WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

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1,086 pointscoloneltcb628 comments

I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone but Facebook gets around that by building a profile but not assigning it to your direct name.

Regulations should have sprouted in Obama years, but the admin and tech execs were too buddy buddy and no way Trump promotes this because it makes him look like he is accepting Russia interfered and it's not politically expedient for him to do so.

Same thing with Harvey Weinstein and all the metoo that was known by everyone. I mean I'm happy with all of this coming out, but why now? How is it so coordinated? Usually these guys pay journalists for fluff pr counter views or to shut down stories. Weinstein did.

Is this Data just a metoo thing? Is google next?

> I don't get what changed?

What changed is it helped the current President get elected.

The only people who really used to care about Facebook's behavior were people in niche online tech circles like HN. But then the election happened, and the media has been beating the "Facebook is evil" drum very loudly ever since.

> We've knows Facebook tracks everything

Not disputing this, but when you say 'we' I think you mean the < 5% (maybe even < 1%) of techies and lawyers and journalists in the world who really really care about their data and privacy.

The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid").

Many of my friends in India (where I was raised) and elsewhere used to freely post their phone # and home address on my wall asking me to call them / send them stuff from US. I don't think this 95% population really cares or gives a sh*t.

> The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid").

pretty much exactly my experience with Canadian and American family. People didn't give one iota of a fuck when the Snowden revelations came out because they just assumed that it was the case already.

I think the average techie underestimates how important platform lockin + user interface design + ubiquity are. Once something like Facebook Messenger has reached a critical market share trying to get people to stop using it, no matter how privacy violating FB may be, is about as effective as trying to get people in the year 1985 to disconnect their house's analog telephone line.

> People didn't give one iota of a fuck when the Snowden revelations came out because they just assumed that it was the case already.

It's more complex than that. The tracking and surveillance are not visible to the average person. Point your camera at someone in a coffee shop or bar and take their picture. They'll be coming over to ask you why you took their photo. The fact that the coffee shop or bar is brimming with overhead cameras is completely lost on them because it is mostly invisible (or least no longer noticed).

Just wait until someone does a massive leak of actual personal data, photos, and videos, as opposed to abstract technical reports and Powerpoint slides that Snowden leaked. The average person will be screaming like a banshee when they can look up all the personal info and private pics of themselves and their neighbors and friends on some public webserver.

The true data apocalypse will come when ISP logs are compromised and leaked (urls visited, dns lookups, tied to ip or even subscriber ids, etc), and there is enough leaked PII floating it out there to join it to people records.

With the exception of big evil things like Comcast, you might be surprised how few ISPs keep detailed logs like this. The effort to correlate them with customers is generally not worth it unless you get a subpoena, and only then is it done manually.

(UK) The new surveillance law requires web and phone companies to store everyone’s web browsing histories for 12 months and give the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to the data.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/snoopers-chart...

While the UK is still part of the EU, will there be a case to have your history removed under the new GDPR legislation?

No, the GDPR allows states to include exceptions for such cases: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

In the end, incompetence might save us all :)

>The fact that the coffee shop or bar is brimming with overhead cameras is completely lost on them because it is mostly invisible

With the coffee shop, it makes sense; the cameras in retail are expected to only be used for review, when some event occurs. No one expects it to be used for data mining and behavioral analysis purposes. And even if it were, the expectation is that this would be for academic purposes; that is, with no real commercial intent.

Worst case scenario is that it'd end up being archived in a box of tapes somewhere.

Datamining abuses this expectation. But it makes sense for the expectation to exist; it was the norm until extremely recently.

> the cameras in retail are expected to only be used for review, when some event occurs. No one expects it to be used for data mining and behavioral analysis purposes.

Right. Except that this is also not true.

Source: "A crashed advertisement reveals the code of the facial recognition system used by a pizza shop in Oslo..." => https://twitter.com/gamblelee/status/862307447276544000?lang...

The word "reveals" is used because it is not expected by the average person. Otherwise it would be something like "confirms expectation".

No, the word "reveals" is used because the code is revealed. Well, it's more a "log file" than "code", but that's detail. The point is that the "code" (log file) is usually hidden from average people.

