Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
bloomberg.com
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The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to agree to allow whatever special permissions the developer is asking for. As for friend data that apps may have access to, when you sign up for and use Facebook, you agree to the terms and conditions, which allow this behavior.
Investors had the opportunity to view both the developer platform policies and Facebook TOS long before they ever bought shares. If they didn't like the possible implications of them, they should not have invested. My guess is that this case will go nowhere.
You can't just write up an arbitrary contract and assume it will hold up in a court of law. For example, if I tried to rent out a unit by signing a lease that allowed the landlord to turn my water off if I posted a negative review about them, their lease would probably be found in violation of the corresponding state's landlord-tenant laws.
Precedents are established all the time. In the case of Facebook, this is something that common law would not have addressed prior to the early 2000s. Never before have we had such an efficient data-mining machine in the hands of anyone. New technologies warrant new laws.
Edit: One example of such a landlord, by the way, is Anne Kihagi who neglected many such tenants. I'm not sure if she did so through a faulty lease, however. It's late... https://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/home-invade...
Applications using Facebook Graph 2.+ (which is the only option since Spring 2015 or so) who access friend data may only access data of friends who have also given consent to your app. So if A and C log into a Facebook app, and A is friends with B and C, the app can only be aware that A and C exist. This is true of legacy and new Facebook applications. It used to be possible to get basically everything about B (name, age, gender, photo, etc), but that all got shut down when Graph API 1.0 was discontinued. If this is somehow not the case for some Facebook apps that got special permission or there is a hack to get at the data, that would be a huge breach of trust.
Before 2015 Facebook apps could access the data of your friends if you gave it permission. Your friends didn't need to give explicit permission (though there were never-used settings to block access).
Some academic dude made a personality test app that harvested the data from all of the friends of people who used it. He paid lots of people (almost all American) on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to use it and harvested their data and the data of their friends.
He sold that data to Cambridge Analytica. This was in 2012 I think. Facebook removed that version of the Friends API in 2015 so this is no longer possible.
Since all apps have these restrictions, I don’t believe that any apps at issue here had special permissions. However, it is possible that they scraped public data and were assisted in being pointed to which data to scrape by the direct profile data they obtained through the apps. Enough friends lists etc. are public to make this potentially beneficial.
No specs have been released about CA’s “psychographic profiling”. We don’t know the extent of the data that they had access to, what data went into it (perhaps it was based on name and friends list only, which are mostly public etc.). So until we know more, we can only assume that these apps had the same constraints that all others do.
So it depends on what you mean by consent, and whether you want to specify "informed consent". Lots of EU data protection law talks about "informed consent". If you asked 1,000 facebook users what they had consented to, they probably would not think that they had consented to that. One can make a case that the long legalese with a checkbox at the end isn't (informed) consent.
SomeFacebookApp is requesting permission to do the following:
Access my basic information: Includes my name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number
I can't imagine how much more explicit this could be. I don't think the argument that it's behind legalese would hold. And it seems pretty informative about what information is going to be taken.
Ah yes, and what exactly are they doing with this information? I can't imagine how much less explicit this could be.
I would have appreciated less smugness, but I get your point. The permissions request should go further and say how the permissions will be used and what can happen if they are used.
Once they had accessed the data, they would not [legally] be able to store it, or use it for any purpose. Text like this worries me because it's clear there is some illegal intent - that doesn't mean I agree to the illegal action.
I didn't even consider that dimension to this issue. The authorization doesn't say anything about whether it will store the data.
If the authorization doesn't say it, then it's not authorized to do it.
This level of explicit consent has legal basis in the EU.
An app that gets a friend list of a user does not get the same access to each friend as to the authorizing user. This should be obvious; if I agree to allow an app to post on my wall and access my friends list, it doesn’t mean the app can post on my friends’ walls from my friends’ identities.
The only information the FB API returns about the authorizing user’s friends is data those friends have made publicly available. In fact, the friends even have the option to configure their privacy settings to exclude them from any “friend lists” given to apps.
Honestly it’s ridiculous... nothing was breached in the CA scandal. Users authorized access to their data, and any data of other people was publicly available and authorized by TOS or (admittedly opt-out) privacy settings.
If you want to stay private online, maybe don’t use a service with the singular business model of monetizing your data.
