The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn’t a scandal: this is how Facebook works
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end.
From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended:
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica's CEO also espouses complete deceit as a strategy core strategy for using data to manipulate outcomes and advocates for using "behaviorally targeted language" to create an outcome. Like say you have a "private beach." If you really want to keep people out, why not say "sharks sighted" instead?
His example, not mine: https://imgur.com/a/q1zYP, https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo
The scandals for me are two fold. First, we have a data repository (Facebook) that's powerful enough to assist in this type of weaponized manipulation that's entirely unprotected. Even if you think Facebook is some type of benevolent overlord that you trust with your data, it's a scandal that nothing has stopped any number of third-parties from doing what Cambridge Analytica did.
Second, we have a sitting president who actively made use of these "targeted information strategies" during his election in a blatantly unethical fashion. (For the record, so did Ted Cruz.) I for a long time laughed off the Antifa crowd as being an overreaction to Trump, but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.
I agree. It seems like the 360-degree camera work they've done in addition to all their work in VR seems more surveillance-related than people are willing to admit but whatever.
Who could have imagined that a suite of tools used to manipulate and target users through commercial advertising and spam could also be used for political means.
The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it? I'm sure there are numerous groups doing this now both privately and funded directly by states. That doesn't make it right, but it changes the question to; What's special about CA?
I've been reading a biography of Allen Dulles called the Devil's Chessboard. Dulles founded the CIA and setup the agency as a prime purveyor of disinformation campaigns. These kinds of Machiavellian tactics likely go back further than The Prince himself. The only thing new here is the level of amplification modern data technology provides, but this is not limited to CA.
You say that as someone who frequents HN. Collectively we are probably the top 0.2% of the population in terms of technology awareness and know-how, to the point where we probably easily recognize this type of propaganda (then again, maybe not!) and understand how it works.
The same cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of the population though. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that the majority of Facebook users don't even understand how Facebook makes money (even though the answer is so obvious to us).
I was around on the internet back in the 90's and the stuff that came out in the Snowden revelations wasn't that suprising (Echelon was widely known back then but unconfirmed), We (meaning techies) have had the suspicion that they where doing this shit under the "just because they could, they would" approach.
Where Snowden was incredibly useful was that it confirmed it in a way that was hard to deny since it was straight from the horses mouth.
We might suspect that CA was doing shady shit but stuff like the C4 investigation confirms it and the confirmation is a valuable thing.
What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.
The classic one is people who move house are more likely to go on to buy a new car in 12-24 months so they buy house sale data and target you with car info.
Supermarkets do tons of profiling based on your CC and purchase history.
None of this is to say that trying isn't scummy, but we shouldn't lose sight of the possibility that CA could be peddling snake oil.
That's why I said "then again, maybe not".
>>What they are doing is what marketing people have done for years, only we know from years of data and experience that these "profile and target" ad campaigns are barely above baseline for RoI.
This is completely irrelevant in the current context, because for people with deep pockets, the ROI of a single project doesn't matter if it leads to huge gains further down the line.
Case in point: CA is owned by the Mercers, who just got a huge tax cut thanks to Trump.
RoI is actually irrelevant. The two bigger issues are that this shouldn't be being attempted, and - more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.
My point exactly. "Democracy" on paper doesn't really matter if the elites are successfully and massively deceiving the voters.
I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:
"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."
To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.
Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left-wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.
That's one of the problems for me in all of this; a group that is lying, or perhaps breaking campaign disclosure laws, is acting wildly different than a gaming company.
So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato/Koch) and foundations (Bradley, DeVos) and right-wing news outlets to spread propaganda. Because they have more money to spend.
So I think rightfully, people feel that the bigger threat is from the right. It's not a coincidence that CA was heavily funded by a GOP billionaire who wants to damage gov't services to cut his own taxes (Mercer is in an $8B dispute with the IRS).
I think the real problem is what Zeynep Tufeksi has been writing about: informed consent. Even if some tiny print says it's ok in a click-contract where they have a majority of the negotiating power, Facebook is releasing data on its uses without their informed consent. That's what we as a society need to re-evaluate.
Clinton heavily outspent Trump in the last election.
"Clinton's unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump's successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. The Democratic National Committee and left-leaning outside groups also outspent their Republican counterparts by considerable margins."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/someb...