Also, the word "reveals" is used to make the headline more sensational, just like any other headline. It doesn't tell you anything about the average person.

How does this show that data mining isn't an abuse of expectation? The reason this is even an article in the first place is presumably because it conflicts directly with expected use.

There is certainly object detection available on the cameras and behavioral analysis applied to this information and POS data in aggregation software at the store and chain level for both loss prevention and marketing reasons. Maybe not used in all cases but I was surprised to learn these systems can be worthwhile in convenience stores, gas stations, and fast food restaurants, let alone larger stores like Target.

But you’re probably right that most people don’t think this is happening but only expect the stream is only flashing on a screen in front of a guard in real time and stored on a tape temporarily.

Worst case scenario is that the stored info is taken by someone more malicious and used for anything unintended beyond the original purpose.

The whole point of "less surveillance" is to limit the amount of information stored, because information stored IS the vulnerability.

>when they can look up all the personal info and private pics of themselves and their neighbors and friends on some public webserver.

I always thought this webserver is called "facebook", isn't it?

My local bar has over a half dozen cameras pointed to customers and workers areas. I installed them plus the DVR at owner request, they're perfectly visible and nobody gives a damn (except a couple customers once asking if the devices were also listening and recording audio). Everyone knows the owner doesn't use the data for anything illegal, and one time thanks to cameras we caught a worker who stole food bags to use or sell them elsewhere. Trust does also play a role here.

You mean everyone assumes he doesn't abuse the data. That's different than knowing. It's just the lazy and thoughtless stance to take. "Why would they be allowed to have the cameras if they were up to no good"? Businesses are assumed to do no wrong and meet some high moral standard because it's easy to.

I also used not to care, because I used to think that "I don't put that much information on it". But it always said data, but not which data, now I know it buys data from other to cross it, don't know which data they buy and don't know what kind of information they are able to get when they do this. This is what we are only now understanding that they are doing and what is possible to do with this. And of course, Facebook say the least minimum necessary to keep profiting with no problems. Hence I don't see how we can expect people to really know what Facebook does.

Excellent point. I'd also like to add, people are afraid and feel powerless and tend to focus on more productive things such as raising their kids.

Normal people aren't obsessing over tech like the common hn reader.

It’s a socioeconomic awareness. If you’re worried about food you don’t care. Facebooks 99% are the poorest and least educated.

I’ve always wondered why face book, a platform which could unify teachers from mit with the poorest students across the globe has never done shit to do so.

They claim to “connect the globe” but the haven’t connected anything.

Where is the teacher hosting a class where any single person from fbs vast user base can connect?

Fucking unreal.

Facebook could have become the global educational foundation with their platform at this point.

But it’s just a circlejerk.

To be fair, “connecting the globe —> making the world a better place” has always been a bit of a vague vision.

> educational foundation

Well, that was the original hope with print, radio and TV.

So we mostly get scandal sheets, soap operas and reality TV.

"What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history", as some wag put it.

I'd like to hear a proposal for how print, radio or tv could have successfully served such an end.

I.e. where enough people watched the content, where the proposal was realistically achievable, and would have been financially viable.

Not saying such a thing is impossible but it sure isn't easy.

Hey, don't underestimate it. Protestant Europe got a big literacy boost from the Gutenberg Bible.

And if you dig around the writings around the time that radio and (later) TV got started, you'll see plenty of hopeful plans for universal education.

But after the transient is over, the steady state is kind of underwhelming. People are very resistant to instruction that doesn't suit them, and I really can't blame that.

> Hey, don't underestimate it. Protestant Europe got a big literacy boost from the Gutenberg Bible.

I was responding to your comment saying "that was the original hope with print, radio and TV. So we mostly get scandal sheets, soap operas and reality TV"!

I'm fully aware there's major benefits that have come from those mediums.

> And if you dig around the writings around the time that radio and (later) TV got started, you'll see plenty of hopeful plans for universal education.

Again, you were the one who said it didn't pan out, and you implied the only reason they didn't was because <quote>"What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history", as some wag put it.</quote>.

My comment was pointing out that the reason has to be more than just that -- thus the challenge to come up with a proposal that could actually work.

