FTC Probing Facebook For Use of Personal Data: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com) 78
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook is under investigation by a U.S. privacy watchdog over the use of personal data of 50 million users by a data analytics firm to help elect President Donald Trump. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree of its handing of user data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge, according to a person familiar with the matter. Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time. If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation.
It's about time. (Score:1)
Trump does it again!
Re:It's about time. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice to have Zuckerburg asked under oath about who he's willing to sell everyone's data to. Also which politicians he's given it to for free.
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It's already public knowledge that the same information was shared with the Obama reelection campaign but no one complained at the time because, well, you know...
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Bias.
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If the service is free, YOU are the product.
Double standard (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazing how Obama can target voters using facebook data and it's lauded as smart and effective.
Trump targets voters and facebook doesn't care before the election(*), but now months later it's an obscene violation of peoples' privacy.
Were any laws broken? If it's illegal to hire non-citizens to do campaign research, how does the Hillary campaign paying Christopher Steele get a pass?
Is this just a company whinging about a violation of their TOS, after the fact, while ignoring hundreds of other companies who do the same thing?
What exactly is the alleged infraction here?
(*) Facebook was informed of the "breach" many months before the election, and literally didn't care.
Flashback to the Obama 2012 campaign (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an article [nytimes.com] from NYT discussing Obama's use of facebook data during his 2012 campaign.
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”
Also, this quote from [Obama’s former director for media analytics] Carol Davidsen:
[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.
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You left out this part in the NY Times article: "Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards."
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You left out this part in the NY Times article: "Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards."
And YOU skipped this, which comes right before your selective quote:
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”
If it was all OK, why the hell would Facebook want them to stop on Nov 7?
Your post is a perfect example of how "fake news" really works - just report the facts that support your desired narrative while pretending facts that prove you wrong simply don't exist.
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I think an ad saying "Vote for Obama" is different from one that says "Black Lives Matter is Coming to Rape your Daughters."
That's why this is getting more attention. They used the data to play on people's fears, and it looks like someone in the chain was working with Putin.
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That kind of ridiculous hyperbole is how you got Trump.
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We get it. Your side is morally and intellectually superior (virtuous) so doing these things is OK. In other words, rules are only weapons to be used against those you disagree with.
OH, HOW STUPID YOU ARE... (Score:2)
First of all, Obama's campaign used Facebook data LEGALLY and with EXPLICIT APPROVAL of Facebook users.
And they were so nice, they asked for it twice.
From TFA which you haven't read, cause you can only just copy/paste what other people feed you, sad creature that you are:
They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook.
When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information.
In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the usersâ(TM) Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on.
"It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list," St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said.
I.e. Obama campaign explicitly asked for permission, openly stating what the data will be used for - then took only names and photos and matched that data to existing voter lists.
But the campaignâ(TM)s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president.
Did you get that numbnuts?
They were looking for known Obama v
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It is amazing how many idiots can't distinguish between 'election interference' and "helping elect Trump". Including the editors on this site.
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Trump does it again!
Thanks, Obama! [nytimes.com]
Literally - Obama did just that, and he did worse - strip mining private data from cable TV boxes.
Data You Can Believe In
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
...
But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.
...
But hey, it was all OK four years ago because Obama did it.
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"If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation."
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, is it? Let me re-quote the relevant part:
"per violation.".
If each person being breached is a violation, you're looking at 50 million times 7 million. That's a BIG number.
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$3000 // your "high-ball" guess // 2011, final days of nov, all of dec // 2012, leap year // 2013
x
(
(2 + 31)
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366
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365
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U.S. privacy watchdog (Score:2)
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Re:U.S. privacy watchdog (Score:4)
Yes. Their function is to watch out in case somebody gets some.
By somebody I mean the plebs, of course.
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No, they did not. They used the data to harm us since Zuck supports Trump. Zuck now owns everything bad Trump has and will do as president. Before, Facebook used their data to help the people by helping make sure McCain never became our ruler. That is different.
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FTC (Score:2)
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Why should the FTC get money if Facebook violated someone's privacy rights? Shouldn't the money go to the victims?
How adorbs! You actually expect a government not to use fines from violations and crimes to not fund itself for its own purposes? Go to your local traffic court and watch sometime - it's not about safely making traffic flow, it's all about turning people upside down, shaking, and collecting all the money that falls out.
It's a normative question, not a positive one. I know how the government operates.
We Need A Privacy Bill Of Rights (Score:1)
Congress needs to pass legislation that sets out the privacy rights of US citizens and regulates what information companies can collect about US citizens, as well as what they can do with that information. Unless you the only sites you go to are Slashdot and Facebook, there's no way any reasonable person can read every single privacy policy of every site they visit, (by which time the site has already started collecting data about them) keep track of changes to those privacy policies, and remember which sit
So, did they or didn't they? (Score:5, Informative)
Two days later, CBS is now reporting [cbsnews.com] that the Trump Campaign only used the CA data for a targeted online advertising and a single TV ad buy during the primaries, because they were playing the CA data off of the RNC, in case the RNC pulled a "resistance" and didn't want to share with the Trump campaign. They ended up not using the CA data for the general election because they didn't trust it coming from Facebook.
Facebook deserves to be hit **very** hard (Score:2)
According to a former high level staffer on the Obama campaign [pjmedia.com], they said they knew Obama's campaign was mass harvesting the social graph and let them do it despite it being against Facebook's rules.
Facebook has been interfering with elections on a level that is utterly unconscionable and must be made an example of.
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Providing data is "interfering"?
Yes of course when Trump does it but not when Obama (or Hillary, for that matter) does it. Progressives get a pass because they're the 'good guys' (only in their own minds).
Progressives are our equivalent of the Sith, and like the Sith, they operate on absolutes. They see themselves as ineffably good, righteous, and always 'the smartest people in the room' so naturally anyone who disagrees is automatically 'stupid' and 'evil', therefor 'the ends justify the means' when fighting 'Pure Evil(TM)'.
Strat
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The iron rule of advertising: people buy advertising because it works, despite the vast majority of advertising effectively being junk.
The problem here is that junk works, and we got ourselves a president to prove it (a divisive populist who is damaging America's standing and competitiveness in the world with every second tweet, whereas Hilary would have been l
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Interesting. My notes contain Hilary Putnam, Hilary Hahn, Hilary Mantel, and Hilary Swank but only one Hillary. My brain knows better, but my fingers often operate on the straw-poll system.
An appropriate punishment... (Score:2)
...would be to delete Facebook's databases and make them start all over again from 0. It'd help break up their monopoly too.
Also, install all Facebook's apps on Zuckerberg's phone that he has to keep on 24/7 and with him at all times and publish all the data they collect as a public live feed.
And publish a live feed of all purchases of Facebook's users' data in detail; who they are and who they represent (e.g. Cambridge Analytica representing the Trump campaign), what data and services they purchased (e.g
Facebook has been selling its its data for years. (Score:2)
They sold users info to the DNC for Obama in 2012, They sold to DNC for Hillary in 2016, They been having been selling access for years, this is not new.
Both the GOP and DNC now use it as a tool for elections. Governments are using it for spying at all levels. Countries are using it to oppress political opposition. Religious regimes are using it to track down posters to punish for blasphemy. Intel agencies and Police are using it thousands of times a day to spy on people.
Do you not follow WikiLeaks or
Nothing new here (Score:2)
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Very low bar (Score:2)
FTC is only investigating whether Facebook violated its terms of service. Have you ever read that document [facebook.com]? It's pages and pages of legalese that basically says Facebook can do whatever they want with your data. Ensuring that they complied with their TOS is a really, really low bar.