Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandeepj | Hacker News Reader

Facebook had enough time to cleanup this mess with Cambridge Analytica (CA). The news about how CA exploited their platform was out just after 2016 election results. If FB was even little bit serious about it they could have done at that time what they are doing now

View on HN

It's not an "exploit". This stuff was freely given to Obama back in 2012. My best friend was a canvasser and before going into each house, the iPad they used told canvassers what to talk about and not to talk about. It knew who was pro-life so you wouldn't bring up abortion. It knows who's pregnant and who's recently had an abortion (you can get this through knowing what purchases someone has made and not made). There is a file on everybody, their intricate political and consumer dispositions, and this is Facebook's product. CA has blown up in the news despite being only one of many consumers of the same thing because journalists can make the technically true charge that they are "Trump’s election consultants" and millions are primed to go apeshit at that. But CA is just one of many buying the unethical products, and Facebook is just one of many producers of these data sets.

That's not facebook data, that's DNC/Obama data, accumulated over time by other canvassers including your friend. They've done that since before Facebook even existed.

Facebook's product is not selling that data, it's selling ads using the data. You can only sell the data once, you can sell the ads forever.

Well, yes & no: Facebook doesn't sell the data itself, but they do give it away when a user agrees when using an app or service mediated by Facebook. That seems to be what happened here: Users took a personality survey, and their data along with the data of their friends made its way to CA.

The "data" that you could get was just like what people listed in their profile page under "Interests" and things like that though. Which maybe tells you something, but not quite like home address and a list of political preferences

No, those things are in a different section of your Facebook profile.

There was never a time that home address was available from the friend graph api.

Perhaps Facebook were contacted for comment on the Channel 4 story (in which CA's CEO suggested something that sounded a lot like sex trafficking Ukranians in to Sri Lanka to help a fictional Sri Lankan businessman discredit his opponents) and by BBC's Newsnight (in which the CEO was interviewed before the Channel 4 interview aired but was to be shown at 22.30 GMT) and realised that something big was going down involving CA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com