Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Threatened to Sue Journalists

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180318/00111439443/both-facebook-cambridge-analytica-threatened-to-sue-journalists-over-stories-cas-use-facebook-data.shtml

by Analemma_ • 8 years ago

504 115 8 years ago

techdirt.com

sol_remmy• 8 years ago

Ongoing discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16626318

pacala• 8 years ago

The NYTimes article you link to doesn't contain the word "threat". This piece appears to contain a new bit of information about the ethically challenged behavior of FB and CA. It deserves a separate conversation.

cryoshon• 8 years ago

so, this is effectively two solid admissions of guilt, in hand. why bother suing journalists if there isn't a truth that you don't want to get out?

needless to say the idea that they want to suppress journalists is egregiously illiberal and warrants our unanimous excoriation of these businesses.

zuck's silence (terror? or destroying more evidence, as they have already done?) is very telling. if we organize, the bell will toll for facebook. it is long overdue.

as a bonus, zuck's presidential run is ruined, hopefully.

mieseratte• 8 years ago

why bother suing journalists if there isn't a truth that you don't want to get out?

Defamation, per TFA.

pjc502• 8 years ago

Defamation/libel is interesting; since only the already wealthy can afford it, more often than not a defamation lawsuit is a sign that someone is trying to suppress true facts.

There have been several high profile cases when politicians sued for libel, won, the facts were established as true, and the politician jailed for perjuring themselves during the trial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1424501.stm

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/jun/08/uk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12059037 (but see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-17909946 )

kreetx2• 8 years ago

Sincere question: this article in the last paragraph says "Facebook threatening defamation against the Guardian for calling this a data breach is ludicrous and Facebook should be ashamed and apologize"

-- does this conclusion hinge on the fact that Facebook should have realized earlier that the app is harvesting data? If the creator of the app said that he is doing it for academic purposes only then how should have Facebook known? Not trying to defend Facebook, but calling this a breach is at least a little bit gray area, no?

EDIT: concise wording

detaro• 8 years ago

If it's a "little bit gray", then you probably shouldn't sue for defamation about it.

The "breach"/"something-else-that's-not-a-breach" debate from what I've seen doesn't hinge on Facebook knowing or not, it's about if all loss of data can be called a breach or if the term should be reserved for cases where the perpetrator did aquire the data without Facebook knowing.

DCF• 8 years ago

How would that not be a breach? Their system allowed a malicious entity acting in bad faith to gain large amounts of data under false pretenses. If they got the data by pretending to be an employee and social engineering their way into the data that way facebook would 100% call that a breach. Is this that different?

castle-bravo• 8 years ago

"The processor is, in fact, operating as it is designed"

- Steve Smith (Vice President, Intel)

fauigerzigerk2• 8 years ago

I don't think it's so clear. Two things happened:

(a) Users were duped into giving up their data under a false pretense. This alone cannot be called a breach.

Also, one of the following occurred:

(b.1) Facebook was duped into letting a fraudster install an app on their platform. If this happened, it was a breach.

(b.2) Facebook knew all along that the academic research was only a cover for duping users into giving up their data. If this happened then it was not a breach, because Facebook themselves effectively sold the data.

So what Facebook appears to be saying is: There was no breach. We sold the data!

[Edit] Judging by what this man says, it was probably b.2: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-c...

My conclusion is that there was no breach.

stale2002• 8 years ago

Well, the difference is that it was not unauthorized access. It was allowed by Facebook on purpose, because this is their business model.

It is WORSE than a breach, because FB is complicit.

IAmEveryone3• 8 years ago

A breach is unauthorized access, possession, or use of data. Cambridge Analytica was not allowed to retain this data, or to use it for commercial purposes. Therefore it’s a data breach.

Consider an alternative scenario: a Facebook employee has access to data to perform his job. He makes a copy, takes it with him, and uses it in his new startup. Breach? It’s exactly the same as above, only the employee was an external partner in reality.

tschwimmer• 8 years ago

Yes, the situation you described is a breach. It became a breach when the employee made a copy and took it outside of production.

kreetx2• 8 years ago

But it doesn't look like Facebook's fault since the situatuation is entirely in the hands of the person who made the app.