So where is the consent? Fred gives consent to run a personality quiz and its associated data gathering - Fred's 180 friends didn't.
What it took for this to be a problem for Facebook was Trump running for and winning the presidency, the press needing someone to blame other than themselves, and them being willing to bury minor details like the campaign probably not actually using the data in question in any form. That doesn't seem like something which could reasonably be predicted in advance.
Perhaps the very best thing that could come out of this is an end to the longstanding legal fig leaf of lengthy, complex legal documents presented as click-through agreements somehow constituting "informed consent."
Except that the folks who'd write such laws...
I recall reading once that a person would need a lifetime's worth of time (50 years? 80?) just to read and understand the legal ramifications of the contracts and TOS he or she must agree to in order to use software.
Clicking "I agree" is probably the most obvious and common lie told by humanity today. Something has to change.
Go ahead and have a glance at it. What would you remove from it that wouldn't cause a significant gap?
Some example clauses:
> For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
(They have to put this. If they didn't, they would get sued by someone who shared a video and then was mad that other people could see it.)
> Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
>
> You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
(Not exactly dense legalese. It is good to ban impersonation, and it is right that they should include such a ban in their terms.)
> We’ll notify you before we make changes to these terms and give you the opportunity to review and comment on the revised terms before continuing to use our Services.
(Seems reasonable to me. Many years ago, people used to complain that the terms changed without notice, so FB committed to not doing that any more.)
I don't know. This whole "terms of service are impossible to read except by a lawyer" meme just doesn't hold water for me.
When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)
You gave access to your friends, who then authorised access to the application.
Readability Grade Levels
A grade level (based on the USA education system) is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. A score of around 10-12 is roughly the reading level on completion of high school. Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 12.6
Gunning Fog Index 13.9
Coleman-Liau Index 11.8
SMOG Index 14.9
Automated Readability Index 12.4
Average Grade Level 13.1
Sentences > 30 Syllables 80 53%
Sentences > 20 Syllables 115 77%
Words > 4 Syllables 37 1%
Words > 12 Letters 2 0%
Passive Voice Count 17 1%
Adverb Count 116 4%
Cliché Count 0 0%Failing to honor that assumption is facebooks fault here.
Actually, that is how it works. Unless there is an NDA in place between you and I, I can share anything you choose to share with me, especially in the context of a social network where we both agreed to and are bound by the same TOS where we authorized exactly this kind of sharing.
This is why we need informed consent for data collection.
I don't recall that ever happening when a TOS was displayed on any of my electronic devices.
So I don't think it's a valid comparison.
Failing to read the TOS is not the same as being informed either. The judiciary seem aware of that too.
Not sure what was limited, but you were able to get name, age, location, gender, photo, categories set (the profile stuff that I don't think many use any more), and other info. That seems more than enough to start building a profile on someone that you have no relationship with. Particularly if you're able to collect in quantity and join the dots.
> more recently, it’s become so limited that using apps for data collection about friends is almost a pointless endeavor.
I was aware it had changed some, but not when or how much. You seem to agree that it used to be useful for data gathering on friends.
That's less than ideal when most of us have connections to teen, and elderly, relatives who might be insufficiently suspicious of a fun questionnaire. To over-generalise a little neither group is renowned for tech awareness.
From https://www.facebook.com/terms.php, item 2.3
When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)
Look at the example of what LinkedIn and WhatsApp and all its ilk does: I don’t want to be on those platforms. But friends upload their address books all the time, so I’m fairly sure they all have a full view of my social connections. How and where did I agree to that? How can my friends meaningfully consent to that on my behalf?
If both parties aren't all committed or informed, this is simliar an intoxicated person entering a legally binding agreement.
These so-called "clickwrap" or "browser-wrap" agreements have definitely been found to be enforcible. However the details of exactly how the agreement was presented and what the user had to click can affect their enforcibilty.
Source: https://www.americanbar.org/publications/communications_lawy...
FB and other big data corporates need to be reminded of this.
