Facebook Hires Firm To Conduct Forensic Audit of Cambridge Analytica Data (cbsnews.com) 137
After it was revealed that political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users, the social media company has been scrutinized for not better protecting its users. Today, CBS News reports that Facebook has recently hired Stroz Friedberg, a digital forensics firm, to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica. According to a press release issued by Facebook on Monday, Cambridge Analytica has agreed to "comply and afford the firm complete access to their servers and systems." From the report: The social network said it asked Christopher Wylie and University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan to submit to an audit. Facebook says Kogan has verbally agreed to participate, but Wylie has declined. Wylie is a former employee of Cambridge Analytica who described the company's use of illicit data in interviews late last week. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie were banned from Facebook on Friday. Cambridge Analytica did not immediately confirm that it had agreed to comply with the audit. The firm has denied the allegations that it improperly collected and used the data. A spokeswoman for Stroz Friedberg declined to comment on the firm's involvement with an audit.
"We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims," Facebook officials said in a statement. "We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We also want to be clear that today when developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a robust review to identify potential policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. This is part of a comprehensive internal and external review that we are conducting to determine the accuracy of the claims that the Facebook data in question still exists. If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made."
"We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims," Facebook officials said in a statement. "We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We also want to be clear that today when developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a robust review to identify potential policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. This is part of a comprehensive internal and external review that we are conducting to determine the accuracy of the claims that the Facebook data in question still exists. If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made."
Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama" - https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America:
"“They [Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted." https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708... [ijr.com]
Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:4, Informative)
The Obama campaign invented the deep-dive into Facebook data for their 2008 and 2012 campaigns. They not only openly bragged about doing what CA did and far more, but somehow the media fawned all over him for it. Odd, that:
https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07... [cnn.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
http://swampland.time.com/2012... [time.com]
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
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Why would you describe this as 'odd'? Nothing 'odd' about it. Friends help each other.
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Jeez there's a lot of Whataboutism [wikipedia.org] on every single article on here these days. Is it new? Or am I just noticing it more?
@Parent: How about you, instead, tell us what you actually think about the mass harvesting, potential abuse, and resale of people's personal information - how does it make you feel? Do you think it's a problem? If so, do you think there are any solutions?
Me? It make me feel very uncomfortable, and I think we need legal mechanisms in place to take control over our data from these parties -
Re: Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:3, Insightful)
A: We're punishing you
B: That seems like a double standard, here's why.
A: whataboutism!
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So for this subject, the underlying issue of whether or not Facebook hoovering up tons of personal data with poor controls on how that data
Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:4, Funny)
Do I need to point out how absurdly self-contradictory that is? Because I will.
You said that the Right is both authoritarian, which you imply is bad, and not authoritarian enough, which you're also saying is bad. A double contradiction!
That aside, do you know what Authoritarianism is?
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I used the term right wing authoritarianism explicitly to differentiate it fro
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W
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In America, the Right and Left argue constantly over where authority over specific matters lies within the framework of the Constitution. Under Authoritarianism, there is no argument.
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Not when it's the same subject, and you're pointing out double standards and hypocrisy. As is usually the case, the people breaking out the "W" word are the real tools in the conversation.
Re: Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:2)
whataboutism is a bullshit argument. Always has been, always will be.
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Me? It make me feel very uncomfortable, and I think we need legal mechanisms in place to take control over our data from these parties - even if we misguidedly gave some control away in the past, usually by having our trust betrayed or being bamboozled by small-print and legal linguistics.
"misguidedly gave some control away in the past"?
That's a nice rewriting of "actually bragged about our preferred politician's supposed tech savviness in doing this exact same thing."
Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:4, Interesting)
Slightly different situation. Facebook sold data to the Obama campaign. Cambridge Analytica harvested data that they didn't pay Facebook for. Facebook wants their cut.
Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics (Score:5, Informative)
https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708... [ijr.com]
"A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.
In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists."
“They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted."
"Davidsen began the tweet thread with a link to a Time article outlining the Obama campaign's Facebook targeting campaign, which she said was codenamed “Project Taargus”
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Nope, you're a liar. Obama used readily available public data and analytics databases. Cambridge used an essentially fake app that was deployed to collect private data that was not otherwise publicly available, under the pretense of research. Over 99% of the people that hit 'no' to the question of whether or not they would like their data shared also had their data compromised, anyway. Then that data was given to the campaign. Lies all the way down. Probably not illegal, but to characterize blatant theft of
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So the firm [Cambridge Analytica] harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission [nytimes.com], according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.
