Facebook CEO Zuckerberg conspicuously absent as data scandal grows
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Now what?
In all reality, the common public is probably indifferent to his running, at this point, and I believe this current series of events hasn't changed much.
It’s not easy to see Zuckerberg getting the nomination under pretty much any circumstances.
It's easy to say in hindsight but nobody gave the guy much of a chance until it was too late.
The draft Oprah people would disagree with that statement.
Given that the dems seem to do anything they can to avoid actually winning elections, I'd have to agree
You cannot keep saying you are neutral when you clearly get outraged when one side does something you let the other side do. Particularly when you shouldn't of let anybody do it in the first place.
It's well known that the Obama campaign used big data to gain an advantage in those elections. It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with Facebook's data too.
Crafting lies into propaganda? No, I don't see them doing the same thing at all.
"The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said." [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig...
That is the service that Cambridge Analytica sells. It was used to swing the brexit vote and by the Trump campaign.
CA was replicating this strategy on multiple continents until Facebook (hopefully) pulled the plug.
He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having any special character or much of experience.
I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.
(I actually agree with your point, but think it is wishful thinking on FB’s part)
Facebook also continuously marginalized their Chief Security Officer who routinely complained about the API loopholes, were caught informing employees of a "don't ask don't know therefore no liability" quasi-official policy towards the widespread abuse (don't rock the advertising/business boat), and eventually reduced the CSO's staff from 120 to 3 and role to what appears to be "tweeting pre-approved pro-Facebook messages".
The FTC is now investigating if Facebook has violated it's 2011 FTC privacy mandate, something which carries fines in the millions per event range I believe (i.e. trillions of USD in fines for this size of privacy mandate failure)
"By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team"
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-al...
Please correct any mistaken assumptions I might have about their business model.
Facebook's business model is curious. They took $200 million in Russian money (Yuri Milner) and that came with an enthralled messaging from Zuckerberg, about how they (the Russian investors) had a "unique perspective" on monetizing social networks.
I'm not sure anyone outside of those circles knows what Facebook's actual business model really is.
Citations: https://qz.com/1121238/who-is-yuri-milner-the-russian-billio...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...
1. While the data is valuable, you still need a medium for your ads. One without the other is way less valuable. If you had user data for 50M users, today, how would you monetize it? Facebook had the News Feed and Instagram giving you a stage to operate on that data.
2. Following 1.), a lot of that "stolen" data was used to buy more effective FB Ads. Cambridge Analytica didn't "steal" the user data to sell to blackhats. They used it to craft messaging on Facebook.
All in all, user data is relatively worthless to most advertisers unless its actionable. Even if facebook gave you the data, the fastest way of monetizing it was to buy more facebook ads. It's relatively more difficult to extract user data from FB and then use that data to buy Twitter ads.
So worst case scenario is a conflict of interests between user privacy and business revenue. I think if Facebook wants to take effective action to correct this, they'll go beyond simply restricting the API, and give users options to limit which data of theirs they want to let their friends expose to third parties, because even when the API is shut down, someone willing to violate the terms of service can do quite a bit of data harvesting using fake profiles and social engineering to get people to add those profiles if some of the data seems plausible.
Granted, this method is slower, but still possible, and I think currently being exploited based on friend requests I've received through friends. I've asked friends if they knew the person, and they said they weren't sure, but they might because the information seemed similar; this is the same concept as a phone call spam technique known as "Neighbor Spoofing".
Multiply this by a million.
The important questions are more like: (for personal safety) how to reduce contact with FB collaborators, and (for society's safety) how to put the organisation itself out of business.
Mark currently getting away as an accomplice to the murder of our democracy.
So data mining Facebook has being going on for a while, except that the MSM and Silicon Valley supported it because it favored Obama.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig...
/s
And in other countries too:
Facebook's Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-facebook-idUSKCN0WL...
Facebook's German Charm Offensive: https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/facebooks-german-c...
A good counter example is Twitter which had equal if not more exposure on Russian ads but they have kept mum. And no one is going after them.
The problem in this case is that FB represents a direct threat to the media businesses, and they are incentivized to drag out the issue as long as necessary
Maybe the problem is that they've actually done something objectionable here, and it's not just a conspiracy against them.
That is very clear, and I think you missed the point.
We've seen numerous examples recently, including Equifax and Wells Fargo and Mylan, of objectionable situations where the strategy of "say as little as possible" allowed the companies to move on and show even greater profits. None of those companies represent a threat to the media entities. What makes the current Facebook situation different from those is the added incentives.
In other words, nothing here is out of the ordinary.
Right for who?
> fb should just stop communicating as that will give media less fodder
Oh I see. Right for Facebook's public image. Wrong for their customers which have a right to know what the hell Facebook has been doing with their data.
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
As a rule, a company's customers are revenue sources.