Most adults simply don't have the ability to understand the dense legalese that these contracts are written in, so they don't. Asking people to take an hour or two to properly read and digest it just to sign up for a website is ridiculous, and expecting them to actually do so is like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
"... you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License)"
I would expect the implications of that provision to be inscrutable to someone who doesn't have at least some familiarity with IP law. Techies tend to have that background, because software licensing is such a big factor in open source software. But I would bet that if you go out and survey people off the street about what that's saying, very few would anticipate that it means, "We can sell your data to anyone we want, including exporting it to places where your local privacy laws may not apply, and they get to do whatever they want with it, including selling it to still other people." Especially in light of the (misleading, if you're interpreting it in terms of vernacular English instead of legalese) statement that, "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook," that opens the section.
Expecting most people I know to reliably all of the relevant implications for their privacy out of that saucer full of tea leaves is, to put it bluntly, bullshit.
Or was FB expecting users to be “accountable” enough to work out that part for themselves?
As far as I am aware, across the whole of Europe, pretty much none of those TOS click-through things hold up as informed contractual consent. They aren't really worth the pixels they are written on in many jurisdictions.
Or they're just greedy and looking for a quick settlement, like all other class action securities attorneys do when the sue over large stock price drops. These types of suits are filed daily, many of them without merit.
For a fascinating look at Bill Lerach, the lawyer who perfected this tactic, check out [1]. He squeezed so much money out of public companies and caused so many problems with these often ridiculous lawsuits, that Congress passed a bill limiting them that became known as the "Get Lerach Act". He eventually went to federal prison for paying kickbacks to plaintiffs.
> The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
It's universally understood why the media wasn't interested in turning that story into a scandal. When it's your team, you look the other way for the perceived greater good.
I agree that it's bad (not just looks bad), but you can't blame the media for something they didn't know about. Fox News went on for years about Benghazi. So in 2018, you can't complain about media being too friendly to democrats.
Also, the piece links to a tweet[1] in 2018, not an article from 2012.
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/20...
This leak was not the biggest, or even the most detailed source of voter information controlled by the Republican party.
What Facebook did is a disservice to it's users - not to the democratic process. Framing it is as such is nothing but sour grapes.
Afaik, there has been no allegation that Facebook sold this data. Rather, someone created an innocuous looking quiz app that then used its access tokens to gather data on people through the Facebook Graph API. The app was called "thisisyourdigitallife".
who ultimately affected the election with it.
I've seen zero evidence that any of the psychobabble being touted by CA had any effect on the election (and I've been scouring the internet for such proof). As much as it may pain Democrats to hear, it's possible that Hillary just lost because she was unpalatable to a large percentage of voters, and not because of Russian conspiracies/Facebook/CA. She had more than her share of baggage.
If you lose by only one vote, then every vote caused you to lose.
(Of course if you're running a campaign, going after things that are bigger issues is more useful, but when we're talking about billion dollar operations, you can go after everything in theory)
It's not the tightest margin, but it's among the lowest margin of victories in the electoral college. Not that it matters, because you either win or lose. And we all know the rules of the game before we start playing
If you don't understand the difference, it is the same difference between having consensual sex with your girlfriend and raping your neighbor girlfriend because she consented to have sex with him...
Now, this metaphor is imperfect, but from what we could see the Obama campaign was within the boundary allowed by Facebook TOS and what disclosed to the user. Did they push this to the limit? Yes. To the point that FB didn't think it was feasible. But legit according to the rule. Maybe having consensual extreme BSDM sex with your girlfriend vs. raping your neighbor's GF? Quiz, which one is legal and which one is not?
("Online, the get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls.")
Note that I specifically picked an article from 2012 because the past 48 hours has seen quite a few articles discussing the Obama Facebook campaign -- articles which I'd argue are likely subject to a taint of bias, given the recent CA events (I'd guess that journalists are digging for a story, which tends to skew perspectives). Anyway, this kind of targeting is, in hindsight, not really OK with me -- but I think the line here is that the Obama campaign collected information and asked your friends (who supported the campaign) to pitch in by asking particular friends to vote. This year's election was much more subtle, since instead targeted voters were treated to a slew of biased ads and propaganda stories. At least, that's how I see it.
Also, while I don't disagree with your analogy, anything involving sexual assault is probably going to hurt rather than help your arguments with most crowds. I don't think it's something we should ignore, of course, but we should keep in mind that it's a strong metaphor -- akin to calling someone "literally Hitler" -- so you might want to reconsider that in the future. Not trying to be a jerk, just trying to be helpful, so feel free to ignore my unsolicited advice.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-...
