue was back in the day the FB APIs were not as tightly scope controlled as they are now - you were not just giving access to your data but also of that of your friends - even if they did not.

SubiculumCode• 8 years ago

And if you want to know what kind of company Cambridge Analytica is, check out this under-cover reporting, jus tout this morning: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica-al...

SLIMY

moolcool• 8 years ago

Facebook trusted user data to a third party who didn't turn out to be trustworthy. How are they not due some share of the blame? Do you think the TOS provides sufficient (or any) protection for this data in the real world?

jdavis703• 8 years ago

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.

flexie• 8 years ago

With that logic anyone making a quiz should be able to get data on 50M users and that’s not a problem?

tomc1985• 8 years ago

That sounds like the use-case for nearly everyone shady on Facebook advertising. Surely there are many other, privately-gathered troves of data that are much larger out there?

IBM2• 8 years ago

The political momentum is building for America to import GDPR. Feels good.

ggg9990• 8 years ago

America has already basically imported GDPR because all of the companies building GDPR tools are not going to restrict them to the EU for fear of accidentally blocking a genuine EU citizen.

TAForObvReasons2• 8 years ago

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...

watertom• 8 years ago

Didn't Zuck take the idea for Facebook from someone else and then run with it?

warent• 8 years ago

That text was so long ago I don't think it's relevant anymore. Oprah Winfrey was also crack cocaine smoker in a cycle of abusive relationships in her late twenties. If people choose to change their perspectives they can, and everything indicates that Mark has matured quite a bit since then.

TaylorGood• 8 years ago

2018: Dumb fucks at scale

themihai• 8 years ago

> 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.

pjc502• 8 years ago

They're now getting their doors kicked in by the Information Commissioner: https://twitter.com/traciemac_Bmore/status/97582507693856768...

(how much will be left after they pre announced the raid on twitter I don't know)

swat535• 8 years ago

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?

darawk7• 8 years ago

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?

sithadmin2• 8 years ago

Your're missing a key detail (the data was collected by a third party, which then handed the data off to CA against Facebook TOS), but I agree, this doesn't seem to be a 'breach' so much as abuse of personal data by a developer.

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

The third party handing the data over to Cambridge Analytica is a privacy breach.

Which is what is happening. The initial headline called it a breach and it isn't all that inaccurate to call it a breach, so it stuck.

cycrutchfield2• 8 years ago

CA also scraped the data of friends of those users, meaning that many millions of people had their info exposed instead of a few hundred thousand.

darawk7• 8 years ago

Right, but that was a privilege that the users authorized them to grant, no? As in, the people who signed up for CA's app had access to those profiles, and they explicitly granted CA's app access to those profiles. And then CA scraped them and saved them. Am I understanding correctly?

makomk2• 8 years ago

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 general profile information, but photos and feed activity. Apparently they were so aggressive about this it tripped Facebook's internal alerts. The New York Times spun all this as some clever, sophisticated breakthrough that marketers could take advantage of: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (While they were more honest about getting those users' permission than Cambridge Analytica, they didn't have any kind of permission from the friends they were hoping to profile and target, much like CA didn't. The viral tweet doing the rounds attacking CA for comparing the two is misleading.)

The main problem Facebook seem to have is that the wrong candidate won the 2016 presidential election and the press need someone else to blame.

Incidentally, based on the reporting come out of the Trump campaign, it's not clear they were even doing much or anything in this area. Their campaign leaned heavily on exactly the kind of "political gut instinct" that article decries - used as an input to models rather than directly, and augmented with stuff like A/B testing, but still nothing like the data-guzzling microtargeting machine of Obama 2012. There doesn't seem to have been much sign of CA involvement aside from the initial check the campaign wrote them and their attempts to use Trump's victory in their marketing.

IAmEveryone2• 8 years ago

Facebook did not authorize data retention. CA’s actions were therefore unauthorized use of data, which is the textbook definition of a data breach.

darawk7• 8 years ago

...you mean facebook said "don't keep this" and then they kept it? And people are calling that a breach?

bdcravens• 8 years ago

So you're saying that every company that is screen scraped in violation of their TOS has experienced a data breach?

UncleEntity• 8 years ago

Facebook did not authorize data retention. CA’s actions were therefore unauthorized use of data, which is the textbook definition of a data breach.

