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Comment by equalunique | Hacker News Reader

This analogy seems out-of-proportion, IMO.

With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. To me, this really is the legitimate status quo of advertising. As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it."

I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests?

Now, I'm not saying that the ideal utopia wouldn't be a Facebook-less interlocking combination of privacy respecting, free open source software, decentralized networking, and federated identity. I just feel weird how it seems like "fears of election interference" and "muh democratic system" are being used to effect arbitrary changes in how Facebook does business.

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> As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it."

Hacker News had various articles explaining that the EU soon will have something called the GDPR (https://www.eugdpr.org/). UK is going to exit the EU, but it's not about that in particular. If EU citizens didn't give explicit permission for this data to be shared Facebook is not following this law. As UK is questioning this behaviour it seems they'll probably have something similar to GDPR after they leave the EU.

Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given. That's what is not ok.

All the other questions seem like strawmans.

Didn’t the third party collect data after users gave explicit permission to the third party app to use their data? From my understanding, users didn’t read the short text explaining the information the third party would receive before pressing the “okay” button.

Fortunately, having sane data protection laws gives you things like being able to rescind an agreement like that at any time. Then the party that collects the data has to inform any third parties of the change and all of them have to delete your data.

Users gave the app permission. The app also harvested the data of their Facebook Friends, who hadn't given permission.

They should take a lesson from the spotify API, friend listening feeds are out of reach for third party apps.

Since facebook apps request these fields so much, they could implement it as an opt-in/out checkbox "Do you want your data to be accessible by 3rd party apps without your consent through your friends?"

This way, if an app request friends access, they would get data only from the ones that allowed it.

It probably would remove a lot of value that can be extracted from their users, but facebook itself would still have all this data to use internally to target ads and they would limit the amount of data that can be exfiltrated to malicious 3rd parties without the consent of users.

Facebook already made this change; however, they changed these things after the data was fetched and stored.

Thanks for the info, I was not aware of that.

Good for them to make this change, bad for them because it was after the data was collected for abuse.

I think the takeaway is that these decisions are irreversible; it's very hard to recall data you've shared, so you need to err on the side of sharing less.

> Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given.

Is it personal information? AFAIK the facebook T&C states that as soon as you put information into facebook it is their data. You're giving something away freely an then complaining about how the recipient uses it.

Facebook may have broken some laws and they are definitely a scummy company, but the onus is still on people not to give away their private data.

It doesn't matter what facebook's terms say. It matters what the law of the land says.

The law of the land says assault and murder are illegal but it's still a good idea to take self defense lessons and to avoid areas with a heightened risk. In a perfect world you can rely on the law of the land but in the real world you can't. A world where you data is traveling in and out of multiple jurisdictions around the world is even further from perfect.

None of which recovers your earlier statements. If a person beats you up, they are liable to penalty of law and you are entitled to complain - no matter where you were or what self defence training you'd taken, or that they'd buried a clause in a hard-to-understand and unavoidable contract for a service they'd offered you that said "we can randomly beat you up".

The person will be prosecuted, but you'll still have been beaten up. Unless you change you're behavior there is a good likelyhood that you'll get beaten up again.

Justice may be served but it's still not as good as not having been beaten up in the first place.

The application of legal penalties should be deterrent enough. If they are not, they should be made more severe.

The whole reason we have laws is to help people protect other people. If we expected everyone to protect themselves, we'd have no use for law. This is exactly why victim blaming is pointless and stupid.

No laws will ever be strict enough to prevent crime, the countries with the harshest laws in the world still suffer from it.

Legal penalties don't matter to people not thinking far enough ahead for them to enter the equation. They don't matter to people who think they can get away with breaking the law (much easier for electronic crime) and they don't matter to people who think they are above the law, which may be he case here.

Harsher penalties can even be counter-productive. If you're on death row for killing one person then you better make sure you kill any potential witnesses, the penalty is the same either way.

> This is exactly why victim blaming is pointless and stupid.