So the whole social graph signed up to Obama's website? Because that's exactly what was happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
---
Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.
Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
---
> it is the same difference between having consensual sex with your girlfriend and raping your neighbor girlfriend because she consented to have sex with him...
Really, rape, that's the best metaphor to reach for...
I'm happy to engage in a debate any time, finding someone else willing to participate is a problem when everyone is only interested in discussing the nuances of how they agree with each other.
I'll also disagree that it's not better to comment at all - voices of dissent are valuable in a democracy, silencing them is the actually dangerous path to take, but that seems to be the path that's been chosen, so we'll see how it works out.
However, I'd just like to say that your previous comment didn't give me much of an impression that you're happy to engage in a debate -- how on earth can I participate in a conversation with you when your comment is 18 words, and I have no clue what you're trying to express? That is why I responded: because I had no clue what you were trying to say, but I was curious.
My point about "not commenting at all" wasn't so much in regard to democracy (on a political platform, most discussion is good, because you need to consider the needs of many different people), but rather just a guide to good behaviour, a la "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." I think HN is made a better place by dissenting opinions (I dislike echo chambers in general) but one-off dismissive comments do not a constructive conversation make. You need to give reasoning and explain your arguments.
I also noticed that you seem a little preoccupied with downvotes. Personally, I don't think you should sweat them too much, as long as you feel like you're having constructive conversations and behaving civilly (in this comment thread, I'm happy to report that you made a lot of good points, and did a lot better than that first comment I responded to). If somebody downvotes you simply for having a different opinion, they're breaking HN rules. Downvotes, as far as I know, are supposed to be used for limiting the visibility of off-topic/poor quality comments. So if you get downvoted, your comments might be poor quality... or you might just be off topic. This thread is awfully off-topic, but I personally believe it's good quality discussion, so if it gets downvoted, I don't mind much: I still benefited, but it might get hidden from general readers. That's OK.
Anyway, thank you for responding to my (probably slightly-too-critical) comment in a reasonable way where you explained your thoughts. I apologize for misjudging you based on your previous comment.
YES! The problem is, who besides you and I realize this, nowadays? As far as I can tell, and believe me I'm sincerely looking for it, I feel like people are falling into some sort of a zombie state. Reddit has been like this for quite some time now, I honestly think it is spreading to HN now, at least on any topic that has a non-technical, non-purely-objective component.
> However, I'd just like to say that your previous comment didn't give me much of an impression that you're happy to engage in a debate -- how on earth can I participate in a conversation with you when your comment is 18 words, and I have no clue what you're trying to express? That is why I responded: because I had no clue what you were trying to say, but I was curious.
That's me lashing out at you due to my frustration with the new culture of close-mindedness around here. 100% wrong on my part no doubt, but being reasonable doesn't do shit so might as well join the party and get an adrenalin shot I guess is my thinking.
> If somebody downvotes you simply for having a different opinion, they're breaking HN rules
That didn't used to be true, because there have been discussions about just that. Currently, it's not even mentioned in Guidelines or FAQ afaict. (I've been breaking a few of these lately tbh.)
> So if you get downvoted, your comments might be poor quality
My main frustration is, you can post a substantive, reasoned comment, and rather than a reasoned disagreement, just downvotes. And fast. That by itself is not so big a deal, it's the intellectual swagger (my interpretation, of course) that so many people carry, but can't piece together a decent argument. Again, this is pretty much what reddit has become, but it's sad to see even HN isn't immune.
> I apologize for misjudging you based on your previous comment.
I can be a jerk from time to time.
Thanks for replying by the way, encountering someone who actually thinks, even if it's differently than me (not that it's the case here), helps restore my faith in humanity.
Jonathan Haidt has studied this psychological phenomenon quite extensively and in my opinion it does a good job of explaining the recent unusual behavior of the public, it's a shame no one's interested.
The moral roots of liberals and conservatives
If you're looking for nuance and constructive discussion, it's crucial to put that foot forward yourself. And understanding, given the climate, that it's likely going to be a lot of work, as you're working against built-in human psychological biases that are unfortunately being reinforced by many trends in media, both traditional and online. Loading your discourse with the phrases you do here are working against that. I'm glad that you've found Haidt interesting in some way. Step up and work the problem, rather than contribute to it. There's no quick fix.