Once something like Facebook Messenger has reached a critical market share trying to get people to stop using it

writing this comment from South-East Europe where many people use facebook not just for cat pics but to find work and network with colleagues. It's a huge problem in developing countries where facebook IS the Internet. FB recently announced it would roll out job-posts for low-income workers[¹]. This will mean an even stronger lock-in for the user. While the discussion on ethics evolve mostly user-privacy and CA/FB role in Brexit/election hacking, the problem for less developed regions is facebook taking from them without giving back (fb is known not to pay it's taxes in Europe)

¹ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/facebook-job-posts/

Echoing your statement, "Facebook is the Internet". In Africa most telecoms have special data bundles for Facebook and WhatsApp. Normal data bundles to browse the Internet are just too expensive. A dollar will give you unlimited access to Facebook and WhatsApp for about 2 weeks.

I have a few cows back in my village. I have toyed with the idea of creating a cattle monitoring application that would have to make use of Facebook or WhatsApp. The herder sends me a picture every evening of the cows. I want to piggy back on the affordable connectivity given to Facebook and WhatsApp. Yes I know, this would contribute to the problem but for me losing cattle is a bigger problem. From parent, finding a job is a bigger problem so we all get sucked into Facebook.

Sounds like a Messenger bot would work well for that use case actually.

Thanks I will add a note to my list of ideas on my rather long list of todo things.

Getting FB to subsidize your cow tracking needs sounds great to me!

Yep. I’ve been explaining this stuff to friends for years. Even the most intelligent and rational dismiss it as paranoia or say, “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide anyway.”

Daniel Solove eloquently states the problems with the "I have nothing to hide" argument in this famous paper now turned book https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

I've not read t but guessing its similar to why you shouldn't speak to police without a lawyer even if "I done nothing wrong". Because you will probably say something they can use against you regardless.

Which is a dangerous family of opinions to apply without fully understanding them, as asking for a lawyer when they’re at your door inquiring about a missing neighborhood kid is probably counterproductive and escalates attention on you unnecessarily. It’s a fine opinion when common sense is involved. I don’t have a problem with the sentiment, just watching people who digest YouTube and shout “where’s your probable cause” at the poor guy looking for gypsy moths at the California border.

(Yes, I’ve seen that on 50 in Tahoe.)

I'm pretty sure that idiots like that will be idiots no matter what advice they stumble over.

But I have to say,

> Which is a dangerous family of opinions to apply without fully understanding them

I get what you're saying, but the point of the advice is that, in a situation to which the advice is applicable, you don't fully understand the implications of anything you may say, so your best play is to clam up and get a lawyer.

>your best play is to clam up and get a lawyer. //

Your best play if you want to waste police time because you for some reason hate society and think helping to make it run smoothly infringes on your rights - because fuck those guys, right, they're not paying you to search for the kid you just saw walking off with Ann Ominous, why should you help.

Hyperbole; but I think it illustrates the counterpoint sufficiently.

> they're not paying you to search for the kid you just saw walking

I said, "in a situation to which the advice is applicable". Nobody is saying leave Timmy in the well, they're talking about situations involving being detained or arrested.

I meant if you suspect you are a suspect

I like this essay but got irritated by the number of times 'nothing to hide' phrase is used.

I know many people who care but they think they can "outsmart" Facebook by having workarounds for its annoying and evil nature. They do it by not giving it their permission to access the address book, location, nude pictures, etc. They told me to "just deny Facebook's request to..." It bugged the fuck out of me and I wrote about it last year [1].

They think they can befriend an evil person who they know too well would stab them in the back. They think that they are stronger and more intelligent than the evil friend.

The proper answer is that if you think a friend of yours is a shitty person, then don't befriend them anymore. If you don't like what the fuck Facebook does, then just don't have a Facebook account. It's an inconvenience in the short term because you can't talk to some of your friends, sure. But if you have it and invent those workarounds and ask me to install that piece of shit so I can talk to you, then you complicit with it and make my life shitty too. When I realized that, I realized that's exactly what Stallman meant when he talked about proprietary software -- which is what he doesn't agree with.

1: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/just.html

The flip side to "nothing to hide" is akin to John Hancock signing his name big and bold because you want others to know what "you" think and are doing.

That is not at all the same as not caring. It's using the platform with intent.