Fine, I'm being pointless and stupid. But if you don't care who you're giving your data too then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

Fine, I'm being pointless and stupid. But if you don't care who you're giving your data too then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

I’ve never had a Facebook account, yet friends and family do, and through them they can get info on me. You don’t have to care though, and I’ll just get with not caring about you. Meanwhile the public at large is starting to care, and your attitude won’t impress them any more than it does me.

Sure, legal penalties don't stop people who don't believe in them. But we believe in legal penalties, so we put people in prisons. Even if they don't believe in them.

>then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

You say that until someone gives your information away for you. Then you'll be crying about how unfair it is that nobody else protected you. Possibly from threats you didn't even know existed.

So we make it illegal, punishable by the death penalty, let's think about how that plays out. Facebook might be destoryed, Zuckerburg might be strung up, but what happens after that?

Some company in Nigeria starts a funny website with quizzes like "what telly tubby are you?" that convinces your friends and family to provide data. The let them upload photos so they can be photoshopped onto the telletubbies for a good laugh. Now that company in a different jurisdiction is building up profile data. They'll build crappy android apps to track GPS data. There won't be one of them, there will be many and they will buy and sell data, accumulating it into bigger and bigger data sets. This isn't even a hypothetical, it's been happening in the west for a long time.

Do you want to attack the root of the issue or keep chopping heads off the hydra?

So what is the root cause then?

We're implementing the gdpr. It comes into force at the end of may, before we leave the EU. Our information commissioner is very keen on the legislation.

Firstly, UK political advertising is highly regulated. There are spending limits, spending reporting requirements, and a general ban on TV advertising outside of the regulated slots: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22238582 Most people are comfortable with this especially if the alternative is lie-filled attack ads as in the American system.

Secondly, the context of this is the "fake news" enquiry. It seems that the Facebook advertising and targeting has been used to identify people who are already susceptible to lies (conspiracy theorists, woo believers, anti-vaxers etc) or racism and then feed links to "fake news" stories that were guaranteed to make them angry while encouraging them to share.

It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it.

Assuming Zuck being summoned is related to Cambridge Analytica, do you have any data on this that you can share?

I assumed the data was closer to, for example: seeing that a person worked in a low-wage position (or that their likes would suggest that), and serving them an ad about how Trump would bring more jobs to the US.

>It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it.

An echo chamber is less acceptable

A place where people are not allowed to demand discriminatory treatment of people based on national origin is not an "echo chamber".

> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds.

There is a very subtle distinction here, no? What you're talking about is relevancy but the criticism levied against Facebook, CA, et al, is that it's not necessarily relevant per se, but manipulating fears and emotions of people based on easily identified characteristics.

If this was purely relevant then you'd expect Facebook and Google to serve you content that challenged your opinion, rather than vying for your approval. As it stands, the technology understands you like certain things and does whatever it can to hide things it assumes you won't like.

Why would relevant content challenge someone's opinion and not simply reinforce it?

Ideally, relevant content (at least by the definition of "relevant") shouldn't solely do either of those.

> With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party.

It was used by a political campaign; that it was not used by a government is...less clear. The Trump-Mercer-CA-Lukhoil-Putin connections are intriguing, and part of the reason this is getting so much media attention with the ongoing Mueller investigation.

> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests?

What does "relevant ads" mean? They're more than just ads for something you would want to buy, the message is specifically tailored to you, and they use what they know about you to decide what to tell you and what not to tell you.

This is bad enough when it's used to advertise products, it's much worse when used to influence how you vote, given candidates and political parties will have views / policy ideas on many different subjects. Targeting means you only hear about the ones you would agree with, not the ones you wouldn't.

> the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party.

... to become the government.

Ignoring scale of emotional reaction here for a moment, do you believe that the actual on-the-ground outcomes of this will be greater or lesser in scope than the Snowden files? I feel like there was a lot of bluster about the government tracking private citizens illegally but nothing really happened. Conversely, this time the wrong political candidate won using social media data, and now we might get some valuable privacy regulation.