In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreign
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Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.
You can't be serious. You mean like how Hillary's campaign hired that British spy to compose a dossier?
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That's how Facebook works, but now that it helped elect someone they didn't like it's a problem?
To my knowledge, it is not illegal for a campaign to hire foreign-based consultants.
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It sounds like your statements accept a lot of facile "answers" to questions about O that.are.not.fully.verified.information with a variety of excuses and simple assertions.
Still waiting after all these years.
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How predictable that the first part would be a copy/paste what-about-ism.
If you have evidence that Obama's campaign did something wrong, post it. Tell the ICO, maybe they will look for those documents when they raid Cambridge tomorrow.
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https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708... [ijr.com]
Ex-Obama Campaign Director Drops Bombshell Claim on Facebook: 'They Were on Our Side'
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The important part that Trump's favourite media outlet left out is that she says they didn't break the rules. Cambridge appear to have broken at least UK law, possibly US law.
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It's hilarious that the left had to invent the term "whataboutism"
It's merely a new label for the fallacy, a subspecies of argumentum ad hominem, traditionally known as the tu quoque fallacy. It remains a fallacy no matter who calls it or by what name they call it. The putative wrongdoing of a speaker is no answer to that speaker's accusations of wrongdoing. This is not, or should not be, a left vs right issue.
If you are not capable of mounting an argument (or defence) any more substantial than "no you
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You're deflecting and hand waiving.
It is when the speaker is completely and utterly full of shit. And you'd be doing the same damn thing if it was a speaker you disagreed with - hypocrite.
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FTFY
Western propaganda about propaganda. The United States only cares about civil rights abroad when it can use it as a weapon against people it doesn't like. And you can fill an encyclopedia set of abuses it's committed at home, much less abroad. That's inconv
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Blah blah blah...
In some cases, an appeal to a more fundamental principle is justified and which invalidates your your highfalutin "your argument is invalid" bullshit, namely this:
*What is good for the goose is good for the gander.*
Tu quoque is a misapplied method of argumentation when one person's wrongdoing is compared to another's similar wrongdoing. I posit that if both parties are doing exactly the same thing, and only one party is being held up for ridicule and discipline, this is not whataboutism or
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100% projection. The word Whataboutery itself is propaganda, used by hypocrites to deflect from their hypocrisy. Like all the whining, bitching and moaning about Trump's supposed collusion with foreign intelligence agents, when the Hillary campaign not only did that in fact, but they paid for it.
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More whining and bitching but it doesn't change your hypocrisy. And waiving around tu quoque doesn't change the fact that you are engaging in propaganda when you attack other countries for XYZ but protest that it's just not faaaaair when anyone points out that you not only do XYZ as well, but on an infinitely larger scale.
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What are you talking about? I've been perfectly clear what the problem is with the term whataboutery: it is propaganda thrown out whenever someone points out western hypocrisy on the subject of human rights.
And yes, fuck your noise about that being a fallacy - that's an argument only made by people trying to excuse an indefensible position.
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But he did it for the right reasons which was to inform the public. Trump used this information to order people to vote for him, and they did. Obama informed. Trump ordered.
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"The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama" - https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America: "“They [Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted." https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708... [ijr.com]
Indeed. All things are good when done by Democrats, and all things are evil when done by Republicans.
If you disagree, you are guilty of whataboutism. And also probably racism, somehow. I'll figure out how later.
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From what I heard on the TV they gave them prior warning. They'll have scrubbed anything incriminating by now.
Wait a second...narrative shifting (Score:5, Insightful)
...when I first heard this story, it was that Facebook sold an analytics firm a shit-ton of data on their users. You can argue all day long whether FB's gathering was moral or no, but the sale seemed straightforward.
Now this has morphed into "..it was revealed that political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users,..." . ...which has an entirely more malignant sound. Coincidence?
So - did CA "harvest" this data in any sort of illegitimate way, or does that have more to do with the person/party they did it FOR than anything?
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FB had better stat recasting this as abuse, not as a sale gone in a way they didn't expect, IE better for the buyer.
Which they will, and are, since they, FB, are caught selling access to data to people they are not supposed to be helping at all. Shame on them, shame!
