Facebook and Its Executives Are Getting Destroyed After Botching the Handling of a Massive Data Breach (businessinsider.com) 187
The way Facebook has disclosed the abuse of its system by Cambridge Analytica, which has been reported this week, speaks volumes of Facebook's core beliefs. Sample this except from Business Insider: Facebook executives waded into a firestorm of criticism on Saturday, after news reports revealed that a data firm with ties to the Trump campaign harvested private information from millions of Facebook users. Several executives took to Twitter to insist that the data leak was not technically a "breach." But critics were outraged by the response and accused the company of playing semantics and missing the point. Washington Post reporter Hamza Shaban: Facebook insists that the Cambridge Analytica debacle wasn't a data breach, but a "violation" by a third party app that abused user data. This offloading of responsibility says a lot about Facebook's approach to our privacy. Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the news about Cambridge Analytica: Yesterday Facebook threatened to sue us. Today we publish this. Meet the whistleblower blowing the lid off Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. [...] Facebook's chief strategy officer wading in. So, tell us @alexstamos (who expressed his displeasure with the use of "breach" in media reports) why didn't you inform users of this "non-breach" after The Guardian first reported the story in December 2015? Zeynep Tufekci: If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used and misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, "targeted", "engaged", "profiled", sold.. There is no informed consent because it's not possible to reasonably inform or consent. [...] Facebook's defense that Cambridge Analytica harvesting of FB user data from millions is not technically a "breach" is a more profound and damning statement of what's wrong with Facebook's business model than a "breach." MIT Professor Dean Eckles: Definitely fascinating that Joseph Chancellor, who contributed to collection and contract-violating retention (?) of Facebook user data, now works for Facebook. Amir Efrati, a reporter at the Information: May seem like a small thing to non-reporters but Facebook loses credibility by issuing a Friday night press release to "front-run" publications that were set to publish negative articles about its platform. If you want us to become more suspicious, mission accomplished. Further reading: Facebook's latest privacy debacle stirs up more regulatory interest from lawmakers (TechCrunch).
A lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lesson duly learned.
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Obama uses Big Data [technologyreview.com] to great effect and is celebrated for it. Trump use it and OMG!
Perhaps in some circles. In others, the team you play for doesn't matter as much as what you stand for.
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*shrug* My data and any of our data have already been compromised from a multitude of non-Facebook sources so does it really matter that this has happened? It just made it easier for them to get the information on people at that particular moment instead of taking a longer time accumulating the same info.
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Re:A lesson (Score:4)
Child porn and privacy violations aren't synonymous. One is not the other. Your data is vacuumed everywhere, including this site, where there are eight different trackers. Unless you stop them, they'll count you, track you, and get into your social business.
That data in turn, becomes easily personally identifiable, thence characterized, and worse.
It's an industry-wide, Internet-wide problem. It won't be prosecuted because: profit. Until it's not profitable or satisfy their seemingly endless curiosity (for profit), it'll continue. Corporate immunity means that breaches are highly unlikely to be prosecuted, because: lobbying and expense in prosecution.
Face this reality and vote until they get it right.
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Tends to be way less controversial than a child porn analogy, yes.
Re:A lesson (Score:5, Informative)
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Absolutely correct.
It's why privacy is essential and folks have signed theirs away for pennies or less.
Re: A lesson (Score:2, Interesting)
Nah, it's very different. We (presuming you're in the UK as well) have good protection of our privacy from business and others members of the public, but very little protection from the government.
In the US, they have quite good protection of their privacy from the government, but very little from business.
I campaigned and protested heavily against the snoopers charter and many other invasions of our privacy (I still think May was the worst home secretary we've ever had), but somehow I still think we've got
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In the US, they have quite good protection of their privacy from the government,
Yeah. that's the theory. Not the practice.
Re: A lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
What was lost by people accessing your private data in your account?
Every page you've ever visited, including any that could compromise you.
Every post you've ever written, even to closed and secret groups.
Every after you've chased. Every move you made. Every like you paid, every group you've saved, they've been watching you.
Oh, don't you see, you're in their data tree, every move you've made means that they get paid.