I see a lot of that on FB. I don't agree with the intent all the time but I do pay attention to it and often use it with purpose myself.

I probably have things to hide, but: I ignore ads. I don't click on political news. I pretty much ignore everything except my friends' vacation photos. Please tell me in concrete terms a specific downside to staying on Facebook. What's the non-tinfoil hat scenario that I am naively ignoring? Wake up and my bank account is drained, or what?

There's a collective impact on society for which everyone participating has some amount shared responsibility. It's up to the individual to decide if that impact is a positive or a negative one.

  I ignore ads. I don't click on political news...

But Facebook harvests whatever cookies and trackers it can out of your browser, even for activity outside of and unrelated to Facebook itself. You will be productized in every possible way. (For one example, haven't you seen Amazon ads in your feed for items you may gave looked at/for strictly external to your Facebook tab?)

I ignore ads. I don't click on political news.

You don't have to click it. For example I have zero interest in celebrities or reality TV, I've never clicked a link or read an article about them. Yet even I know who Kanye Kardashian is, and that he's married to (or is? * ) a woman with an enormous backside. it's pervasive, it becomes part of the background and what you consider "normal". I absolutely guarantee that despite never having clicked a link about Trump, just having that link there and seeing the headline, will have influenced you, same as it would anyone.

* No don't tell me, I don't care

Did you see that through facebook ... ? Friend feeds ? Liked pages ?

I've hidden pretty much everyone, only keeping a few music or art pages, only go on facebook maybe once a week anyways.

I use messenger a lot though. I hate typing on phones so not many texts, and whatsapp web interface is not that great (and it's not as widely used by my friends, and it's owned by facebook anyways so what's the difference ?).

Actually a fun detail is that I entered facebook under the wrong gender : I'm labelled as a male though I'm female. When I looked at my targeted center of interests I had the most average things ever ie sports and such (which I don't follow -at all-). Like, really, you have nothing better on me ?

So I don't care about my data (I don't think I put a lot out there anyways) or whatever and I've yet to be convinced how it matters at all in the grand scheme of the universe.

> most average things ever ie sports and such (which I don't follow -at all-). Like, really, you have nothing better on me ?

To me, that is part of the problem.

For years Facebook, and Google, have been telling the world they understand us better than we know ourselves, and all the fine-grained ways they can categorise and predict us. They actually seem to believe it. Then when they allow us to look at what they have inferred it is usually comically wrong for pretty much everyone.

Then they go on to sell to us, categorise and bubble us as though it were fact, and sell access to this marvellous factual data or sell their marvellous data mining capability to riffle through vast amounts of NHS data, or predict crime, or...

We're building a global infrastructure with a foundation of that 98% bullshit. That was mostly harmless when it was just about product ads. When it moves on to health, justice and politics and it's shown they're able to move the needle I think it does matter. Perhaps not much to anyone personally, but to society as a whole.

Then what's the problem if it's not actually that good for people who leave few, contradictory elements (maybe I would've been easier profiled if I was labelled female for an example). They try to sell me stuff which I won't be interested in, seems fine to me.

As for the last part, could you be more precise ? What exactly could happen that would be bad to you ?

I maybe wrong, but unless he changed his name he is Kanye West and his wife is Kim Kardashian. And I know this not form facebook but probably from reddit memes. And again, unless I missed the fact he changed his name, it does prove the point that you really don't know who he is since you mixed up his name ;)

I don't put that much data out, but I don't mind being profiled. I like being suggested music that I'm susceptible to like based on other people. I think it's fine if one can infer out of my lifestyle that I would be interested in x or warn for risks of y.

What is wrong with it ? I'm probably no statistical anomaly, I don't mind being part of some artificial cluster somewhere, helping having a more accurate portrayal of a type of people. I am not interesting enough that anyone will come for me specifically anyways.

And from time to time, I see worried and lamenting people like here, and I still don't get it.

> I am not interesting enough that anyone will come for me specifically anyways.

No single raindrop believes it's responsible for the storm.

They don't care about you specifically, if you can profile people accurately they have a much easier time of adjusting perspectives for your own aims. You've likely already seen the results of this with the latest American election.

It's gone far beyond getting you to buy more music and they're just warming up.