Re:Wait a second...narrative shifting (Score:4, Insightful)
The created a Facebook app. It looked innocent, one of those stupid personality tests. But in the ToS that no-one read it said it would grab your private data AND the private data of your friends.
That last bit is definitely illegal. You can't agree to give up personal data on behalf of your friends. About 300k people took the test, 50m people's data was stolen.
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The created a Facebook app. It looked innocent, one of those stupid personality tests. But in the ToS that no-one read it said it would grab your private data AND the private data of your friends.
That last bit is definitely illegal. You can't agree to give up personal data on behalf of your friends. About 300k people took the test, 50m people's data was stolen.
How is it illegal? Cite the law, please.
How, exactly, did it grab that data? Did it reach out to people's PC's and grab it? Or did they buy it from Facebook?
What setting to NOT share that kind of data was ignored? A setting in CA? Or a setting in Facebook?
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Data Protection Act. EU rules on personal data are much stricter. The ICO is applying for a warrant to raid them today.
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I believe the only real issue is that Kogan may have violated terms by selling data that was for non-commercial use.
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There are also the tapes C4 released, where they talk about setting up political rivals with honeypots and the like.
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They are a British company. They very likely broke British law.
Having said that, isn't foreign interference in US elections illegal?
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But in the ToS that no-one read it said it would grab your private data AND the private data of your friends.
That last bit is definitely illegal.
That's just part of FaceBook's API. Is FaceBook's API that allows a user to grant access to their friends list illegal?
You can't agree to give up personal data on behalf of your friends.
Here's what the Obama campaign did in 2012: [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.
The only thing I can see that CA did differently than the Obama campaign is that they (allegedly) told FB it was for "research" but in fact used it for commercial purposes. So if you're mad at CA for violating FB's TOS and want to make sure Zuck gets his cheddar, then okay, that's fair. But if it's all just "conservative politicians are using soc
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No, AniMojo's objection was about CA harvesting of the data of your friends. Yet you sign up for Obama's stuff and he takes your friends' data. It's the same thing.
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Here's what's happening. The Russia narrative fell apart. Even with Democrats screeching about it 24/7 for months, it's obvious that Trump isn't going to be ensnared in that and nobody right of Bernie Sanders believes it. So the next thing was some porn star that Trump apparently had sex with. Oh, wow, *nobody* knew he was a womanizer. Right. Of course, the left lost all their credibility on this being a big deal 20 years ago.
So this is the latest. Some company tied to Trump stole a bunch of data fro
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The Russia narrative fell apart.
Lol, over 100 charges so far. I don't think "falling apart" means what you think it means.
The full list [vox.com] of known indictments and plea deals in Mueller’s probe
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.
2) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.
3) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted in
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1. Get back with me when Trump is convicted
2. It'd be interesting to set Mueller loose on Clinton's campaign staff, wouldn't it?
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None of which have anything to do with Russia changing the results on voting machines or colluding with Trump.
Oh, but it does. See above. The rest of your post is a classic Gish Gallop: [medium.com]
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Of course they have. [nytimes.com]
1) There is no scandal
2) Russiagaters keep moving the goalposts. First it was hacking the DNC servers, then it was hacking electric grids, then it was spreading "discord" amongst Black Lives Matter activists. That minorities live in a murderous police state was a big shocker to them until Russia said it was happening.
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It has been pretty well established that the Russians waged a psychological warfare campaign in the 2016 election, and it looks like they were reaching out to elements of the Trump campaign at least both through Papadapolous and the Trump Tower meeting about "adoptions", aka the Magnitsky Act and the sanctions surrounding that. I suppose you can bullshit if you want about that, but there have been many indictments and even several guilty pleas around with these iss
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As well established as the ideas that:
And so on. Russiagaters have exactly the same amount of evidence as all those other whackjob conspiracy theorists: none.
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List crazy conspiracy theories all you want, but you're just flashing shiny objects to distract from what's actually happening. Maybe in Russia you can get indictments with no evidence at all, but it typically doesn't work quite that way in the US federal legal system, at least as long as democracy isn't torn down. There's evidence both in the indictments and found by the news media, as well as forensic analysis
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Or you could stop waiving those hands for five seconds and post some evidence. If, say, I'm arguing with an Obamabot who insists 44 had the greatest intentions but was held back by a Republican Congress, I will bury his dumb ass with facts and citations on how the worst policies from the Obama Administration came from Obama himself, not Republicans.