But I see the point of this being a breach, and suing based on this does then look as the article says. :)

decacorn• 8 years ago

might be time for Zuckerberg to consider resigning. house of cards is falling.

anonnel• 8 years ago

The house of cards is falling.

Or, perhaps the castle is reaching the next phase of construction, where users are supposed to have an appropriate level of fear.

wongarsu• 8 years ago

This will blow over, Facebook is far too entrenched and without serious competition. Some people will use Facebook less and replace it with Whatsapp and Instagram, but Zuckerberg has that base covered

tzakrajs3• 8 years ago

Facebook is entrenched because the culture allows it, but I sense a major kumbaya moment for Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millenials that could upend this culture. Finally, the younger generations can see in practice why many of their elders were intuitively resistant to social media.

KasianFranks• 8 years ago

Entrenched like AOL, friendster and myspace were no doubt.

jstalin• 8 years ago

This is fun to watch. The most evil company I can think of is being exposed for its core purpose. Are people going to realize what a monster Facebook is?

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

When millions of Americans get their news from Facebook, it's doubtful that many current users will find out what is happening. It is certainly similar to the Fox News effect.

IAmEveryone3• 8 years ago

I’ve had these stories in my news feed. You really need to bring some evidence when you’re spreading conspiracy theories.

f2n• 8 years ago

No, Americans will continue to give zero fucks. A few more people will be outraged, but business as usual will continue. Maybe Facebook will claim they "fixed" the problem that created this "breach" (as it's being called), but nothing will change

HugoDaniel• 8 years ago

A good time for rogues to buy some FB stocks

lambda_lover3• 8 years ago

Unfortunately I agree. This is just PRISM all over again. Unfortunate that my fellow citizens don't care about this issue at all.

bogomipz3• 8 years ago

"No, Americans will continue to give zero fucks."

You realize theres 2 billion people on FB but only 330 million people in the US right? That's many more people than just Americans giving "zero fucks."

paulcole4• 8 years ago

The most evil company I can think of is being exposed for its core purpose.

• Nestle

• Every cigarette maker

• Gun companies

• Mosanto

• Pharma companies who charge astronomical prices

• Private prison companies

SubiculumCode• 8 years ago

DeBeers.

ggg9990• 8 years ago

Destabilizing governments and social movements is exactly the playbook of Shell/United Fruit/etc.

viridian• 8 years ago

I downvoted you due to the doublethink of providing an out for good pharma companies to exist, while calling all firearms companies evil. I can see having a problem with IMI or other state funded companies that are a part of a Nation's greater military industrial complex, but on what grounds do you consider Glock or Remington evil?

drharby2• 8 years ago

Why are gun companies evil?

curun1r• 8 years ago

Facebook should be proud. It's quite an accomplishment to be the most evil company a user named jstalin can think of.

mattbrewsbytes• 8 years ago

Anyone else thinking these are very similar behaviors coming from Facebook execs and the White House?

Threaten lawsuits, fire/demote people that don't agree with you, etc.

SSLy• 8 years ago

When corporations and governments are in bed together they learn the best practices from each other.

kazen442• 8 years ago

I wonder how the UK goverment will react to this, aswell as the EU, considering they tend to value privacy in a different light then the american court system.

bogomipz3• 8 years ago

You left out "espouse noble ideals" - "connecting people" or "making America great again." It's behind these public "facades" that the litigating into submission and threatening into silence is done.

dvt3• 8 years ago

Not sure why people are so hung up on the "breach" vs "not a breach" debate. The issue is this: taking a random personality quiz online is old news. We've been doing these since the 90s. The problem is that when you log in with FB, your real name, and all of your metadata is attached to that quiz.

It's not just "IP 12.342.32.1 is chaotic neutral" but "'Bob Smith, with a degree in X from Y, that likes A, B, and C and is newlywed' is chaotic neutral." The issue isn't really the quiz (and it's not even CA tbh), it's Facebook giving out real names, real pictures, etc. every time you "Log in with Facebook" on any random website or app.

akjetma• 8 years ago

Additionally, I think the public is now realizing how powerful the friend/follow metadata graph is. It's pretty easy/robust to infer traits about people for whom you don't have explicit information. Alan, Betty, and Charlotte filled out the quiz and all live in Florida; Dave has mutual friendships with Alan, Betty, and Charlotte; Dave probably lives in Florida. You can do this recursively and don't need to have concrete information about the majority of members in a graph in order to make pretty strong probablistic inferences about the traits of a large graph.