> Blaming everything on "the other side" as you are doing here
> Step up and work the problem, rather than contribute to it.
My argument is that HN is increasingly becoming a ~"progressive, illiberal echo chamber", where dissenting ideas are not welcome or open for discussion, and censored (to the degree that people like me often have to wait up to several hours or until the next day (in which case the discussion is effectively over) to post a comment as I am almost always in the penalty box, for the reasons being discussed here).
If that's true, should the onus be only on the censored side to fix the situation?
If you believe my claim isn't true:
- do you believe that it is possible for any community to be like this?
- do you believe HN has any imperfections at all in this respect?
If that's not something you believe, take to heart, and practice, you're part of the problem, and it's not worth my while to continue attempting to engage. This is regardless of one's ideological views, and something Haidt hammers home repeatedly.
Edit to add: Of course HN has imperfections. (And to answer your other question society has imperfections: to suggest otherwise is facile and disingenuous.) Online discourse is hard, and new, and we haven't come close to figuring out the best ways to do so. That doesn't excuse each of us taking responsibility for trying to make it the best we can.
> If you think the problem is solely (or mostly) on one side (regardless of which side that is), then there's no point on continuing this discussion
Literally, you are saying that unless I don't believe that the "guilt" is exactly 50/50, you won't continue the discussion? I'm communicating in good faith am I not? If not, what am I doing wrong?
Or, is the problem that I'm not agreeing with you? Because that is exactly what this feels like to me, and it is precisely the aspect of the recent HN culture that I'm complaining about.
There is no shortage of conservative science-hating idiots on forums, is that what I am? Does it seem likely that the person who first mentions Jonathan Haidt, and links to a talk very closely related to this subject, is the same type of person "who believes 100% of a communication problem is on the other side"? Political discussion is difficult, that's my point. Human beings of both political stripes suffer from the same psychological shortcomings. I am aware of this. I am pointing this out. I regularly get censored (via time-outs in the penalty box), not for posting crap (which I admittedly do on occasion, largely out of extended frustration from what I'm complaining about), but because I disagree with the general political sentiment. But then if one reads the HN guidelines, considering a downvote as a means of disagreement is correct behavior, expecting anything else is probably bordering on mentally retarded and I should just take the hint.
I suppose as a last request, I'll ask for a favor: what should I have written in my previous reply? Other than just completely agreeing with you (which I don't, and makes conversation a bit pointless), I honestly can't think of anything that would be appropriate.
You also need to be charitable, which means when I bring up "If you think the problem is solely (or mostly) on one side (regardless of which side that is), then there's no point on continuing this discussion", providing examples of where you're doing this, you don't put words in my mouth such as "unless I don't believe that the "guilt" is exactly 50/50". And you certainly don't promote a constructive discussion where we're talking about how to promote better conversation by accusing me of requiring you to agree with everything I say. There's a difference between providing a framework, a set of expectations where people can usefully discuss contentious issues and requiring people to agree on those contentious issues. I don't know how to have a conversation when the focus is on blame and pointing fingers rather than on what actually move things forward, and I also know that if I don't think a conversation is worth having or continuing (for whatever reason, including that I don't know how to move forward), it's best that I leave it.
You mention "I honestly can't think of anything that would be appropriate" in considering alternative replies: there's nothing wrong with not replying at all. Sometimes that's the right choice. Another option is to look at Rapoport's rules of criticism as a guide when you feel you're stuck:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
You also need to be aware of what you leave yourself open to. While you may not be one of the "conservative science-hating idiots on forums", when you use similar language ("re-education lecture"? really?), you aren't doing yourself any favors by making it easy for others to lump you into those groups. It would be nice if people were perfectly rational and able to always make such nuanced distinctions, but you know that's not the case. You need to take that into account because that's how people are.
You need to be better than those you decry. You don't get to point and say "that's not fair, look what they're doing", because that's all some will hear. You don't get to say in so many words "you need to listen to me because you're ignorant of your biases and I'm telling you the hard truths." You don't get to label people into groups. You don't get to have a chip on your shoulder, even when you see the chips on others'. Yeah, you might feel like you're fighting with a hand tied behind your back. But the point is that we're not supposed to be fighting or arguing. We're supposed to be figuring out how to work through things together.
