Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

2018: Dumb fucks at scale

>> A cynic would interpret the current state of the world to suggest that Zuckerberg, and by extension Facebook, considers a large segment of the world population "Dumb fucks"

I wish I could contradict you but I can't...a large majority of the world population is exactly like that.

I'm feeling very outraged.

Hell yeah, as a New Yorker I wholeheartedly agree.

I remember a Louis C.K. routine about the phrase “the N word.” He summarized it as “I’m not going to say the word, but I’m still going to put it in your head.”

There's some interesting analysis waiting to be done on the preference for words from a certain category to be used as expletives in different languages. Let's start with English, a language most here seem to be familiar with. English seems to prefer sexual acts (fuck), sexual organs (cunt, dick, bollocks), excrement (shit, piss), the combination of the two (fucking asshole/cunt/...), religion (damn, goddamn, etc) and more.

In Dutch, my native language, one is more likely to use diseases (kanker (=cancer), tering (=tuberculosis), typhus (=typhoid fever), etc)), hardly any sexual acts or organs (only 'lul (=dick)' really although 'mierenneuker' (=ant fucker) is also a common mild swear word), excrement (schijt (=shit), zeiken/zeikert/zeikstraal (=to piss/someone who pisses/jet of piss)), religion (verdomme (=damn), godverdomme (=goddammit).

Swedish, my second language, is not a good language for swearing as it uses rather silly, powerless words of sometimes dubious origin, mostly related to religion (fan (=the devil), satan, (i) helvete (=(what the) hell)), sexual organs (kuk (=dick), fitta (=cunt)), excrement (skit (=shit)) and what seem to be random words (sjutton (=the number seventeen...?)), weird combinations (jävla skitstövel (=devilish shit boot)).

German is the most proficient swearing language I know, both due to its rich vocabulary as well as the satisfying vocalisation offered by the language, using words from just about all categories except for diseases (wherein it differs from the related Dutch language). I also know French but my knowledge of French swear words is lacking beyond the basics.

Don't mistake my form of emphasis as overly-emotional behavior, or my statements as any indication that I see myself as significantly more rational than the average person.

There are steps you can take to make yourself less susceptible to propaganda, and it starts with disengaging from the Huxleyan, social media, dopamine machine. Until you do that it's near impossible to get a real sense of your own cognitive biases.

Indeed.

I barely use Facebook anymore but because I live in a different country that's how I keep up with friends and family. If someone wanted to contact me they would do it through Facebook.

> I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way.

Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:

> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

My disgust lies with the regime that's suppressing that regional identity. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook would still disallow the Kurdistan option even if governments didn't criminalize recognition of Kurdistan, then this blame rests on Turkey.

I can't find a reason to fault Facebook's response to this harmful government policy. Would it be better to allow people to select the "Kurdistan" option, knowing full well that this could cause people to be imprisoned, or killed? "Facebook disallows selecting of contested regional identities" is bad, but not nearly as bad as "Facebook helps oppressive governments hunt down disenfranchised people".

It's a culture of silencing disagreements, and that of not having leadership with a spine; in reality this is less expensive for a company, with external cost to society of course.

I think the likes of WeChat and Alibaba have Western companies thinking twice before proudly wearing a "Banned in China" badge.

Response to your bullets with their corresponding number.

1- The story I am talking about was 5 years ago, at that time you could not select Kurdistan in hometown. it was the previous version of facebook profile (before they change it and it was like that for more than 10 years) we fought 10 years, hundreds thousands of pettitions. so your screenshot is Irrelevant.

The story of kurdish accounts being banned for having Kurdish flag is still true, specially during the massacare that happened in the city of Afrin Massacre just a few days ago.

2- I did not work at FB, FB reached out to me to hire me, I went there and I asked them the questions inside FB. I will NEVER ever work for FB. Crappy technologies, Crappy company, not inline with my values.

4- They invited me to W hotel in Chicago, I might still have the conversation in my LinkedIn, what are you trying to say ? are trying to imply I made this story up ? I believe the the recruiting team (including managers and developers) was visiting Chicago, and the job was not in Chicago.

and in the end you are suspecting my credibility, you can checkout my Github I am a public person, I am actually presenting K8Guard for Kuberentes for Linux Foundation in a few weeks. I can stand and testify for every claim I made.