But they did authorize data acquisition which means they weren't "breached" but fully consented to handing over the data.

Be like HN saying I can read all the comments I want but can't copy them to my hard drive, if I did copy them and used them for some other purpose would this also be a "textbook definition of a data breach"?

TwoBit• 8 years ago

That's not at all what a data breach is, much less a "textbook definition" of one.

cryptoz2• 8 years ago

users who authorized their app to do so.

Users did not authorize the app to do any of this. You are incorrect in that assumption.

This was a data breach. Facebook also knew about it and did not care. It is a data breach made worse by likely criminal negligence.

Edit: I have been (temporarily?) banned from replying or writing comments on HN. Maybe it is because of all the downvotes. Here is my response to the comment reply below (and with this, goodbye, I'm no longer allowed to post on HN I guess).

In what sense did they 'not authorize' this?

Users did not authorize the data that was collected by these apps to be retained for more than a day or two, as described by Facebook's terms of service for CA using the data.

darawk7• 8 years ago

Users did not authorize the app to do any of this. You are incorrect in that assumption.

Are you saying their accounts were hacked? In what sense did they 'not authorize' this?

oh-kumudo3• 8 years ago

And the friends of the users, including their shares/likes, who are largely unaware of it. That is THE meat of the incident. There is no consent to begin with.

toufka• 8 years ago

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?

cinquemb• 8 years ago

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.

matt4077• 8 years ago

This is arguably correct. While it may be more pragmatic to practice lenience with wistleblowers, there is no moral principle to shield them from all consequences of their actions.

This guy was not just an observer of unethical practices. He was the technical lead for this behavior.

Whistleblower protections usually shield you from retribution by your employer. What people argue for when they criticize Facebook over this is more akin to immunity.

mlamat2• 8 years ago

In about 20 minutes, an explosive documentary about this will be airing on Channel 4 BBC.

garblegarble• 8 years ago

Channel 4 BBC

Just a side-note, Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster, whereas the BBC is publicly funded via a license that's required to watch live TV

bodyfour• 8 years ago

Yes, the fact that "BBC4" and "Channel 4" are completely different things is (understandably) missed by nearly everyone outside the UK.

petecooper• 8 years ago

Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster […]

For completeness, from [1]:

Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA),the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport […]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4

Overtonwindow• 8 years ago

Damage Control.

jhayward• 8 years ago

Reporting that I read said they suspended him because he wouldn't sign what I inferred was an NDA to advise them on how to understand and mitigate the problem.

medyadaily5• 8 years ago

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 from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of u

olivermarks• 8 years ago

Thanks for sharing this

scoggs4• 8 years ago

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

Chaebixi• 8 years ago

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way.

Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:

Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

manfredo• 8 years ago

My disgust lies with the regime that's suppressing that regional identity. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook would still disallow the Kurdistan option even if governments didn't criminalize recognition of Kurdistan, then this blame rests on Turkey.

I can't find a reason to fault Facebook's response to this harmful government policy. Would it be better to allow people to select the "Kurdistan" option, knowing full well that this could cause people to be imprisoned, or killed? "Facebook disallows selecting of contested regional identities" is bad, but not nearly as bad as "Facebook helps oppressive governments hunt down disenfranchised people".

loceng• 8 years ago

It's a culture of silencing disagreements, and that of not having leadership with a spine; in reality this is less expensive for a company, with external cost to society of course.

tzakrajs• 8 years ago

Turkey is an embarrassment to NATO members and their will should never have influenced Facebook. Facebook is evil if they do not recognize Kurdistan.

pjc502• 8 years ago

Thank you for telling this story :(

Situations where countries try to dictate this kind of thing outside their borders produce stupid bad results. A previous example: no maps are legal in both India and Pakistan. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...

lolc2• 8 years ago

It is surprising to me how easy Internet companies are bullied into censorship. Services should start carrying the "Banned in Turkey" flag as a badge of honor. "Banned in China" is required nowadays if you want to be taken seriously anyway.

For individuals, "Banned from Facebook" has a similar note. For a time now, Kurdish interests have been prosecuted by Facebook. And not just in Turkey.