If you think or know you're treading on sensitive topics or at (or across) the edges of the community's expectations, you need to take that into account and be even more reflective in what you say. Those that already agree with you aren't those you really need to reach; and realistically, you're not going to reach people who aren't willing to listen to you. You have a chance with those who are still open-minded enough to listen to you. You need to take advantage of that, couching what you say in ways that are going to be effective in encouraging them to believe you're reasonable and someone who's worth listening to in the future. People stop listening when they're feeling attacked and put on the defensive, so you need to endeavor not to do that (and to recognize when you have, learn from it, and likely back off). From my experience that's the same online and off.
You know this is tough stuff. You've said so yourself. And people make mistakes, both in speaking/writing and in listening/reading. It makes it all the more important to be unrelenting in being charitable and constructive in discourse, in working against the biases we both know are there. And very likely HN isn't the proper forum for contentious stuff. The bandwidth's too limited. Our reputations aren't on the line like they are in real social interactions. But if you intend to, I encourage you to take this stuff to heart and work on the only thing you immediately can, which is your own actions and behavior.
Anyway, that's it for me.
I just listened to:
#03 Under The Skin with Russell Brand & Adam Curtis - Do We Really Want Change?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBy08P7tHPQ
Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, his most recent one is fairly famous, Hypernormalization. I haven't seen it because I thought it was a hardcore conspiracy theorist movie, but now I think that's not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis#Filmography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
If you can recommend anyone else with interesting opinions on the insanity of the current world, please share.
I think the key takeaway is that HN is simply not the forum for political discussions, so probably the best strategy for me is to not open any comments on those topics.
Thanks again.
The differences I see between CA and the Obama's own campaign.
CA was accused of, "Setting up proxy organisations to feed untraceable messages onto social media"
There's also the issue of whether they went around campaign finance laws.
"So, campaigns are normally subject to limits about how much money they can raise. Whereas outside groups can raise an unlimited amount. So the campaign will use their finite resources for things like persuasion and mobilisation and then they leave the ‘air war’ they call it, like the negative attack ads to other affiliated groups"
https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-...
Bad optics, no matter how you slice it.
Well actually that's not quite accurate, some didn't look away, they were singing praises. His campaign won a major marketing award in 2008, beating Coke, Nike and Apple:
http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...
---
I honestly look at Obama's campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers [...] to see what he's done, to be able to create a social network ...
Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, pointed to Mr. Obama's facility with engaging voters in social-media channels. "It's the fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said.
---
(Sorry for repeated link, I know it has been posted many times but I think it perfectly illustrates the point well).
People are referencing 2012, not 2008. The data operations of both campaigns were very different.
I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.
Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to awknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.
I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this mean about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.
I was merely pointing out a peculiar selectivity in reporting and outrage.
This is exactly what you’ve done.
This is also highly damaging to discourse.
That being said - this should be particularly interesting given the topic. Securities fraud cases are usually boring, but this lawsuit may bring to light more details on exactly what FB didn't disclose.
Probably wouldn't be seeing this headline if it weren't the investors that were upset.
The argument that they shared too much information with third parties is a fair one. I don’t know if it was caused by naivety or apathy. But they never hid what they were doing from users. And, unlike some are claiming, they definitely didn’t sell that information.
It was Cambridge Analytica who chose to “weaponise” (their word) that data. The engineer who acted as a whistleblower is currently playing the victim but chose to participate in a morally bankrupt project.
This is not the thread to get sanctimonious about people defending Facebook.
or perhaps they need to believe facebook is innocent to justify what they're working on.
What do these investors want exactly, more money?
The stock price went up by any measure, from Feb 3, 2017 to Mar 19, 2018, so it can't be compensation for that. Unless they are willing to give those gains back?
Investors should be able to win a lawsuit if they can prove that company did not immediately disclsee important information, falsified information or that some owners were privy to insider information when they traded (Zuk sold his shares in suspicious time).
It's more interesting than that:
> Zuckerberg has sold more Facebook stock in the last 3 months than any insider at any other company
Given that there were indications that he knew well before today, there may be a case.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/zuckerbergs-facebook-stock-s...
>Zuckerberg's sales accounted for the most, by far. He announced plans in September to sell 35 million to 75 million shares over the next 18 months to fund philanthropic efforts.
