Settlement for Australian users impacted by Cambridge Analytica incident

https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media-centre/landmark-settlement-of-$50m-from-meta-for-australian-users-impacted-by-cambridge-analytica-incident

by ajdlinux • 2 years ago

76 37 2 years ago

oaic.gov.au

rukuu001• 2 years ago

Individuals should be aware that scammers may use this media release to falsely claim to help them get payments. If you receive a call…

I can just imagine the heavy sigh that accompanied the decision to put this at the end of the media release.

b112• 2 years ago

This is a tangent, but the Bank of Canada is where dormant bank accounts go.

I've known this for years, and I suspect like many who find out -- you look for some. Especially ones you had as a kid, that you haven't thought of for years.

Point is, after that you start to look for relatives. Just in case they didn't realise. And while I did not find a person I thought was a relative, they did have the same last name.

So I Googled a bit, found their relative, and called.

The guy started yelling at me first thing. Telling me to go to blazes, and so forth. I just said "YOU contact them, I don't want any part of it! I just hate the idea of $1M sitting in a dormant account!"

Nope. From the sound of the screaming and blathering on the other end of the line, this guy had been beset by endless scammers calling. Repeatedly. All the time. Trying to "do all the work" for 10%, this sort of thing.

Still his response was incredibly over the top. Didn't start off with "I am NOT interested", but instead with screaming. How many calls per month, per week?

Per day?!

ganeshkrishnan• 2 years ago

50 million is chump change for Facebook. In a fair world, we would have competition against facebook and there would be choices for consumers. In this real world we are stuck with the bottom feeders like facebook which just works with impunity.

Not only did facebook lose all the data, it disabled customer support chat in Australia for all services including advertising.

Our company fb account (for travelers) was disabled due to "Suspicious activity" and then permanently deleted. But they conveniently left the ad account on which we can neither login nor disable. If we do a charge back, Facebook will instaban the instagram account as well and in process we could lose our 16 year account.

There is a huge group of such people here https://www.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/

Both reddit and facebook belong to trash of history (for different reasons)

protocolture• 2 years ago

I have an account like that that simply exists but can never interact. Support requests (even when I figured out how to make them) do nothing. They just say "It will be fixed within the week"

grugagag• 2 years ago

Not in your case as a business but for majority of people being banned on facebook and other social media could be a blessing in disguise.

ipaddr• 2 years ago

In fairness facebook has many competitors and it's possible to create a clone for a small sum. That doesn't include the scaling components which are world class. But a profile some photos and videos has been done successfully by vk for example.

How to you get everyone to signup? This is how facebook did it. Start in top universities and only allow people from there to sign up. Repeat at other universities. Open it up to all .edus. Get press coverage about this site many are talking about but only college kids can use. Open it up to everyone but setup cities regions where content is shared. Introduce a tool that reads your hotmail and emails everyone to join. Add games. Groups. Kill games. Promote flame bait. Replace content with ads.

The facebook rollout was magical and hard to replicate. Having people within the same colleges on a public/private network created communities. Places where parents/relatives/past school mates wouldn't see that content. Lost some magic with cities but it still created communities. Killing games started the decline. Everyone you know from your grandparents to your little sister joining killed the original feel. Politics killed conversations.

Facebook had many paths to choose and they ended up here. If you started a similiar journey you could make different choices and end up somewhere else.

strogonoff• 2 years ago

The “you are the product” cliché might be the most underrated phrase of the last decade or two.

What Facebook did was not about some genius move where they got university students to sign up; it was about making it seem as if your customers are not who they actually are, and by exploiting the market contrary to how it’s supposed to work. Facebook is not the only one who did it, but they are perhaps the first ones who did it for social media and at such scale.

The bright idea of the free market—customers pay for things they get value from, which helps more of these things to exist—is turned on its head and inside out when the product customers pay for is people paying for things while those people are misled into thinking they are being provided a “free product”.