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Hey sting fan, I see what you did there
Re: mathematics (Score:3)
That's the answer. Only from your food habits one can tell all kinds of things about you....from health to finance to political preferences... it might seem tedious and useless to a human to sift through all that boring data but the machine does not care and does it millions of times faster.
100 likes and they know you better than your friends. 300 likes and they know you better than you know yourself. That's proven BTW....
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You mean neoliberal. If they were left leaning they would promote unions and ethical treatment of workers, maintianing personal privacy, collective ownership, executive pay caps, and on and on.
Re: What's The Problem? (Score:2)
Umm, no it doesn't, you know this, and frankly I wish for a new constitutional amendment requiring conspiracy theorists be dropped in a volcano.
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A totally evidence-free piece of bullshit and you know it. You are fabricating claims you know to be false, relying on Slashdot never censoring and the first amendment to cover you for blatantly false accusations and a rabid hatred of anyone different from you. See Godwin for details.
Re: What's The Problem? (Score:1)
The former digital director of President Trumpâ(TM)s 2016 campaign, Brad Parscale, has been named campaign manager for the 2020 re-election campaign.
What began as a one-man operation in 2015 grew into one of the most successfulâ"and controversialâ"digital campaigns in presidential history, with Parscaleâ(TM)s team working alongside embedded staffers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google to fine-tune the campaignâ(TM)s advertising online.
As Parscale told WIRED shortly after the election
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Some of us don't use Facebook. I don't care what Facebook knows about me. And I'm sure they know something, since my family members use it. But they con't track my location, calls, emails, and other personal stuff that could only come from me.
Re:A lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care what Facebook knows about me. And I'm sure they know something, since my family members use it. But they can't track my location, calls, emails, and other personal stuff that could only come from me.
That's kind of like saying that this octopus tentacle over here on my left can't hurt me when I've got this whole other side where it can't reach.
Our problem is that this is just one single arm, not the whole beast. The actual data aggregators are obscure companies or agencies that you may have never heard of, and they are OK with that, because you are their product, not their customer.
The consequences come when your automotive insurance shoots up for no reason (because some one in your family has hit the threshold to trigger some algorithm you've never heard of) or your medical insurance starts going up every quarter, without limit, because they've decided you're no longer a good risk and need to be shaken off, or you can't seem to buy property where you want because the HOA thinks your profile is "just not right", or when you can't get a job you're superbly prepared for because of something your son posted from your machine a few years ago and on and on.
Facebook gathers opinions, political views, and social networks. Someone else is responsible for tracking other bits of your life like location, phone calls, and emails.
You should be concerned about this because it is part of a larger and growing system, and that system is massively unconcerned with your best interests.
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> Some of us don't use Facebook.
Me neither, but...
> But they con't track my location, calls, emails, and
> other personal stuff that could only come from me.
Tell me about your smartphone. Have you rooted it and removed the default Facebook app? If not, it's still digging its tentacles into everything you say/do on the phone. The paraphrase a certain meme... only crAPPy crAPPs can crAPP on your privacy.
Re:A lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
For people who didn't see why they should care about who uses thier data or how it's used, thinking they had noting to hide and it wouldn't affect them, I hope you learned a lesson.
I highly doubt that anyone has learned a lesson:
"No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- H. L. Mencken.
Often paraphrased as:
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Why did the Facebook execs take their story to Twitter . . . ?
Easy they want to calm the great masses of their user base, whose reading comprehension can't deal with anything longer than a Twitter message. The Facebook execs don't care about what other, more intelligent, folks think. They are a lost cause for Facebook anyway.
But most folks would react:
"Facebook was hacked? No, it wasn't . . . their management said so on Twitter!"
"Oh, look! Facebook! Baby pictures and ponies!"
Do most folks in the US care about what Facebook is up to . . . ? Or do they want to know what the Kardashians are up to . . . ?
Re:A lesson (Score:4, Funny)
That race on Deep Space 9 that was always quarreling with the Bajorans.
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No one will learn a lesson. They're blaming Cambridge Analytica for doing what Facebook and advertisers and dataminers are doing as you read this. The only difference is that the Trump campaign apparently commissioned the data.