IAmEveryone3• 8 years ago

I believe it’s a legal point: In case of a breach, Facebook would have been required to disclose it to the affected users. They are pushing hard against the term because it might end up determining their liability.

dvt3• 8 years ago

Fair enough, but what if data points were implied? Where does that fall on the breach-not-breach spectrum?

darawk4• 8 years ago

But this is how these sorts of OAuth schemes have always worked. It's always been explicit, too. You grant these apps access to this information. What exactly is the issue here? That this time it was used in a way people don't like? There's a reasonable debate to be had about how to deal with all this data, but to blame Facebook as if they made some error or leaked some data in an unauthorized way, or did anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time is just totally disingenuous on the part of journalists and regulators.

dvt3• 8 years ago

Yeah I agree. There's a price for the convenience of one-button logins, and we're paying it right now.

creato• 8 years ago

The thing that seems really wrong here is that you weren't just granting access to your own information, but all of your friends as well, who had little say in the matter beyond their original grants of permission to Facebook.

It is this way that Cambridge Analytica was able to get 50 million profiles by just paying ~270k Amazon mechanical turkers [1].

It's true that everyone agreed to everything along the way: people allowed Facebook to have the information in question, and people allowed Cambridge Analytica to access that information. But it wasn't the same people agreeing to both. The set of people agreeing to the latter was much smaller than the former.

It may be true that technically neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong (at least in collecting this information, this seems to be by far the least shady part of CA's business), but, Facebook's business is built on trust, and this is a huge hit to that trust. Arguing technicalities doesn't help.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridg...

wpietri2• 8 years ago

I believe that you, a person with a strong interest technology, believe the consequences are (and perhaps always were) obvious.

But I disagree that if we went back in time and quizzed people clicking "yes" that the majority would really understand that recent events were the probable expected outcome of them clicking "yes".

There's a difference between consent and informed consent. And it was strongly in the interests of Facebook (and anybody who made an app using their APIs) to be very vague about the potential consequences.

fdw2• 8 years ago

No, this is not how OAuth works - OAuth itself is just a protocol to receive authorization from another server [1]. In this case, a third party relies on Facebook to say "This user has logged into Facebook and their ID is foo". OAuth _does not need_ social information or anything else.

Of course, you can allow the authorization server to publish these details, but this is not an inherent part of OAuth. Also, there's OpenID Connect [2] which builds on OAuth and adds just this information in another token: "The ID token resembles the concept of an identity card, in a standard JWT format." (from [2]). However, you can happily use OAuth without ever publishing the user's details.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749 [2] https://openid.net/connect/

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time

I believe the reason this story is blowing up so big in the media is because most people never imagined their data being used in this way. When I login to patreon and subscribe to someone, I know exactly what I am paying. When I login to facebook and make a post, I (the average user) have no idea what it is that I am paying and/or how it can be used. I give away some factoid about myself without realizing that my angry post about Trump actually tweaks some political vector that is being calculated on me.

Consent is not enough, informed consent is the bar we have to set and it's basically impossible to say that the average facebook user is properly informed of what data they're giving, how it's being used and how much it is worth in dollar terms. Can you imagine if I could log into Facebook and see the models they've generated based on my content, and the dollar amount they've collected for that information so far. That's informed consent and somehow I doubt Facebook would be quite as profitable if people knew the actual cost they're paying.

justaguyhere2• 8 years ago

"anything that we didn't all know was possible this whole time"

Actually, there are lots of people who have no clue that such things are possible. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, everyone would become savvy enough to understand the implications of giving away their personal info freely, but we are not yet there. The people who know (younger, tech savvy etc) are in the minority. Today a big chunk of the population simply believes everything they read on FB, that is why trolling works so wonderfully

briffle• 8 years ago

If it was just this, I would be okay with it. It was also saying "and here is a list of all of Bob Smith's friends, and their info".

I have my Facebook profile set to 'friends', and perhaps its obvious now, but I guess I didn't realize an app installed by my great aunt now has all my information. I happily gave her access to see my profile, kids pictures, etc. But do I want every single thing she connects to to see any data I allow her to see?

throwbacktictac• 8 years ago

Does it really go that deep? I was under the impression that the app cool only grok that you are a "friend" of you aunt.