I'm not satisfied with the off-hand dismissal of outside spending from the linked article. Since 2010, this has (arguably) been the more interesting area to scrutinize, and deserves more than a sentence.
The polls all predicted an easy coast to victory for Clinton. Even Trump on election night appeared shocked that he won, and seemed to have made no plans in case he won.
How do you reconcile that with the claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters? Do you have any figures?
> Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination
I don't think this is true. Irrespective of whether there was impropriety at any particular election, there was no way Clinton would have lost the nomination by the time that Sanders was in his stride. The superdelegates all but assured this.
Incidentally, the Sanders campaign went from decrying the presence of superdelegates to courting them - they may be an unreasonable mechanism for elections, but both groups tried to use them to their advantage.
> claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters
I made no such claim. I suspect that it's true, but my point is that looking at campaign donations (and Reddit activity) highlights the activity of low-dollar donors.
Finally, to put into perspective the numbers from the article you cited, it seems that PACs spent 4 billion USD (across all races) in 2016[1] - around four times the spending of the two presidential campaigns.
It seems complicated to total super-PAC spending. Many websites state that there was more money supporting Clinton/Democrats, but this may ignore Republican PACs that do not declare a party preference[2].
[1] https://www.fec.gov/updates/statistical-summary-24-month-cam...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2...
Donna Brazile (Chairman of the DNC) wrote a book about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Hacks-Inside-Break-ins-Breakdowns-Don...
Are you being serious? She was the overwhelming choice in the primaries... Bernie lost by like 4 million votes. What are you talking about???
Yes. Check out the DNC chairman's book on it.
There is a huge incentive for billionaires to spend money on propaganda, because they need votes for their pro-wealthy policies, which almost no voter would support without propaganda.
By the way, the same thing would be valid if H. Clinton used them. But for now we only have proof he did.
From the Guardian:
>He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”.
This is a fatal vulnerability to the ideal of democracy. The only way to beat this game is to play it, and whoever can play it faster, smarter, and harder wins.
The only limitation is when these actions cross the line and cost you support by alienating your base, but I don't think that line exists for Trump.
The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.
Given that Trump won on the slimmest of margins, if CA’s work resulted in a net increase in Trump’s margin, the “ROI” is huge.
“The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”
Joseph Schumpeter —Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947)
How on earth is such a baseless comment voted to the top of this thread? The truth is that this is a scandal, only because it involves Trump.
Pretty much all of what you've described is run-of-the-mill marketing, that has been used by all political parties for years. You also described some astroturfing, which is also widely used by all political parties (though perhaps some more than others).
How is any of that authoritarianism?
>favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
They're well beyond that. Once upon a time, there was no "news feed." Then they made one, and people were not happy, but at least it was strictly chronological. Then they made it subject to an opaque and ever-changing "news feed algorithm," which makes it possible to control what you see. Those creepy studies a few years ago about emotional manipulation weren't an accident. Facebook is in the Skinner Box business now.
A wise man once said, "Drain the swamp." It's my civic duty to point out swampiness unabashedly and impartially.
Since CAs behavior, and by extension CAs customers, is inexcusable, swampy human behavior, I will stand against it. In the same way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, the way the DNCs actions against Bernie Sanders was inexcusable, union corruption is inexcusable, corporate negligence is inexcusable, product misrepresentation is inexcusable, bullshit ICOs are inexcusable, authoritarian communism is inexcusable, the same way that history has been full of lying and deceitful politicians, priests, businessmen, lawyers, activists, messiahs I will stand against it.
The rest of your post makes it sound like the former, so I'll assume that's what you meant. In that case, I think you're giving Facebook far too much credit. What you describe in your post re: CA is accurate and scandalous, but I think it's naïve to think Facebook was not only aware and complicit, but rather that they actively encouraged and have essentially based their business on this exact system. Their decision to suspend CA is topical PR spin, an opportunity for them to be momentarily seen as enforcers amongst so many other negative headlines related to Facebook, data and voter manipulation.
Isn’t this the modern definition of politics?
> The Obama 2012 campaign used data analytics and the experimental method to assemble a winning coalition vote by vote. In doing so, it overturned the long dominance of TV advertising in U.S. politics and created something new in the world: a national campaign run like a local ward election, where the interests of individual voters were known and addressed.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...
Obama's campaign was famously one that was 'won by data', but there was no outrage back then, in fact the opposite. What's different here?