If you Russiagaters weren't completely full of it, you would come
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I guess you can go ba
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Oh, it probably is illicit. Probably if they'd known how much was being taken they'd have quadrupled their prices.
Be careful what you click (Score:4, Informative)
“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”
So, what really happened is that a bunch of people installed a bunch of Facebook apps, and the users authorized their personal data to be used by the app. What happened after that was standard Facebook Business Model stuff, they sell your eyeballs to advertisers [consumerist.com] and take a 30% share of sales [facebook.com]. It's how all social media stays in business, by passively collecting data about you, where you eat, your income levels, what you buy, etc. All in the name of "targeted advertising", which we as users frankly embrace. We love seeing ads for things that may interest us, companies like the opportunity of us buying stuff, FB loves collecting data and giving it to the govern.... I mean collecting data.
So, if we the public are clicking Accept every time we want to do a survey, or use a service, or install an app.... the horse is out of the barn. Then we get to Cambridge Analytica, who is accused of using personality quiz apps to gather information.. yeah, which is pretty much the whole purpose of those little quizzes to find your interests. The user answers a bazillion personal questions, and it spits out "Your Medieval Name Would Be Patsy", but what do you think happens to all that data after you click Commit? They aren't even building a profile of you, because Facebook already did that work by getting you to fill it out yourself. CA figured out, like Obama did in 2012. What do you think "big data" is really all about? Joining all these little data sets, like purchased this here, travelled there, likes flying, hates TSA, lives here, people that live here tend to earn this much, people that travel there and live here tend to vote this way, so hook them up with some targeted political ads and bam, you've increased your probability of an election win.
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A couple of points: (1) did Cambridge Analytical or a partner/contractor use a degree-of-network harvesting license that had been provided for academic research only, then transfer the data collected to a for-profit political consulting firm/division? A lot of conflicting information on this question and key parties including Cambridge University have now clammed up (2) if Facebook user A accepts an app Facebook argues she/he has accepted harvesting of their personal data as consideration for the use of
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“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”
So, what really happened is that a bunch of people installed a bunch of Facebook apps, and the users authorized their personal data to be used by the app. What happened after that was standard Facebook Business Model stuff, they sell your eyeballs to advertisers [consumerist.com] and take a 30% share of sales [facebook.com]. It's how all social media stays in business, by passively collecting data about you, where you eat, your income levels, what you buy, etc. All in the name of "targeted advertising", which we as users frankly embrace. We love seeing ads for things that may interest us, companies like the opportunity of us buying stuff, FB loves collecting data and giving it to the govern.... I mean collecting data.
The difference here is that even with that authorization there were things that Kogan (who collected that data) and CA were not allowed to do with that data. And even after Kogan and CA claimed to have destroyed the data they were still misusing that data.
I agree it's a very difficult policy to enforce, and if you're in the habit of clicking agree some of those 3rd parties are probably violating it, but it doesn't change the fact that Kogan and CA are one of those scummy 3rd parties misusing your data.
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If it was just the person who used the app it would be okay, at least legally. But it's their friends as well. Friends who didn't agree to anything.
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They agreed when they signed up for Facebook.
Facebook collected the data. Facebook claims ownership over all data you send to the.
Facebook ignored their user's privacy settings. Facebook sold that data.
At worst, CA is guilty of violating a Facebook ToS regarding the use of that data.
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The users data and the ads pay the bills. That allows the social media brand to grow.
Social media is not free. Something has to be sold to make a profit.
They don't just "analyze". (Score:1)
I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ
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Well, the do say the man who pays the piper calls the tune. I suppose they could hire them to prove that Facebook was innocent.
What crime is being alleged here? (Score:3, Insightful)
A private firm used computers and access to social networks to learn about people's opinions on various political matters. What's the crime in that?.. Why would this even be unethical, much less illegal?
Maybe, this violated Facebook's TOS — but that's the most, that can even be alleged here... If that...