Vinnl• 8 years ago

I think the likes of WeChat and Alibaba have Western companies thinking twice before proudly wearing a "Banned in China" badge.

olds• 8 years ago

medyadaily5• 8 years ago

Response to your bullets with their corresponding number.

1- The story I am talking about was 5 years ago, at that time you could not select Kurdistan in hometown. it was the previous version of facebook profile (before they change it and it was like that for more than 10 years) we fought 10 years, hundreds thousands of pettitions. so your screenshot is Irrelevant.

The story of kurdish accounts being banned for having Kurdish flag is still true, specially during the massacare that happened in the city of Afrin Massacre just a few days ago.

2- I did not work at FB, FB reached out to me to hire me, I went there and I asked them the questions inside FB. I will NEVER ever work for FB. Crappy technologies, Crappy company, not inline with my values.

4- They invited me to W hotel in Chicago, I might still have the conversation in my LinkedIn, what are you trying to say ? are trying to imply I made this story up ? I believe the the recruiting team (including managers and developers) was visiting Chicago, and the job was not in Chicago.

medyadaily5• 8 years ago

and in the end you are suspecting my credibility, you can checkout my Github I am a public person, I am actually presenting K8Guard for Kuberentes for Linux Foundation in a few weeks. I can stand and testify for every claim I made.

The leaked document inside facebook was also verifies a lot of things I said. (the leaked document was very old not sure how many years ago 6-7 years ago maybe) that they clearly had examples of what flags to and what words to ban. including innocent kurdish flags.

mda• 8 years ago

"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.

mnm1• 8 years ago

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

sofaofthedamned• 8 years ago

Thank you. Upvoting and replying so I can find this again.

fortythirteen3• 8 years ago

Just get the f### off Facebook, already.

If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook.

If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook.

Ask the Facebook "friends" you care about for an email address, phone number, or other messaging account and get the f### off Facebook.

You don't need up to the minute information on the playdate of your cousin's college room mate's toddler. Get the f### off Facebook.

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

Enough with the #. If you want to swear, swear. If you don't want to swear, don't.

For fuck's sake.

horsecaptin• 8 years ago

I'm feeling very outraged.

fancyfish• 8 years ago

Hell yeah, as a New Yorker I wholeheartedly agree.

maxlybbert• 8 years ago

I remember a Louis C.K. routine about the phrase “the N word.” He summarized it as “I’m not going to say the word, but I’m still going to put it in your head.”

Yetanfou• 8 years ago

There's some interesting analysis waiting to be done on the preference for words from a certain category to be used as expletives in different languages. Let's start with English, a language most here seem to be familiar with. English seems to prefer sexual acts (fuck), sexual organs (cunt, dick, bollocks), excrement (shit, piss), the combination of the two (fucking asshole/cunt/...), religion (damn, goddamn, etc) and more.

In Dutch, my native language, one is more likely to use diseases (kanker (=cancer), tering (=tuberculosis), typhus (=typhoid fever), etc)), hardly any sexual acts or organs (only 'lul (=dick)' really although 'mierenneuker' (=ant fucker) is also a common mild swear word), excrement (schijt (=shit), zeiken/zeikert/zeikstraal (=to piss/someone who pisses/jet of piss)), religion (verdomme (=damn), godverdomme (=goddammit).

Swedish, my second language, is not a good language for swearing as it uses rather silly, powerless words of sometimes dubious origin, mostly related to religion (fan (=the devil), satan, (i) helvete (=(what the) hell)), sexual organs (kuk (=dick), fitta (=cunt)), excrement (skit (=shit)) and what seem to be random words (sjutton (=the number seventeen...?)), weird combinations (jävla skitstövel (=devilish shit boot)).

German is the most proficient swearing language I know, both due to its rich vocabulary as well as the satisfying vocalisation offered by the language, using words from just about all categories except for diseases (wherein it differs from the related Dutch language). I also know French but my knowledge of French swear words is lacking beyond the basics.

IAmGraydon• 8 years ago

If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook.

Yeah - see that's not how it works. CA and companies like them have developed far more clever ways to influence you than targeted advertising. The best of these techniques go undetected by you, and are coordinated by machine learning systems which know more about you than you do. Basically, if you are online, you are under their influence whether you know it or not. Don't fall for the illusion that you aren't susceptible. As emotional as you appear to be from your posting style, you are exactly the kind of person that they target.

fortythirteen3• 8 years ago

Don't mistake my form of emphasis as overly-emotional behavior, or my statements as any indication that I see myself as significantly more rational than the average person.