And ? Did the world crash, the USA's GDP sink, did people starve and die by thousands ? No, nothing happened.

This may be okay for you individually. But Facebook will treat someone with bipolar or serious impulse control issues just the same way... Assuming some level of accuracy, an algorithm could predict when someone is having a manic episode, susceptible. Its predatory and dangerous. The vast majority of people are not aware of how to protect themselves from out-of-hand tech giants and their customers. Getting ahead is becoming about how well you can unplug so that you are not being puppeteered. We all need some counter-intelligence know-how.

I suggest, use rational means to work out for yourself what products are best for you and your budget, or on the other hand what political affiliations actualy represent your interests. Figuring out what's real in the world is a big task and only the most vigilant will be okay, or blow the whistle so the average person might be.

>But Facebook will treat someone with bipolar or serious impulse control issues just the same way... Assuming some level of accuracy, an algorithm could predict when someone is having a manic episode, susceptible. Its predatory and dangerous.

And what would they do out of that ? People with poor mental health don't need facebook to be triggered, it seems even less harmful because it's through an interface and not a direct human interaction.

>use rational means to work out for yourself what products are best for you and your budget, or on the other hand what political affiliations actualy represent your interests.

I don't buy stuff mostly, it's an easy solution. And no political affiliations represent the rare interest I have that I think would undoubtedly be good.

Anecdotal but definitely illustrative: a close friend of my mother had serious trouble managing her bipolar states, she would start manic and it got out of control within hours or sometimes minutes. Bye bye meds, and on more than one occasion, she would spend thousands of dollars in days, vacation scams, grocery shopping for things unneeded that sat and spoiled, you name it. She made comprehensive arrangements with friends and the companies she dealt with repeatedly so she couldn't get more than a few dollars pocket money when off cycle. In this regard, my mom was an angel, saved this friend multiple bankruptcies.

Anyone not so fortunate could be so easily scammed its scary. And heart wrenching.

Is state guardianship not possible then ? Or arrangement with the bank ? No credit card, get cash at the bank counter when needed... I really have a hard time seeing this as an unsolvable problem, let alone scary or heart breaking.

I'm sure it might have been, but her kids took the "bail and never have to deal with it again" option, and she honestly had trouble just staying focused enough to have something of a day job, let alone remember to make appointments and keep them.

Not so much heart breaking, but hard to watch from the outside, she meant to live well and tried but her brain chemistry gave her random minuses to intelligence wisdom and charisma.

I was talking to my daughter about that yesterday. Suppose Facebook knows your interests, taste in music, where you live, what good you like, etc. A political campaign could use that information to tell you that their local candidate shares your interests, lived in the same town, loves the same music, supports the same charity or whatever overlaps with your profile, while knowingly avoiding telling you about things you like or are in favour of for which they hold opposing views. So you get a personally tailored, custom ad for the candidate pushing all the right buttons and concealing anything that doesn’t match or it knows you would dislike. Meanwhile it could also show you targeted attack ads on a rival customised to highlight things they know you dislike.

All the information might be true (or might not), but IMHO I don’t like the idea of people intrusively trying to manipulate me like that. We all have biases and preconceptions. We’re all open to manipulation and the last thing I want is my online world to become an echo chamber, turning me into a parody of myself. In the wider context, it’s also a threat to civil society, driving a wedge between us as citizens by magnifying our differences and promoting divisiveness. That’s what the Russian interference campaign was all about.

I don't vote, I don't care. Couldn't care less about politics to be quite honest. They have a very marginal influence on my life, aspirations and happiness.

If that's true, that's a pretty handy description of what many US leftists call "privilege." There are many marginalized people, including in developed western nations, for whom the politics you're able to ignore can have decisive impact on their day to day lives. Many of these people, like many people in general, will not have the knowledge of internet technology and policy they need to protect themselves.

That's not a compelling argument.

The thing is, if a candidate seems interesting, you should teach her to look up their website and read their full agenda. If they've held positions before, also to google them to find out what they've actually said and done in the past, and to think carefully about what kinds of implications those deeds may have had. You most certainly shouldn't base your election choices on paid ads - or, really, any kind of information only from a single outlet.

That's also the general recipe for avoiding echo chambers: don't be lazy, and go a little out of your way to find things out.

