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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

Biggest concern for Facebook has got to be them investigating the other sharing of data beyond Cambridge Analytica. I seriously doubt they turned the other way for conservative but not liberal think tanks / firms.

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And with Peter Thiel being a Trump supporter, even giving a speech on stage at the RNC in praise of Trump, it would be crazy to think that Palantir's involvement isn't of similar (if not much greater) scale as Cambridge Analytica.

Palantir, in my guess, is probably like CA on steroids.

Whenever I would talk about stuff like CA a few years back to my friend who works at Facebook, he would just say Palantir is even worse. Palantir has everything that can possibly be scraped from Facebook, and everything else they can get. It's not far off from that show Christopher Nolan's brother made... Person of Interest?

I would assume Facebook has more than Panatir can scrape. They are the real problem.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/palantir-worked-with-cambrid...

Looks like CA is just one means Palantir has used to get Facebook data.

I'd be curious to read more about what your friend saw. There are ways to make that happen, e.g.

https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/news-tips/index.ht...

https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f...

For those who may be concerned about this being a partisan hit job because it's a news article, the primary source from a verified account: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760

Also, a new article from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

They were directly involved with the Obama and Clinton campaigns... and so was Eric Schmidt.

The Podesta e-mails have conversations between John Podesta and Sheryl Sandberg about meetings to help elect the first woman president. So, while I think Facebook is morally reprehensible, this latest media outrage because of connections to the Trump campaign feels a bit like an economic hit job more than anything.

They also have datasets of 50M user profiles floating around out there filled with Facebook-like data. There still hasn't been a public leak of that kind of data that I can think of. I think a concern for Facebook is also what happens if/when 50M Americans' names, gender, hometown, birthday, and names of 500 closest friends become public for all to see. That's not really data that you can change or put back into a bottle.

The name and address data isn't anything unique. There's probably multiple companies with better address data than Facebook has. And the national party organizations have pretty much complete voter rolls with addresses.

The unique data is the friend graph and the likes, which they can use to (quite effectively) predict political attitudes.

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