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

Getting the discussion to "breach/not breach" is taking the discussion away from the actual point. Facebook is a cancer for privacy. The affiliates of Facebook are a cancer for privacy. Privacy is a human right. Facebook is cancer (imho).

That said, I believe FB would LOVE if we change the topic from PRIVACY to "anything-except-privacy".

And yes. Any/all dictators (of any shape or form) are trying to silence the media/journalists. Why would FB practice a different method?

This way they want to make sure that the next whistleblower won't have an outlet.

twostoned• 8 years ago

I agree with you about being very cautious about how this debate gets framed. Big corporations are boss at framing the debate in such a way that the results don't matter. Be very aware of this tendency.

vha32oiwe• 8 years ago

This thread seems to think the technical implementation is at fault.

I'd offer an alternative: the fact that we're stuck "sharing" via centrally managed platforms is the real issue.

I don't care about Facebook auth mechanism. Regardless of how it shares data, FB still HAS all the data, and can find a different way to share that with whatever party they want.

There's no leverage in the information economy outside "Use the one or maybe 2 ISPs you have, and these handful of "top" providers online."

It's like having a meat space economy be controlled by a top-down authority, and you can only trade along it's finan... distribution network.

Oh wow, what a shock. We remade cyberspace society to be just as centrally controlled as meatspace society. While meatspace became more constrained in an authoritarian way yet again in human history.

Human society exists in a strange loop of "build walls that are used to oppress me."

feelin_googley• 8 years ago

"Not sure why people are so hung up on the "breach" vs "not a breach" debate."

Wild guess (probably incorrect):

http://web.archive.org/web/20170205180142/https://www.foley....

equalunique• 8 years ago

Is there anyone in advertising who wouldn't want this? I honestly don't see why this is a problem. Many people don't care about what gets shared but do care about the benefits it brings to their user experience.

usmsid• 8 years ago

Information and data are good as long as the right people have access to it.

logicallee• 8 years ago

This is a really weak-sauce dictatorship, come on! In a real autocracy, Facebook would simply suspend all involved journalists' and editors' Facebook accounts for 6 hours with a message that Big Brother is watching and the suspensions will be formalized if they don't drop their story.

Any editors or journalists that don't cooperate should have their Facebook, Whatsapp, or any other service suspended. (If any other service starts gaining network effects, Facebook can just buy it when it has < 100k users - this is how a monopoly works under network effect)

Anyway Mark Zuckerberg, my message to you is if you want to be remembered as one of the worst autocrats who ever lived, you are really going to have to step up the retaliation. Maybe introduce targeted executions of journalists?

Just some thoughts.

pasbesoin• 8 years ago

There needs to be serious discussion in society and the legal community, about the deliberate "weaponization" of legal actions. Where the purpose is not to pursue a legitimate and balanced complaint, but rather to cow another party into compliance/cooperation by threat to destroy them through legal actions rather than the outcome of a legal process.

The threat of forcing the other person to spend themselves into bankruptcy, for example.

Standards need to be defined and enforced, where such activity is grounds for punishment up to and including disbarment.

To the extent such already exists, it is clearly proving insufficient.

Law should be about justice, first. Not just another field of unfettered warfare.

Also, to that end, sealed records and confidentiality should be more severely constrained. The judicial system is a public system; everyone should be able to see what you're up to in it, for better and for worse.

Protecting clearly threatened victims, sure. Defined legitimate, critical secrets, for defined limited periods of time, ok (real national security, trade secrets). Beyond that, not so much. Not at all, maybe.

mithoon• 8 years ago

One thing I don't understand, at one hand you are supposed to keep digital data for X amount of years ( I think 7), and on the other hand the company cannot make use of it, why would it be sitting on servers, might as well make use of it.

harry82• 8 years ago

delete your facebook account. It feels sooooo good!

harry82• 8 years ago

Downvote the above hard to confront your withrdawal symptoms then make your posts with your contact details announcing you are going to leave facebook, a few reminders then do it.

Life is better without them. They really haven't got you, you can break free just by deciding to do it.

(Apologies for mentioning up/down voting)

mankash666• 8 years ago

The next step is for Facebook to go after individual dissenters, and train their AI to do so.

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Threatened to Sue Journalists

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