Of course, but are we really ok living in a world where the vast majority of the electorate are completely unprepared to protect themselves from this sort of manipulation?

It’s not that I’m against advertising, or capitalism, or that I’m some sort of over-regulating socialist. I just think that we need basic, fair rights over and protections for our personal information, and that this isn’t just good for us it’s good for our democracies.

Thing is, it’s not dangerous on an individual level - no different to a friend telling you about a particular candidate and why you should like them.

And personalised ads sound great at the individual level - relevant, interesting products and services that I’m likely to interact with instead of irrelevant crap clogging up my screen. We’ve always had targeting and echo chambers.

But, like the algorithmic kids videos a few months ago or the deluge of fake news, we and our society are totally unprepared for the speed and scale that technology now allows. It’s the sheer quantity and pervasiveness - and the fact that it’s not obvious what’s going on - that makes it dangerous.

To (poorly) quote Charlie Stross, we’ve ripped out the mechanisms for how things work and replaced them with something alien, without anyone noticing.

You're saying you don't mind being profiled and don't see the harm in it, but in several places downthread you describe in detail how little you use the platform, how poorly it understands you, and how little exposure you get to it. If these things are true, you're not a good example of how harmless their profiling is for other people.

Then isn't it that a reasonable, unprofiling, harmless use is possible?

All kinds of edge cases are possible. That doesn't in any way address, let alone refute, the widespread concerns.

When people say "I have nothing to hide anyway." ask them about their weirdest sexual fantasy and their credit card number. Usually then they realize they might have somethings they want to keep private.

Or just ask "Nothing to hide from whom?"

Everybody's got something to hide, just not from everybody else. As much as we share with friends what we would not share with strangers, we have things that we would enthusiastically share with strangers that we would never share with our friends. Something similar applies here: everybody would absolutely do mind if someone in their personal sphere could browse their search term history, but the same data as one of billions of profiles on some corporate datacenter does not appear in that threat model. Ultimately, "nothing to hide" is short for "nothing to hide from them", and the main difference is wether the possibility of leaks is taken into account or not.

People got so comfortable with ease of being able to reach anyone anywhere and in one place of all places that they have been conditioned to give up all privacy. Today's environment is a heaven for law enforcement agencies, marketing agencies and cybercriminals. It's too easy to manipulate, build profiles and do just about anything with anyone you'd like to Target. One could argue that while technology improves various aspects of our lives it also dumbs us down to the point of being totally numb to sanity.

People care, but assume it's inevitable. The government knows everything about me since I have to pay taxes. Likewise the banks because I have to keep my money somewhere. Likewise my cell provider because I need a phone to participate in society. Social media is not as high on the necessity list, but once you've already accepted this inevitability, how much is going to change if you give up Facebook? There is a downside which is measurable if you value the social contact. The upside is completely abstract and un-measurable. What outcome could you ever point to and say, this thing X happened specifically because I gave up Facebook?

People are fucking okay with their data being in public. They even fucking post any slight event in their lives.

Data being public and data being hoarded by an platform with lock in is different. I share plenty of things that I'm perfectly OK being public but that I'd never ever want to give away to a single entity that I don't trust like Facebook.

Facebook exploits "bugs" in the human psyche, such as our need to avoid feeling lonely (by sharing intimate details of our life) is far more compelling than any abstract fear of "big brother". That is until big brother is Donald Trump, then suddenly the fear is no longer abstract.

> Facebook exploits "bugs" in the human psyche

Small quip: the need for social interaction/emotional support is a human trait not a "bug". A bug would imply that this need is somehow undesirable/irrational, but that's just not correct.

Ah what I meant was that prioritizing loneliness over privacy is a kind of a bug; satisfying a more unconscious need over taking conscious decisions to be smart with your own privacy.

They’re starting to. They just need enough examples of something having gone wrong with huge consequences. This is one of them.

And this would be the time to revisit John Oliver’s Snowden interview [1]. Specifically at 25:53. Since the topic is surveillance it may be inappropriate to link YouTube. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to, the gist is people only care when their dickpics gets leaked...

[1] https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M

What about the overwhelming majority that don't take images of their genitals? Is there a downside for them?