As the Facebook brass said, it wasn't a data breach. It was, in every respect, business as usual. And the public don't get that. The MA attorney general is making a big show of cracking down. Cracking down on what? Online spying? Great! But she probably has no idea that a dozen datami
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I suspected this is what they could do for a long time. Zippo to hide but facebook is in ublock and in noscript. These companies are advertising platforms. Advertising is *wildly* different than what it used to be. Now they want to track the metrics. The only way to do that is to record what I do.
That they track their employees is not surprising at all. These people are no longer the underdogs. They are the overlords. Treat them with suspicion and a wide berth. They are looking to monetize you at a
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For people who didn't see why they should care about who uses thier data or how it's used, thinking they had noting to hide and it wouldn't affect them, I hope you learned a lesson.
Pffft. That's awfully optimistic, now isn't it? They'll just find someone else to blame, or do basically anything that absolves them of any kind of self-responsibility, like always.
Enough of the hyperbole in the headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Slashdot, please knock it off with the hyperbole in the headline. Unless the Facebook executives are literally being torn limb from limb or being ground into dust, I don't really find the over top headline informative or useful.
Re:Enough of the hyperbole in the headlines (Score:5, Informative)
It is a pretty idiotic headline. It looks like something a twelve year old would write.
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50,000,000 Users Hate Him! (Unironically)
Re: Enough of the hyperbole in the headlines (Score:2)
What did you expect? Plenty of experienced writers who are old-timers on Slashdot, but they aren't the ones who run the site or who were hired.
This is standard in industry and is why Apple and Microsoft write such defective software.
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Re: What (Score:4, Interesting)
Then you never understood Snowden's message, never understood what Facebook records and never understood European law.
And people wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Ignorance.
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And people wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Ignorance.
The world is going to hell? That's an interesting thought given that other than the environment, the world and our lives in it have never been better.
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He was not, and is not, a Russian agent. That was investigated and thrown out. Your pukeworthy bullshit has no business here or in any civilized society. Go back under your rock.
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Your proof is an opinion piece at the Observer?
Go drink your juice box and take a nap. Let the adults continue the discussion.
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It's not what they know about you - it's that they're using what they know about you to send you fraudulent 'news' items that make it increasingly hard to know what's real. The crime here, such as it is, is that they fraudulently got permission to use info about a set of Facebook users - by posing as academic researchers, and to use the info in that research. They most certainly did not disclose that they were a political opposition research firm.
And they they scraped the facebook accounts of all the frie
Destroyed (Score:4, Insightful)
Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:5, Insightful)
tl;dr: it's not just about "All your data belong to Facebook (and the rest)", it's that they'll freely share that data with third parties and don't give a fuck what happens when someone abuses their access to it.
Re:Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:5, Insightful)
You are almost right. Facebook isn't upset that this company got so much information about Facebook users. They are upset that this company didn't pay Facebook for that information, and that the company didn't pay them more to used Facebook's targeting services.
Re:Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's not a breach, Facebook is correct on that point. The real issue here, and one that Facebook seems to be pulling off successfully judging by some of the replies so far, is that Facebook's response to 50m user profiles being harvested and abused is to turn it into a discussion about semantics.... a bad actor like Cambridge Analytics in the mix.
It seems like you are lost in the same fight against semantics. User profiles were harvested, because that is what they are there for. But how are the users abused, other than receiving campaign attention? And how do you judge that Cambridge Analytics is a bad actor in establishing that attention?
These people were not scammed of their life savings, no one opened credit cards in their names, and no one lost their house over this. But because it favored one political candidate, it causes outrage. Why?
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Re:Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:4, Insightful)
The kind of targeted advertising that was delivered via Facebook (outright falsities and incitements to violence, etc) would be illegal on just about any other medium. Certainly on Television, and certainly as relates to electioneering rules. That it wasn't illegal in 2016 - and that it was so widespread - is just more indication that Facebook needs to be regulated as an advertising medium. Ads and other commercial items clearly labeled as such - with their sponsors identities either shown or made available.
"Hi, I'm Vladimir Putin, and I approve this message"
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It does seem CA got the data through violating FaceBook's TOS, but as far as harvesting your friends and targeting ads...that's what FaceBook does. And political ads are no different, and Obama did the same thing in 2012 and it was lauded as breaking new ground in political engagement [theguardian.com].
Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.
Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
"If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.
Re: Harvesting profiles is not a breach (Score:3)
No, that is not what they did. RTFA. They used malware to gain access to the entire user profile, including every Facebook link clicked on. Everything Facebook stores on you. Including in the closed and secret groups. Every click, time spent viewing something, everything.
By going through the UK, it wouldn't matter, malware is covered by the computer misuse act, personally identifying information (even if public) is covered by the data protection act.
It's no wonder such lunacy happens, if nobody bothers to u
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Which FA calls it malware? Or is that your embellishment?
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The report in the Observer by the person who actually discussed the software by one of its authors and saw the internal documents. You know, the FA that you're always supposed to go to, the source. Use the source, Luke.
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I haven't seen a link to a single article from the Observer. I've seen links to articles on this subject by Carole Cadwalladr, who is described as a reporter for the Observer, but (as far as I've seen) those haven't used the term "malware". So, again, which FA are you talking about?
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But they didn't use malware. People downloaded themselves and gave consent. Again semantic.
It's no different than millions of user give consent over access their information with android or apple apps. Nothing really prevent the app developer to harvest the information and sell it to another party other than a written rule.
Whiner (Score:2, Interesting)
I think its hilarious that Zuckerberg hates Trump and pulls this 'oh yeah well I'm gonna..' stunt and now it has drawn attention to what Facebook has become: Ugly and intrusive.
I want a Ferrari, but I'm not about to help the US Government nor a private company [insert terrible babies and pitchforks jokes here] to get one.
Does no one else think twice about this?
"""Facebook insists that the Cambridge Analytica debacle wasn't a data breach, but a "violation" by a third party app that abused user data."""
So, wh
What's the real issue? (Score:1)
Because Trump's campaign did it and Hillary didn't?
Re: What's the real issue? (Score:3)
No, multiple European laws were violated, malware was used, and the military's psychological warfare division attempted to rig an election (aka a military coup).
Re: What's the real issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
multiple European laws were violated, malware was used, and the military's psychological warfare division attempted?
Yes, and Facebook is being "destroyed" as we speak.
They might even pay a small fine when this is all over. Or not.
Equifax is still standing, and that was financial, non-voluntarily given data, and on a far larger scale.
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Facebook has a European presence. That means they can be fined. Cambridge Analytics is in the UK and will be ripped a new one iff (if and only if) May doesn't try and exonerate it.
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TFA (don't judge me, I read it before coming to /.) says that
Although unlikely, that could theoretically mean charges of contempt of parliament, leading to imprisonment.
Re: What's the real issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hillary's campaign was very proud of their use of social media platforms to harvest votes. Obama's campaign bragged about their efficiency at doing so.
Trump hires advisors who beat them and suddenly it's a breach?
That Facebook decides its response based on the politics of their customer tells us all we need to know about their lack of values
Color me surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would have thought that a company founded on collecting people's personal data and selling it to third parties would be involved in a scandal about the collection of people's personal data without those people's permissions?
It's almost as if the people using FB had no clue what was going on.
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Yes, people that use FB are clueless.
Can we just shut down the facebook already? (Score:1)
And get on with our lives? Or how about we create a pros and cons list, I'll start...
Pros: Well nothing really comes to mind.
Cons: Where do I start?
They're not wrong (Score:2, Troll)
Using Facebook as intended doesn't make it a data breach, as facebook quite clearly told everyone.
The "other" political party using facebook for their own ends is the reason for this autistic screeching.
It's not as intended (Score:3)
If malware is used to download FB's internal profile of you using your credentials, it's not access as intended by the user.
This is an EU company, EU laws hold. Including the computer misuse act and the data protection act. As does the right to be forgotten, along with various pieces of human rights legislation.
This is a criminal enterprise and Cambridge University should be shut down until its role is established.
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If malware is used to download FB's internal profile of you using your credentials, it's not access as intended by the user.
Please provide a citation that says malware was used as part of the data collection process.
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Try the article in the Observer/Guardian, you know, the only article that actually invokves the source. It is stated very clearly that malware is used, I trust you can read.