The best outcome would be privacy from both private and government, but if I had to choose I'd pick privacy from government. It appears I'm either in the significant minority or it's just easier to kick private corporations than it is to kick the government.

I don't like the choice.

It's a matter of being ~abused. With analytics, many large companies are so powerful they can manipulate my emotions and decisions. Effectively they can choose what I will do.

It's true that people and small companies have always done that, but I'm on a relatively level playing field with them. With these massive corporations, I can do pretty close to nothing about it.

And in many cases we're talking about companies so big they're as powerful or more powerful that whole countries.

The government could arrest someone I love and hold them under administrative detention because they'd decided "type of person X" is bad for the Party. But Facebook manipulate people's emotions - someone with that kind of power could encourage those who they don't like to commit suicide or acts of terror.

It's not obvious to me that 1984 would have be different if we realised that the Party was democratically elected every four years and had merely manipulated everyone using a private service into voluntarily acting that way.

There's an important difference between corporations and governments. Corporations rarely get a monopoly and in the event that they do they don't last forever. Once a government gets power it almost always keeps it forever.

May Cameron Brown Blair Major Thatcher

That's a lot of change in 30 years to be "forever"

In the u.s

Trump Obama Bush Ii Clinton Bush I

Perspective is everything I guess. For the issues I care about most the difference between those US Presidents is largely cosmetic. So I would have presented them as evidence in my favor.

A key reason they stay in power is because of private companies and people who fund both campaigns, something which America seems to think is fine.

Consumer tech corporations, do seem to end up with monopolies — and they'll fight, lobby, and pay (through acquisitions) to keep them. It's a complete red-herring to argue that they don't last forever since that's utterly irrelevant to the impact they can have while they are around.

Google's been around for almost 20 years now, FB didn't kill it. FB has been around for 14 years and can sway elections.

If you want privacy from government, then you'll only get it if you can be private from corporations. They basically run things anyway via lobbyists.

FB today can't sway elections any more than CBS of the past could.

You're basically saying that you don't believe advertising (or influence) works at all — which is bullshit.

CBS and its ilk probably made a big difference compared to what was there before (radio?) and FB has has made an even bigger impact since (specifically with respect to scale and ability for fine-grained targeting).

>You're basically saying that you don't believe advertising (or influence) works at all — which is bullshit.

No I'm not. I'm acknowledging that advertising has always worked.

>CBS and its ilk probably made a big difference compared to what was there before (radio?) and FB has has made an even bigger impact since (specifically with respect to scale and ability for fine-grained targeting).

I think you're over-estimating FB's ability to impact elections compared to being one of only 3 television channels. Particularly given the fact that we're not really talking about FB itself impacting the election, but competing parties utilizing the semi-neutral FB platform to advertise.

> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. ... Is the objective to be less informed ...

Do you feel more informed when targeted with relevant adds?

Good question. Saying "I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant ads" is like saying I'm grateful for only seeing what I want to see, and not what I need to see.

A couple of things. First, the USA and UK are regulated differently - while you might be right that it's fine in the US, it may not be in the UK. I'm from the US, so I don't actually know, but there's a good chance here given Europe's data privacy laws.

The other is that this might not be legitimate advertising at all. Depending on what eventually shakes out regarding Cambridge Analytica's intent, there might be fraud in play, and conspiracy to fraud to various actors that may have assisted in some fashion. I'm not saying for certain, just raising the possibility as this unfolds.

You may be missing the context that political adverts are strictly regulated in the UK (and most of europe). For example, there are no politicians in TV commercials, no politicians on billboards, etc.

There are TV spots and billboards, I’m not sure where you’re getting that from.

TV spots: https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+uk+party+political+b...

Billboards: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=david+cameron+billb...

But party political broadcasts are time political advertising on TV and radio is allowed, by the Communications Act 2003.

>it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it."

Ah yes, the poor plebs just don't know what's good for them!

> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo?

That's what you're giving up your privacy for. So you see more ads that relate to your interests. And you're grateful.

Are you from Mars?

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