Any value the end user gets from the system is purely incidental. If it is harmful to the end user long-term, that is orthogonal to the bottom line. The company is not incentivized to provide the end user any value, the company is not interested in helping the end user succeed and prosper—rather, the company is incentivized to not let the end user leave in bulk (that would hurt the actual paying customers, that is the advertisers, and the bottom line) and to keep their eyes on the non-product for as long as possible (if riling them up by algorithmically chosen triggering posts works for that purpose, great).

This fosters monopolies, infects capitalism, and when it becomes the default engine of human interaction it infects society.

29athrowaway• 2 years ago

"Justice"

nomilk• 2 years ago

Kinda weird. We (Australia) have a new major data breach every month. Seems strange to single out Meta, what about Optus, St Vincent’s, Dymocks, the AFP (!), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (hardly surpising, with their 1990s website), Pizza Hut, the Royal Women’s Hospital, and about 100 (not hyperbole) others?

askvictor• 2 years ago

We (Australia) have no enforceable privacy legislation. The choice to single out Meta is probably political, though could also be about scale, and being a huge foreign company with deep pockets.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

[...]personal information of some Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app in breach of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The information was exposed to the risk of disclosure to Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, and risked being used for political profiling purposes. [...]

The relevant law had been in force for two decades before facebook ever became relevant.

xyzzy1233• 2 years ago

The Australian government is targeting Meta on a wide range of issues and will keep doing so until they transfer more money to news oligarchs to compensate them for "loss of business model".

chii• 2 years ago

This is how you know the (old) media mongrels have bought out the australian gov't.

I am vehemently against it, but no matter which party you choose to vote for, the result has been the same.

urig• 2 years ago

I dunno, techbro. Somehow Meta being the victim here is not the key takeaway that springs to my mind, you know?

guidedlight• 2 years ago

Because it’s harder to prosecute incompetence.

BLKNSLVR2• 2 years ago

My understanding is that the difference is that the Meta-Cambridge Analytica situation wasn't a 'hack' data breach, it was Facebook sharing data in breach of existing Australian privacy laws.

ie. Meta is at fault, as opposed to a criminal intruder.

vasco3• 2 years ago

It was an API. After years of getting shit for not opening their social graph. To this day I don't understand how the world decided that was a big deal.

xmodem• 2 years ago

The incident that lead to this occurred 8 years ago, and the incidents you cite happened much more recently. I have no idea if any enforcement action is ongoing in those cases, but perhaps you should consider checking before posting an angry comment, or you could instead direct your ire towards why the process is so slow.

jongjong• 2 years ago

How are we supposed to know if someone in our network used the 'This is Your Digital Life app'?

I feel like there is so much more behind this. Personally, I feel like I've been secretly blacklisted for 5 years straight. Even LLMs are telling me that it seems like I've been blacklisted and that it appears like there is 'an element of coordination' when I describe some of the bizarre work experiences that I've had in the tech (esp. crypto) industry.

I can't even talk about some of my experiences (at least not the full extent) because they are too weird and the motives make no sense.

gregoryl2• 2 years ago

You can check with this support article; you need to be logged in to a Facebook account.

https://www.facebook.com/help/1873665312923476

dylan604• 2 years ago

It’s crazy to me that the CA debacle is still reverberating as unsettled this many years later. For a breach that’s been known for a decade to just now coming to a settlement is insane. Delay delay delay tactics should get push back from judges.

whamlastxmas• 2 years ago

The $50 million settlement would be worth $217 million today if it was paid as Facebook stock in 2016

bigs• 2 years ago

How do you know if a friend installed This is Your Digital Life?

stephen_g• 2 years ago

There's a link you can go to when you're logged in to Facebook and it tells you.

It came back that none of my FB friends had used it for me.

denkmoon• 2 years ago

I wonder where this link can be found?

Settlement for Australian users impacted by Cambridge Analytica incident

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