Anyone surprised by this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not about posting. FB tracks nearly every web site you go to, whether you post or not. They track your location when you use their app, whether you post or not. They know what everyone around you posted, everyone you've associated with, everything posted about you.
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FB tracks nearly every web site you go to, whether you post or not.
Unless you use something like uMatrix to just go ahead and block all that crap. The only thing you "lose" is access to the comment functionality on some sites.
Expectation of privacy (Score:2)
It's not even about that rule, though .... (Score:2)
You're on the right track, generally speaking. But the biggest danger with all of this information culled from social media sites is the potential to mis-use it by taking it out of context.
Anything I was willing to post on Facebook under my name is a statement I'm willing to stand up and take the credit for posting. Therefore, if someone published it in the local newspaper? I'd be fine with that too. (Why you'd find it worthy of an article in the paper, I'm not quite sure? But for the sake of argument ...
Breach (Score:2)
A breach has a specific technical meaning. This is a technical site. This wasn't a breach, this was at most a contract violation. This page does a decent job of describing incidents, breaches and the like:
https://iapp.org/news/a/is-it-... [iapp.org]
This isn't CNN, these things matter. Please keep your politics out of our technology news site. Is that too much to ask?
It depends on whose Al is getting Gored (Score:1)
Are people outraged because of a leak or because of a design flaw or because they so detest the current POTUS and possibility that the campaign made use of the available data?
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Hillary's campaign had the full blessing of Google, Facebook, and twitter to uses their full data and resouces and still lost.
How dare the opposing party attempt to do the same with 1% of the same data? How dare they!
autistic_screaching.jpg
Hey wire tap, how do you make pancakes? (Score:1)
who's fault, exactly? (Score:2)
And msmash writes: Nothing (Score:2)
Because putting together a readable summary rather than a list of tweets is too frigging hard.
Getting destroyed? (Score:2)
They're getting destroyed, are they?
Okay, so is it a ritual hanging for the executives, or will fire be involved? Will they make it public or more of a behind-closed-doors event?
And as for Facebook, I guess the userbase will migrate to something else over the next few days. A pity, as some of my elderly relatives would use it to keep in touch with various hobby groups.
mindless sheep (Score:1)
Maybe you should just get off FB and go explore meatspace... There's real flowers, roads, mountains, rivers, and people out there. Your social skills might improve too!
How does this compare to Aaron Swartz? (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carryin
Stopped using facebook over 7 years ago (Score:2)
They repeatedly violated user privacy rights, changed settings without warning, and I finally cut ties with them. I've never gone back.
They are not trustworthy.
You are the product being sold.
Violation of agreement (Score:1)
Destroyed? (Score:2)
Like consumed by those nanobugs in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, the recent 'green' version not the original one.
Is this really Facebook's fault? (Score:3)
Facebook's response was correct, this wasn't breach, and just because the over liberalized media doesn't understand that, doesn't make it Facebook's problem. The only reason that Cambridge Analytica was able to grab the data is because people provided it and provided it openly without any second thought for the consequences of what they were doing at the time.
if you don't want to be tracked, then stop willfully giving your data up to everyone who wants it, otherwise you have no right to complain when it gets used against you.
Harvesting information is the entire point of FB (Score:3)
What did anybody expect? How naive can you be?
This amuses me (Score:1)
... since back in the day I was writing facebook apps and in the end user agreements you were made to agree to said something along the lines of being "obligated" to not misuse customer data. The use of the word "obligated" made me giggle. We'll give you access to nefarious shit, but you're "obligated" not to sniff around.
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Can you point to a similar thing done by Democrats where nobody raised a stink?
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This maybe? [theguardian.com] I don't really see the difference between CA getting your data because you're friends with someone who took a survey and Obama getting your data because you're friends with someone who signed up for their campaign. At the end of the day, the political campaigns have your data because of stuff people you maybe know did, but you sure didn't give Obama or CA your info.
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Wow....you think that's the same thing? I bet you think white bread with ketchup is pizza too, eh?
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You're not wrong. This being modded as flamebait is hilarious.
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Another example of the simple fact that morality and ethics are things you are born with, or not.
[Citation needed]
(IOW you're wrong: We're born knowing that sucking on something does something about that bad feeling inside, and that's about it.)