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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of Facebook, but if they have some sort of contract with CA, isn't it within their right to audit them? And if one company wanted to invite another for whatever collaboration, they should be allowed to.

And if the collaboration is doing something illegal, obviously personnel from both companies should be charged. And FB can do whatever investigation it wants (as long it's legal) and the authorities are free to ignore their findings.

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When police are involved that's one of those 'get in line' situations. I suspect the UK authorities are far more worried about the potential for destruction of evidence that they are in hampering an 'investigation' by FB.

I would think it was very likely that Facebook itself seeks to destroy evidence. They've got a much clearer sense of their culpability than any outsider would.

No, when police are involved that's one of those 'maximally invoke your rights' situations. The police are the enemy. Get whatever brigade of lawyers you can afford and stop their efforts in any way you can. This is true whether you're an unfortunate person who happened to be driving while black or a multinational corporation.

One can only hope that is the case.

From what I've read, CA wasn't Facebook's customer. CA bought the data from a researcher who was authorized to slurp the data.

Interesting, do you have a source on that. I would like to see the agreement researchers have to agree to to use fb data. I'm guessing this includes private profile information not public? Or is it a platform level EULA or something like that?

I wonder how FB views public scraping. Shades of webcrawlers.

NY Time article "The technique had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing.

Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr...

Thank you.

if there has been a breach of the law that takes precedence over contract law. If a criminal prosecution takes place and results in a conviction then it makes the civil case a much easier win (and less costly to as the government is doing the majority of the work).

Obstructing justice or going against a legal order takes precedence over contract law. But pretty much all laws take precedent over contract when the contract is in conflict.

Facebook at CA isn’t illegal in and of itself. The important factor will be what they were doing.

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