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Facebook Gave Data About 57 Billion Friendships To Academic (theguardian.com) 114

Posted by msmash from the it's-not-over-yet dept.
Before Facebook suspended Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting "scam" at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57bn Facebook friendships. From a report: Facebook provided the dataset of "every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level" to Kogan's University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015. Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time. A University of Cambridge press release on the study's publication noted that the paper was "the first output of ongoing research collaborations between Spectre's lab in Cambridge and Facebook." Facebook did not respond to queries about whether any other collaborations occurred. "The sheer volume of the 57bn friend pairs implies a pre-existing relationship," said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. "It's not common for Facebook to share that kind of data. It suggests a trusted partnership between Aleksandr Kogan/Spectre and Facebook."
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Facebook Gave Data About 57 Billion Friendships To Academic More

Facebook Gave Data About 57 Billion Friendships To Academic

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  • And now I know why Facebooks is scared (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday March 22, 2018 @01:17PM (#56306871)
    this could be a major political issue if it doesn't turn out they did the same for the other side. The Dems might make it a campaign issue with FB stuck in the middle. The one thing they've got to be afraid of most is regulation. After all, you are the product. It's not the adverts where they make all their money, it's selling all that sweet, sweet demographic data.

    • Amusing tidbit (Score:2, Informative)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 )

      What I find amusing about this whole thing is that the Trump campaign never used the data [cbsnews.com], because they didn't trust it.

      The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data's reporting -- principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value.

      So Facebook giving all that data to the Trump campaign had no effect on the election whatsoever.

      All this outrage and calls for regulation and boycotting - because it was Trump of course - over something that Trump didn't use.

      I don't care who y'are - that's funny right thare!

      • A gift from Trump (Score:4, Insightful)

        by iMadeGhostzilla ( 1851560 ) on Thursday March 22, 2018 @01:59PM (#56307183)

        It doesn't matter whether it had any effect on the election -- the perception on the left is that it had. To them FB will be forever tainted with the unbearable thought that it helped Trump win. If this drives people away from FB and social media, or at least curbs the addiction, that alone will be a phenomenal consequence of Trump presidency.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by orlanz ( 882574 )

        So, what exactly are you saying (assuming that Trump's campaign didn't use the data)? That we shouldn't be outraged at Facebook or we shouldn't regulate this or this type of research and profiling be allowed without societal checks & bounds or without user consent?

      • What I find amusing about this whole thing is that the Trump campaign never used the data, because they didn't trust it.

        Although... Trump did eventually use at least some of their suggestions generated from that data. For example, Cambridge Analytica came up with the slogan "drain the swamp" based on the Facebook data they stole and passed it along to Trump -- who admitted (on video) he got it from them.

      • What I find amusing about this whole thing is that the Trump campaign never used the data, because they didn't trust it.

        Perhaps you should re-read article you posted. This is NOT what it says.

        "Cambridge Analytica data was used for some targeted digital advertising and a large TV buy"

        So Facebook giving all that data to the Trump campaign had no effect on the election whatsoever.

        1. Facebook didn't give it to Trump.
        2. Article you cited says data was used.
        3. Whether it had an effect or not is irrelevant.

        All this outrage and calls for regulation and boycotting - because it was Trump of course - over something that Trump didn't use.

        Some simply grasp for excuses to pounce because they hate Trump.

        Some are concerned by revelations of how their data is being used. Perhaps belated contemplating issues they should have thought about much earlier.

        Yet other

      • All this outrage and calls for regulation and boycotting - because it was Trump of course - over something that Trump didn't use.

        Cambridge Analytica is owned by the Mercers and the Mercers have been laundering [thedailybeast.com] Russian money for years.

        Cambridge Analytica's admission that they used Ukrainian prostitutes to blackmail politicians is interesting because Breitbart (another outfit owned by the Mercers) is the one that broke the news that Representative Conyers (a Democrat) had Congress pay 27 thousand dollars for a sexual harassment claim (out of the 17 million dollar fund that a number of other representatives used, although their names ha

      • The Trump campaign didn't use the data that was handed over by Facebook because it was useless in and of itself. According to the story it was "every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level". What does that mean? Read on in the Guardian article and you find, “The data that was shared was literally numbers – numbers of how many friendships were made between pairs of countries – ie x number of friendships made between the US and UK,” Face

    • this could be a major political issue if it doesn't turn out they did the same for the other side. The Dems might make it a campaign issue with FB stuck in the middle. The one thing they've got to be afraid of most is regulation. After all, you are the product. It's not the adverts where they make all their money, it's selling all that sweet, sweet demographic data.