It almost certainly broke EU data laws, and CA referred to their data operations as 'propaganda' when speaking to clients. https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/19/cambridge-analytica-chan...
Disclosure and funding.
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
"But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign.... That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists....in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-...
>signed up for the app
Either way it's great to see some light shined on FB, this is exactly the reason I don't use their services.
> 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.
> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0]
Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.[1]
He also continued to revel in his company's ability to manipulate after the election.[2]
[0]: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-an...
Yes, but lots of apps are deceptive about what they do with data.
> Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc
That's called advertising. Obama's campaign did the same thing (and so did every other modern political campaign).
> The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.
That one is actually somewhat significant, although it's not clear that lying is exactly a novelty in politics.
I would agree with you that the purpose of the application was deceptive, but don't most applications that use Facebook logins attempt to monetize this data?
Please, just call it what it is: propaganda.
Whether you're selling a product, a service or an idea, you're still doing your best to manipulate your target audience. The techniques are the same.
And I use the term in a purely clinical sense: manipulation at scale, the subtler the better.
All political campaigns are propaganda, though.
It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.
> It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions.
Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution.
>It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.
This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have.
The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago.
Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult.
So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.
For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.
They were all establishment candidates who've historically played the game that's lead us to the discontent we face today. They never really cared about the people either. Trump at least talked the talk in ways from an economic perspective (in unfortunately misogynistic and racist terms...) But I still believed that maybe he actually gave a damn at some level about the working class and genuine creation of opportunity and happiness.
Now I'm thinking he just really wanted to win an election at any cost and has turned the executive branch into a complete swamp... I mean... if this was supposed to be a referendum on corporate hegemony and cronyism, what the hell are all these millionaires, billionaires, and family members doing in government?
On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a good thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate.
On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.
Either way, I agree with you that the election of Donald Trump was more than just "the Russians". However, just because some of the elements were home-grown doesn't IMHO mean that we dismiss the degeneration of social media that has come about of late. Both from Facebook (and others, but they are the big offender)'s tendency to over-spy into your personal life (of which Cambridge Analytica is a symptom of this). And the extremely poor safeguards on API abuse on too many social media platforms (Russian and other Twitter political propaganda bots are but a symbol of the bot problem on Twitter and elsewhere in general).
The interests and ideology of the Mercers and the Koch are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
They, most of the Republicans, practice a “take no prisoners” form of politics, in which they care little how either the ends or the means of their campaign affect lower class people.
The deceptive elements, and the use of sleazy propaganda, by these neo-reactionary King makers, is of a piece, whether they use modern data mining techniques or not.
If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious. The joke is on all of us.
Most of the über rich conservatives were anti-Trump.
> are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.
Trumps policies are incredibly practical and if implemented will go a long way towards solving inequality in the US.
Again, it's why most of the über rich conservatives are anti-Trump.
People lack very basic critical thinking skills.
So...politics?
My second point is that advertising, to include political advertising tends to be manipulative. So many ads are deceptive, so many play on fear. I do agree that populist messages around the world tend to be simplistic, but that is more of a criticism of political advertising in general than anything specific to this campaign.
I am not convinced this use of Facebook was more effective than a typical ad targeting operation. While the people involved may have had other aspects of the operation that were more sinister, the surprise at how Facebook and ad targeting works has been widely reported in the last election. The extreme response to these events seems to be more about who was elected than how.
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.
When Facebook found out what they were doing, they were “surprised,” she said. But she also claimed they didn’t stop them once they found out:
https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f...
For the record I was for Bernie.
<snark>What country is going to come to The US's aid and send in troops to "restore democracy"?
That's how.
Cambridge Analytics is accused of using data that was harvested from a quiz app that was purportedly the creation of a Cambridge professor. I think that CA is being accused of something different than just spamming, but part of the overall problem is the subterfuge involved, which is generally a frowned upon thing in U.S. election regulations.
For example, it's not shady if Clinton buys up all the ad space during your favorite shows to spread her liberal indoctrination. It is problematic if those commercials run without a "This ad funded by the Hillary Clinton for President campaign" disclaimer.
Additionally, the CEO has basically admitted - under hidden camera - that they are fine with blackmail and lying. Is blackmail and lying technically illegal? I'm not sure. But if you lie and blackmail as part of a political campaign, but do not let people know you are a political campaign, you have broken the law.