There are steps you can take to make yourself less susceptible to propaganda, and it starts with disengaging from the Huxleyan, social media, dopamine machine. Until you do that it's near impossible to get a real sense of your own cognitive biases.

AgentME• 8 years ago

If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook.

The people that vote based on targeted advertising may not be the ones that have a problem with it. This is like if people complained the pool has too much pee in it, you told the complainers to stop peeing in it.

fudged71• 8 years ago

This is a very privileged perspective.

Facebook spent years getting billions of people on the platform and those users haven't left due to lock-in. They are connected to their families, their businesses, their friends.

pier252• 8 years ago

Indeed.

I barely use Facebook anymore but because I live in a different country that's how I keep up with friends and family. If someone wanted to contact me they would do it through Facebook.

arca_vorago• 8 years ago

My problem is that they compile information on people whether or not they have a fb profile (the shadow profile). There is something about this (and various other privacy violating aggregators for hire) that really bother me. We should be having a discussion on a broader solution that applies to control of a persons data from all third parties, not just singling out facebook.

This is why I am on the fence between deleting the account and just poisoning the data.

donarb• 8 years ago

This has bigger implications than just data breaches, it goes to campaign finance violations of the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica shared an address in Beverley Hills with Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon's political consulting company called Glittering Steel. The implication is that GS used Cambridge's data to target users on Facebook with political ads for Trump all while being paid by a PAC called Make America 1 that was believed to be funded by Robert Mercer and his family.

This Twitter user has numerous posts about this. Not sure exactly who they are, but they have multiple sources of information about this story. https://twitter.com/emlas/status/975138624911151104

mcguire• 8 years ago

Yahoo just delivered a full-screen, "Your computer has been infected with digital ebola" page when I visited that link.

dpwm• 8 years ago

I'm still shaken with the magnitude and strength of the revelations that have been made in the last five hours on Cambridge Analytica (though some of the things sound more like SCL -- they share the same CEO).

At 7pm GMT we had the Channel 4 News investigation[0] which featured Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, in which he appeared to be bragging to a fictional Sri Lankan businessman (who was in fact an undercover reporter) about the things they can do to discredit his opponents involving (with a delicious dose of irony) hidden cameras. Such tactics sounded a lot like they may involve trafficking of Ukrainian sex workers. There were also things that sounded a lot like blackmail and spreading of things that may not be true.

Then, just after that undercover story broke we had the Facebook raid, which really looked a lot to my untrained eye like heroic efforts to protect data of the more evidential variety from being unnecessarily breached to the authorities or the public.

At 10.30pm we got an interview [1], filmed before the undercover reporting broke, with Alexander Nix. Most memorable to me was Mr Nix seemed to attempt to confidently assure us that Dr Aleksandr Kogan had merely shared with them the gradients with which to build additional models upon and had never shared the data harvested from FB as the whistleblower in this article had alleged. We were also either told or given the impression that this was a great big misunderstanding and all part of a spectacularly coordinated attack by journalists who were upset about Trump.

[0] https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

[1] https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight

artemisyna• 8 years ago

Given how the guy took data then refused to cooperate when asked, I think his account being suspended makes sense...

https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10104702799873151

tango12• 8 years ago

I was so terrified about how India was almost serious about letting Facebook Zero / free basics or whatever happen.

I feel extremely concerned also that new generations are growing up without knowing how the web was intended to be de-centralised and "free" and self-correcting.

Maybe that doesn't work at scale and things need regulation, but I feel like there was a chance to set culture and tone so that even when a large number of people would come on to the Internet, it would be more with a Wikipedia like attitude perhaps.

Now imagine if the first introduction to the Internet for a billion-ish people in India (current penetration is 460mil) would have been through Facebook's internet.org. Imagine if that happened in a country as large as India set that precedent for other countries with low internet penetration.

I used to scoff in university at a batchmate who told me over lunch that he doesn't use gmail because Google is too large and could become evil. I'm not scoffing anymore I guess.

Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

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