      Not sure what you're going on about. The Trump campaign did not get voter data from Cambridge Analytica, and the Facebook data they had was not used by Trump or the Trump campaign at all. Facebook's political division offered to embed their employees in the campaigns to help with analysis and targeted advertising (the offer was made to both the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign). The Trump campaign accepted and had Facebook folks working with them. The Clinton campaign rejected the offer because they

  • umm (Score:3)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@NoSpaM.hotmail.com> on Thursday March 22, 2018 @01:23PM (#56306909)
    "Aleksandr Spectre"? Are you fucking kidding me? Was it so cartoonishly evil that Facebook's legal and ethics team didn't believe it was real?

    • "Aleksandr Spectre"? Are you fucking kidding me?

      Cool Hand Luke Voice: "Lotsa white pussycat photos down here in the private data, Boss!"

      Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.

      . . . and each of the authors passed it on to their friends . . . under the condition that they, "Not give it to anyone else . . . "

      . . . which means, who knows how many copies of this are floating around . . . ?

      "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        . . . and each of the authors passed it on to their friends

        who knows how many copies of this are floating around

        57 billion?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It would almost be funny if it didn't all keep coming back to the same old culprit, Putin's Russia:

      "Kogan is also an associate professor at the St Petersburg University â" a fact his Cambridge colleagues, aside from the head of the Department of Psychology, were not told, according to The Guardian/Observer. In this position, he received funding from the Russian government to study âStress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networksâ(TM). In a CV from 2014, which was previously avai

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      And didn't the white cat give him away?

  • So... Facebook is Facebook? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Thursday March 22, 2018 @01:30PM (#56306977)
    This is kind of what Facebook does... how do you think they went from 0$ to 15 billion $ a year in advertising over a few years?
    • and focused on the Adverts. It's now front and center and in the minds of regular people. There's also a sizable Anti-Trump faction in America (he did lose the popular vote after all) that is going to seize on this and keep it from going away. Facebook'll end up caught in the middle of a political fight. Worst case scenario a bunch of new privacy regulations get passed that make a significant portion of their business illegal.
  • Since Facebook's business model is built on selling user data, our response is obvious: poison the data! Create dozens of fake accounts with the most ridiculous user profiles imaginable, and friend them with random people. If we make the user data garbage enough, then it becomes useless and Facebook's business model fails.

  • How is this such a big surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WolfgangVL ( 3494585 ) on Thursday March 22, 2018 @01:37PM (#56307013)

    Huge social media company mines data for years. Trades data for money. Are we going after google next? What about the cell phone companies? Grocery store loyalty cards?

    Seriously. The people have decided.

  • Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc sell our data. When you go to these companies, I can buy who you are, your address, your pix, and most of all, your name, etc. .
    With Google, I can buy clean data for stats, but it will not come with address, pix, names, OR, I can buy access to you. That is I can direct Ads at ppl that live in Houston Texas and then sell them cheap ACs from China. While I can not direct it to an individual, I can give criteria that would allow me to focus on those most likely to buy junk.
  • With a rough guestimate of half a billion users at that time, it comes to 100 friends per person.

    It is an interesting number. Steven Pinker argued our brains evolved in extended family clan social structure. And that our brains are incapable of holding more than 200 persons. We extended the "persons" to entities. Most people can not name more than 50 friends or relatives strictly from memory. With address books and contacts etc they can stretch it to about 150 to 200 range. If asked to "like" or "dislike"

    • You are confusing friends with popularity. You don't want to hear thier nonsense (though you could pretend to listen to curry popularity) you want them all to bask in the glow that is you and keep that number rising.

    • Most people can not name more than 50 friends or relatives strictly from memory. With address books and contacts etc they can stretch it to about 150 to 200 range. If asked to "like" or "dislike" people, entities, national groups, any grouping, most people can not go beyond 200 without resorting to paper, notes and other aids.

      That's a load of horse shit.

      Your average tween can prattle off endlessly about the mundane details of hundreds of celebrities they've never met, including up-to-the-minute relationship statuses, fashion choices, career info, and a personal rating of how much they hate/love that person.

      You've got the same thing with weeaboos and their anime and video games.

      You've got the same thing with little boys and dinosaurs, construction equipment, and sometimes trains.

      You've got the same thing with movie buffs, basebal

  • Someone seriously under counted the Earths population!
  • The only scandal here is the shear number of people unaware that the purpose of all social media is to sell your private information...
    "Google isn't free, the cost is your information" - Eric Schmidt Former CEO Google.
    so just go head, fill your house with Alexa, Google home, Nest, FitBit, Apple watch, use websites to analyze your DNA... and pay no attention to those annoying little ELUA popup's where you waive all your rights. Then be shocked when they sell that information..considering it's their busi
  • Help me understand this.

    There are roughly 7.6 billion people on earth.
    Consider that most people do not have Facebook accounts, thus cannot be 'friended'.
    A 2017 survey shows ~2.2 billion Facebook users.
    That leaves an average friends per Facebook user at 25.9.

    So, then, for any researcher to have "friendships" data on me, they know who I have "friended".
    How can this be "anonymised"?

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