The leaked document inside facebook was also verifies a lot of things I said. (the leaked document was very old not sure how many years ago 6-7 years ago maybe) that they clearly had examples of what flags to and what words to ban. including innocent kurdish flags.

The third party handing the data over to Cambridge Analytica is a privacy breach.

Which is what is happening. The initial headline called it a breach and it isn't all that inaccurate to call it a breach, so it stuck.

Right, but that was a privilege that the users authorized them to grant, no? As in, the people who signed up for CA's app had access to those profiles, and they explicitly granted CA's app access to those profiles. And then CA scraped them and saved them. Am I understanding correctly?

I don't think that's really the problem. I mean, Obama's 2012 campaign scraped the data of Facebook friends of people who'd signed into the campaign website in order to figure out the most effective way to convince those friends to vote for him via microtargeting and other techniques, in particular working out which friends their volunteers could most easily convince to vote for him. We're not just talking about general profile information, but photos and feed activity. Apparently they were so aggressive about this it tripped Facebook's internal alerts. The New York Times spun all this as some clever, sophisticated breakthrough that marketers could take advantage of: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (While they were more honest about getting those users' permission than Cambridge Analytica, they didn't have any kind of permission from the friends they were hoping to profile and target, much like CA didn't. The viral tweet doing the rounds attacking CA for comparing the two is misleading.)

The main problem Facebook seem to have is that the wrong candidate won the 2016 presidential election and the press need someone else to blame.

Incidentally, based on the reporting come out of the Trump campaign, it's not clear they were even doing much or anything in this area. Their campaign leaned heavily on exactly the kind of "political gut instinct" that article decries - used as an input to models rather than directly, and augmented with stuff like A/B testing, but still nothing like the data-guzzling microtargeting machine of Obama 2012. There doesn't seem to have been much sign of CA involvement aside from the initial check the campaign wrote them and their attempts to use Trump's victory in their marketing.

...you mean facebook said "don't keep this" and then they kept it? And people are calling that a breach?

So you're saying that every company that is screen scraped in violation of their TOS has experienced a data breach?

> Facebook did not authorize data retention. CA’s actions were therefore unauthorized use of data, which is the textbook definition of a data breach.

But they did authorize data acquisition which means they weren't "breached" but fully consented to handing over the data.

Be like HN saying I can read all the comments I want but can't copy them to my hard drive, if I did copy them and used them for some other purpose would this also be a "textbook definition of a data breach"?

That's not at all what a data breach is, much less a "textbook definition" of one.

> Users did not authorize the app to do any of this. You are incorrect in that assumption.

Are you saying their accounts were hacked? In what sense did they 'not authorize' this?

I remember when I could make unauthenticated api calls to public posts useds made for their phone numbers…

I'm wondering if I should start a seed of the ~300-500 million useds info in JSON files (I was only interested in name, sex, profile photo) I was able to get from facebook via the thousands of credentials people check in on public repos that everyone else can still do today (beyond the name, sex and profile photos)… but I've been hording it to start up in Indonesia the project I shut down in the US (seeding profiles used to crowd source fur thing information about people like geoip location graphs of people interested in them, pseudo anonymous messaging if you have their email [acting as an email forwarder], and other personality information, and having it publicly accessible by default and/with an api). I'd be willing to give it away to any who ask though as long as they build something with it.

In the past me and my friend monetized with adsense, but now were going to mine monero while people engage with the site and give up information about their friends/enemies/lovers.

We half joked about being an "open source" NSA/BND/[insert ones favorite SIGINT acronym] or what it would be like if everyone had access to the data to leverage for their own ends instead of the privileged few do today.

Thank you "open graph", oauth and the weakest link, other developers and the apathy of most people.

Either way, this genie is not going back into the bottle unless you can convince billions of useds of platforms like facebook to exercise some discretion over things they, for the most part, don't care about nor choose to understand on a technical level.

Yes, the fact that "BBC4" and "Channel 4" are completely different things is (understandably) missed by nearly everyone outside the UK.

>Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster […]

For completeness, from [1]:

>Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA),the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport […]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4