It's not new and was announced in September 2017.
From the same article:
>CEO Mark Zuckerberg sold 1.14 million shares as part of regularly scheduled programs.
While you are allowing us to use the information we receive about you, you always own all of your information. Your trust is important to us, which is why we don't share information we receive about you with others unless we have:
• received your permission;
• given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this policy; or
• removed your name and any other personally identifying information from it.
The lawsuit claims Facebook violated bullet points 1 and 2, citing the CA news. The lawsuit uses this point to argue Facebook lied to their investors, did not provide more information on this in their SEC filings, and that investors suffering financial loss when the stock price fell after CA news.
"The suit would represent people who bought shares of Facebook from Feb. 3, 2017, when Facebook filed its annual report and cited security breaches and improper access to user data, through March 19.
Investors may be able to sue Facebook successfully if they can show the company induced them to invest based in part on false, misleading or incomplete information regarding practices that might have averted the user privacy issues, Robbins said."
The fact is, Facebook knew about the voter-profile harvesting. The question is, were they legally supposed to disclose it publicly and did anyone invest in Facebook under the false pretenses created by Facebook choosing not to disclose it.
It's kinda narrow and it is very hard to prove why someone chooses to invest in a company. I doubt this get much traction. I also think it sets a scary precedent, unless the plaintiffs can prove Facebook covered this up with an intention to lure potential investors (like a memo from Zuck stating as such).
Enthusiastic about what the discovery process uncovers.
> “defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent,” according to the complaint.
"The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use."
It's not clear to me whether the transfer of data from GSR to CA was legal, or covered in the ToS for the app.
I'd guess that end users agreed to blanket sharing of data in the FB ToS, but again I don't think we can be certain that their ToS covers exactly this situation -- according to FB, CA / GSR were in breach of their ToS agreements, which might mean they transitively caused FB to breach their agreements with their users. I'd be interested to hear theories from anyone with legal expertise, but I imagine we'll hear more before too long.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analy...
How can I download a copy of my Facebook data?
However, the facebook data isn't good enough because I found that most of my friends didn't put in their contact information. So whether you download a copy of the facebook data or not, you're going to lose contacts (you decide whether it matters) and the rest you're going to need to call friends of friends and find the contact info you need, or ask people directly on facebook for their information.
For example FB recently announced it would roll out job-posts[1] for low-income workers.
In poor parts of Europe like Croatia, Serbia, BiH & Balkans (where I chose to live and work as a foreigner), many people use Facebook to find work and network w/ colleagues. In these locations facebook is the Internet. Often you usually accept a friend request before you are able to discuss a job.
FB job market will lock in users from those regions even further. These economies don't stand a chance and are already bled dry thanks to facebook & Co not paying their taxes. These locations already suffering a huge braindrain of local talent.
Their local society / governments are becoming increasingly corrupt[2] because and honest work opportunities are so scarce some people (like nurses or occupational therapists helping the elderly and disabled) even work for free[3] (I know several people who have the choice of working for free or not be able to graduate).
So many people just leave to the North where they find themselves in slave-labor like conditions in Germany[4]. (sorry for switching focus to Germany for a second I'm trying to show some causality). It's not limited to healthcare. Literally any industry has setups where shady middle-man benefit from Germanys "Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz" (yes that's a word) which is Germany's outsourcing law (a law criticized for creating a dual class workforce) and they are making a killing thanks to the many loopholes present to exploit foreigners/minorities.
When facebook rolls out it's job postings for low-skilled and low-paid jobs it's targeting the most vulnerable minorities in politically volatile regions.
One takeaway from the facebook/CA election meddling is that because majority of people in Balkans are already depending on facebook, it's even easier to spread disinformation and rig elections. And it's giving powers to local crime gangs which usually influence 100% of the electorate[5]. Ask yourself what data harvesting means in these regions, who benefits and what effects this might have 3-5 years from now.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/facebook-job-posts/
[2] https://euobserver.com/political/136664
[3] http://www.etf.europa.eu/pubmgmt.nsf/%28getAttachment%29/760...
[4] http://www.dw.com/en/foreign-nurses-exploited-by-unfair-priv...
[5] https://www.amazon.com/McMafia-Journey-Through-Criminal-Unde...