The Obama app was misleading - it was not at all clear about how the users Facebook data would be used - the key difference is at least they knew the app was political in nature and they likely supported Obama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ
This isn't just data mining, it's straight up misinformation, entrapment, and god knows what else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica-al...
Note: I tried to post this here, because it seemed worthy of its own thread, but it was marked as a dupe for some reason - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16622761
Renaissance aren’t the type to think only one step ahead.
Three key parts of Facebook’s model come into play: gathering data from people in order to profile them, designing systems that allow that data to be used to target people, then allowing third parties to use the data and those targeting systems for their own purposes
Back in Nov 2017, when the senate was questioning Facebook, Google, and Twitter about the Russian ads during the election...
Burr issued a warning to the sites, saying they are on the front lines of defense for the security of the country's future, urging the representatives: "Don't let nation states disrupt our future."
I sleep better knowing The Zuck is on the frontline keeping us safe. /s
Politics aside, I wonder how this will affect the "Russian intervention in US and UK politics" search for "truth".
I am also expecting that UK authorities will be paying a visit to "Cambridge Analytica" and I hope we will find out the truth on what exactly they did for the UK Referendum, US Elections, and wherever else they "helped people decide".
Something tells me though that we won't ever be told the truth. E.g. let's say that there was no Russian interventios to US election and it was all Cambridge Analytica's doing. With Theresa May driving the attention away from the actual problems and into a "UK-Russia" debate about the death of a spy, it would NOT serve her political agenda of smoke-and-mirrors to clear Russia's name (just theorising - I don't take sides).
Ps: I remember a saying "live by the sword - die by the sword". How do people expect a spy (who has been uncovered) to die? In his bed on his 90s?
I know you're posing a hypothetical, but your scenario is impossible. Over a dozen Russians have already been indicted. Russia was involved. Period.
>How do people expect a spy.... to die?
Pretty sure the guy’s daughter and the British police officer incapacitated in hospital, by a military nerve agent with no cure, weren’t expecting to end up this way. I think you’ve been watching too many Bond movies.
Well what did you think the very targeted things that you're selling to anyone would be used for?
Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.
For the data scientists and psychologists, it's a chance to work on large scale data/populations and test all sort of theories and hypotheses on a large scale, probably unavailable anywhere else except Google and Amazon as postulated here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...
I imagine it's a dream job in that respect, where one gets so caught up in the work the consequences don't matter to the worker until the 2016 US election (Trump got about 25% of the vote in the Bay Area) or Brexit referendum and now these investigative reports.
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
- Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people.
- Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from across the ideological divide and news orgs.
The point is to give voters some transparency into what a politician is actually campaigning on.
For all political ads, why not aggregate and publish the demographic's preferences too? "People who liked this ad also liked $these_things." That way you could see what kinds or subgroups the ads are trying to engage.
I love it! Where do I sign the petition?
Remember when Google was proud of how its ads were targeted so you'd see actual useful things instead of endless shoes and cars? Internet ads really are much better now than in the late 90's.
An 'I'm not in this group' button would be powerful feedback mechanism.
The real test will be whether Facebook sues CA for a billion dollars over what it did, or just gives it a slap on the wrist.
People uploaded their whole shitty lifes onto Facebook while everyone out there warns you to not do that. Yet people argued that they need a place to connect to their friends and all the other crap that FB-users come up with to explain this shitty move (much like cigarette-addicts). Also it is pretty clear how that data is sold. And how intelligence uses it. Snowden? Anyone?
Now that the masses need it they come up with this bullshit story. There have been companies like this before, Democratic and Republican (e.g. Targeted Victory helped Romney, Obama had his Team). The lemmings out there just used the past 4 years to fill Facebook with all the data they could eventually sell to Cambridge Analytica and their friends.
Grow the fuck up people.
Anyway from a tech standpoint this might be exciting times. It could very well be the end of $FB. I doubt on its own it would be enough, but if someone has been working on a social network for the past few years now would be a good time to do a big publicity push? G+ are you listening!!
> We shouldn't allow one instance of evil to slide just because other instances have gotten away with it.
What evil exactly? People gave their data to FB and decided not to listen to everyone warning them. It's in FB's ToS that they will sell your data and they did. What evil did happen here? People may didn't like what was done here but seriously they could have avoided it.
> G+ are you listening!!
So the next big headline will be G+ sold data to CA?
Those two dtatemts seem to be contradictory.