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We'll see. Or probably we won't, since violations of US election law are no longer prosecuted, but in any case it looks a bit darker:
Re:What crime is being alleged here? (Score:4, Interesting)
Supposedly Facebook's CSO, Alex Stamos, who actually wanted Facebook to look into the Russian misinformation campaign during the US elections, is leaving Facebook after clashes with other senior management, most notably Sheryl Sandberg. Even more potentially damning is that according to Carole Cadwalladr [twitter.com] Facebook staff were in Cambridge Analytica's London offices "securing data" when agents of the UK's ICO turned up to do the same. Whether this occured before Cambridge Analytica became the subject of a formal request for a seach warrant [bbc.co.uk] is a little unclear though. I think this is starting to look like it's might have got some real legs to it, so I'm going to stock up on the popcorn and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica can at least count their blessings on one thing though; they managed to have all this blow up in their faces *before* the GDPR kicked in.
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So, planting a provocateur is illegal now? There goes the [washingtontimes.com] Democratic Party [zerohedge.com]...
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It's not - but it's everything that Russiagaters have been whining about for over a year and a half. A foreign company openly bragging about changing American elections - but the company is based in the U.K., not Russia, so the media and Stepford Democrats DGAF.
How long is it going to take people to realize (Score:2)
how awful social media is and just quit using it?
The first time I saw someone post a picture of one of my inebriated classmates I realized facebook's potential for destruction and deleted my 2 month old account.
I advise everyone to do the same.
Pull the plug.
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I don't use Facebook either, and I've never created an account. But I don't fool myself into believing that this means they don't have a dossier on me, or that the way they store those isn't as accounts on their system...possibly with a flag saying "non-user".
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I hear you, but it's better to make them have to dig for info on me and doubt its veracity than to give them all the info voluntarily. They exist to sell me to anyone with a big enough budget to screw me and others. The really big budgets buy millions of records and win elections. The low budgets send me postcards in the mail advertising a new local tattoo parlor.
I think if you're going to have a facebook or other social media account you should do everything you can to give them false data to compete wi
Paying attention, Russiagaters? (Score:4, Informative)
This a company that has bragged about subverting American elections [youtube.com] - but they're based in the U.K., so don't expect to see Democrats or Rachael Maddow freaking out about them 24/7 for the next two years or more.
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Again - are you paying attention? Even the Russian indictments have nothing to do with hacking election systems and even the DOJ says they had no impact on the election. Probably be
Hearing it called "misused data" (Score:3)
Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people stayed home because they just couldn't pull the trigger for Hillary. There was plenty of reasons to not vote for her. Including the ongoing meltdown she's still has over her second failed attempt at being president. And the worst part is, Trump beat the only person he was capable of beating, because she stank so bad.
Now, you can blame that loss on all sorts of reasons, but the plain fact is, she sucked as a candidate. Most of the reason she lost was her own making.
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Really? I don't think more than half the reasons she lost were her own doing. But it's true, the only two reasons I heard to vote for her were:
1) She's a woman.
2) She's not Trump.
Both were ok reasons, but hardly very good. (Well, not being Trump was a pretty good reason...but for a candidate?? Not being something doesn't say who you are, and there's more than one way of being a poor choice.)
The thing is, I didn't run across a single person who liked her as a candidate. Some people approved of her, but
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Really? So who forced her to:
Smear black and brown kids as Superpredators
Pick a right-wing pro-life running mate
Be a homophobe until the Supreme Court legalized gay marraige
Be an incompetent neocon warmonger
Not bother to campaign in the Rust Belt states that went for Trump
Rig the Democratic primary
Take hundreds of thousands from dirty banks as she was running for president
And so on. Hillary is ra
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Irrelevant. What Trump does or does not do does nothing to change the worth of Hillary's actions. It's not like you're going to give Trump a pass on some stupid lie he's told just because dumbass Hillary credited the Reagan's for their AIDS activism.
Care to try again, without the butthurt partisan drivel?
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1) isn't a reason. The many of the very people voting for Hillary because she was a woman, wouldn't vote for a Republican Woman. That means that being a woman was just an excuse to vote for her, because she had nothing else going for her.
2) Plenty of people voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. Voting for someone because "they aren't the other person" is a pretty lame ass reason.
Both were ok reasons, but hardly very good
They are reasons. Saying they are "ok" is a large part of why we had Hillary and Donald as the two options. Neither option wa
Re:Oh really? (Score:4, Insightful)
And as long as we're being honest, you know there's no such thing as a popular vote for president in the United States. Millions of people stay home or vote third party because they know full well their state is going for one party or the other. If everyone's vote actually counts, both candidates would have actually run completely different campaigns with completely different outcomes. Democrats in Texas would have a reason to go to the polls as well as Republicans in California.
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