Facebook says it’s hired a forensics team to investigate Cambridge Analytica | Hacker News Reader

Facebook says it’s hired a forensics team to investigate Cambridge Analytica

theverge.com

45 pointsaylmao13 comments

The BBC aired a documentary about Cambridge Analytica and how Trump's digital strategy team used Facebook using the information gathered through analytics to target people.

Evidence this thing exists: https://twitter.com/bbcstories/status/896752720522100742

It's been a while, but I am pretty damn sure in this documentary it was mentioned that due to the amount of money the Trump campaign invested in their digital strategy efforts people from Facebook were assisting them on site to make sure everything went smoothly.

And now the same company who at that time happily took Trumps money and gave the campaign full assistance (and thus being fully aware of the kind of gray area shit CA was pulling off) is making them look like cyber criminals, likely to just look "good" (while they actually were just as bad) and virtue signal the living shit out of this incident.

Amazing.

> people from Facebook were assisting them on site to make sure everything went smoothly

I watched a show (60 minutes or something?) that said exactly that. Considering that, Facebook coming out with this now would seem a bit daring and provocative, but then we're well into the era where almost everything is propaganda & persuasion and the actual facts are mere details that no one will fact check anyways, so it's likely a pretty reasonable strategic move.

I have no sympathy for Facebook, but I believe it’s entirely possible to square these facts: these consultants could have easily helped with ad management without being privy to the less benign side of the operation.

The Cambridge Analytica campaign seems to also have been separate from the campaign’s main ad campaign run from the US, which is the one that got th consultants.

According to the stuff I saw at least a few data scientists from CA were at the same location as Trumps digital strategy team in San Antonio, Texas. Which is the same location at which people from Microsof (although not on location 100% of their time), Facebook, Google and Twitter assisted into making him POTUS:

"Those staffers, two each from Twitter and Facebook, and one from Google, and three from Microsoft, joined 12 more digital experts embedded in the campaign from Cambridge Analytica, the Boston-based data firm which is under investigation in both the U.S. and abroad, and is funded by Trump benefactor and billionaire Robert Mercer"

Source: https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/8xmvkg/trump-campaign-ha...

With all these people in just a small amount of space (because Trump's team and the office they were located in weren't that big according to the documentary) I can pretty much guarantee you that they all knew what was going on back then. Nothing stays secret, especially not in such small uncompartmentalized workspaces in which people need to work hard and work hard together.

>people from Facebook were assisting them on site to make sure everything went smoothly.

Facebook make the same offer to the Clinton campaign and they turned down the offer.

Is this gonna affect Facebook’s bottom line in any meaningful way? My five dollars are on the “hell no” option, unfortunately. Let the newscycle pass and it’s gonna be just another speedbump noone will recall three months from now. Looking forward to the staggering yoy revenue growth Facebook will report in January 2019.

Direct link to announcement: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/forensic-audits-cambrid...

They could just watch the channel 4 documentary that just aired. As the other post on the front page now kind of says, they were just using Facebook as designed to spread disinformation.

> They could just watch the channel 4 documentary that just aired

Link please?

Here you go: https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

People will trust that as much as the next batch of data being sent thru FaceBook not being sent to 3rd parties. The need the DOJ to do a more fair job

Has there (yet) been a public leak of millions of private facebook-like or gmail-like profiles? Sure emails, sure PII, but ever 50M people's gender and sexuality linked to their real name leaked to The Pirate Bay?

I'm curious if Facebook might be concerned right now that the raw data might itself get leaked. This would make yet even more personal what once was only theoretical or abstract.

I'm watching the Channel 4 News special about this incident and it seems to me that there is a lot of serious unknowns. But perhaps I am just not up to date on everything.

Has Facebook released information on what data about friends of friends was "stolen" by Cambridge Analytica yet? From what I've seen, Facebook has known about this since 2015, so I assume they have a pretty good idea of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com