I have nothing to hide” - most of the people a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!

Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy. I found this article very interesting about FB - http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/ reply

>I have nothing to hide” - most of the people a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!

Has this ever been proved or is it just an urban legend? I keep hearing this anecdote but I always thought it was fishy and could easily be explained by a simple coincidence. Like these people who claim that the Facebook app is listening to them continuously to match keywords for ads.

My girlfriend and I are in our early 30's, she's been regularly targeted for pregnancy-related products for the past 5 years at least. It seems that for most advertisers you don't need a super fancy algorithm harvesting thousands of data points, simply "woman age 25-35" is probably good enough to assume that pregnancy is likely. Undoubtedly Target has that information, they thought that it was plausible that she could be pregnant (or would be in the close future) so they sent pregnancy-related material. When it turned out that this person was actually pregnant they thought Target was surprisingly prescient. Of course that's not counting the hundreds of people who potentially received the same offer but were not actually pregnant and discarded it immediately as junk mail.

I'm sure the profiling takes place but this anecdote probably overplays how accurate these predictions are. Facebook and Google are in an other league though, they have access to so much more personal info, I'm sure these companies "know" many of their users better than any of their friends or relative ever will.

I think you prove the point you're denying. You say you don't need fancy algos, but companies are wasting advertising on your gf by using basic indicators (age, sex) when in the Target case the advertising was, well, targeted.

If advertisers know what will get you to push the buy button then they can use that against you. Advertising pregnancy pants to those who aren't pregnant will almost always fail, and from the advertisers perspective it wastes an opportunity to push a product that you might buy.

It looks like the pregnant teenager thing may have originated as a theoretical example. However the story about Facebook publicising people’s recent purchases, including telling one guy’s wife about some Jewelry he bought, is absolutely true.

https://www.wired.com/2010/03/facebook-beacon-2/

It's not an urban legend, it happened, Andrew Pole was a statistician who worked at Target:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Also, a bit later in the article, they realise that being explicit about what they're doing is bad, people do care, when it obviously happens to them:

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

Acxiom (and I assume many others too) infers women's menstrual cycles from retail purchases so they know when it is best to send them certain ads. One week its kittens and flowers, the next it'll be an attractive man, etc. This kind of deep data mining has been going on for decades. You voluntarily give this information up when you make purchases with loyalty cards.

It's called a loyalty card, not a "we'll spy on you to get you to spend more, the discounts aren't for your loyalty but to get you to use the card" card.

This is what so many people on the thread don't seem to get. Most normal people take this stuff at face value. They assume it does what it says on the tin. They apply human decency and an expectation of a normal human, fallible, porous memory to a frightening, insatiable industry that has no decency and an infinitely perfect memory.

Facebook, they assume, lets you connect to your friends. Facebook never say "in return for a free photo sharing and messaging system we will spy on everything you and your friends do, track everything you do on the internet, figure out what makes you tick, your loves, hates, wants, 'secret' desires, tie it all up in a bow and sell it to anyone who'll pay us, with your name, email and phone number attached".

A little bit of research tells me that the story was entirely fictional. More of a case study / click bait of what might have happened. Media ran this shit out of it though. At least online. Eyeballs > integrity right?

As per my comment, the NYT ran a big article about it quoting Andrew Pole, a statistician who worked at Target. It specifically says that this really happened.

Did your research find that story to be a fraud?

The part about the teenager in Minneapolis wasn’t from Pole. Re-read the article and you’ll notice that story isn’t attributed to anyone. It’s just stated. We have no idea where this story originated, whether it’s fact or fiction, and if it’s even related to Pole’s work or just a marketing snafu.

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregna...

It's very simple. No one will care unless it has a tangible effect on their lives. For that reason, if it does have a tangible effect on peoples' lives, Facebook is doing it wrong.

Maybe ask them how they would feel if a little robot owned by some giant corporation was following them around every day, all day long. And imagine the corporation had similar robots following everyone else around, even children. And tell them the corporation made its money by selling the information it collected to anyone who could pay. And tell them some of the purchasers use the information for various nasty things, like identity theft, And then ask them how they would feel if the robots were invisible, so they didn't realize they were being monitored. And then tell them that is what is actually happening today.

Up until now the bug was known but it wasn't clear it's exploitable. Now there's an exploit and everyone's getting exploited so people are freaking out.

How do you know Google does the same thing? What can you get out of Google by writing an app?

Off the top of my head, I don't think Google even has most people's friends lists (outside Orkut back in the day, and Google+, which isn't so popular). They do have contact lists in Gmail, which is a bit different.

There is address book spamming via mobile apps, but again, there are permissions. How good are they?

It seems like it's "the same thing" only if you ignore all technical detail. We should be able to do better than that!

Google absolutely harvests all info they can get. They scan gmails, they monitorig everything on all Android phones, even when you disable something [1].

It's just that Google maybe be a bit hesitant to sell data to 3rd parties, since they abuse them themselves :)

(and this is the price of a 'free' service).

[1]: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/google-tracking-user-loca...

Isn't selling or just giving data to third parties what we're talking about today?

> It's just that Google maybe be a bit hesitant to sell data to 3rd parties

Which is the entire point. I know Google is taking data when I use Google products. The problem arises when Google freely gives my data to a random third party company I neither know nor trust, without my knowledge.

Why is it better that google has your data than that another company has your data?

Because I agreed to give it to them, for one.

For another, I know what Google is. And where it is - they have an address. They're in the US. I could, if I wanted, sue them.

Compare that to a literally limitless number of unknown organisations all across the world? Yeah, I'd say Google is better.

Because at least then you know who has your data. If I agree to Google having some of my data because I trust them with it to some extent that does not mean I want to give any third party access to that data. And I'm not saying there's any reason to trust Google with your data, but at least you'll know who really has access to that data.

Arguably Google can create a pretty good social network from email. That's why the use it for ads.

I was looking at Google Plus again last week and there's a lot of interesting things about it. I kind of wish they would spin it off into its own company.

Google stopped scanning emails 9 months ago[0].

[0] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

The exact quote is "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change." I know they still scan my emails, because airbnb reservations will magically pop up on my calendar.

Do you log in to AirBnB using Google credentials? Perhaps they use an undocumented feature to broadcast the dates to GCal without mail harvesting.

Nope, using Facebook credentials. That's definitely a possibility.

Maybe I'm cynical, but whenever I see qualifiers around a verb I get suspicious. Something like "hey, we're not lying when we said we stopped scanning emails for ad purposes, but we are still scanning to improve other Google ecosystems tools like Calendar".

They scan emails. I have had airline ticket reservations that my friends emailed to me added on my Calendar.

Yikes. That would prove it...

It's not exactly a secret: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/6084018?co=GENIE....

Information about events, flights, parcel tracking, etc. are explicitly provided by email senders for things like automatic calendar integration by the email client. https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg

You are implying friends list is the main factor here. Let's assume you are right. Still, Google may have a database for people you might know, you just don't know its existence yet. They don't have to let you input your contacts voluntarily to find out about your relationships. For example, have you used Google Maps? You search a place, Google tells you popular time of that place, how did they get the data? If they are able to do things like that, they might also be able to know who (or which Google account) you spend time with and where, they just don't have reasons to tell you they have the data or they have deep learned the data for various purposes.

We just don't have a whistleblower to testify that they sell the data yet, possibly because they have strict internal confidentiality policies.[1]

Disclaimer, about that Google Maps example, it's just my assumption, I don't know how it actually works.

[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/employee-lawsuit-acc...

So you're saying they have lots of personal data (nobody is disputing this). If they have the data, and they let someone else have access to it, it could leak. Which, sure, makes sense.

But that's not the same as "know[ing] Google does the same thing" unless you define either "know" or "the same thing" very loosely.

You are right. Basically what I'm trying to say is they could do the same thing regardless whether they have your friends lists or not.

Indeed, I don't know if Google does the same thing.

If you have Google Maps running on your phone with data and GPS on, the app will explicitly ask you about your experience in whatever place you're visiting at that moment. I have friends who enthusiastically respond to those notifications every time, arguing that the information will help other users. More people than you think are happy to share more than passive metadata.

> More people than you think are happy to share more than passive metadata.

I'm aware of that. I used to be like your friends because I love technology. Though I didn't know it's an opt-in since I haven't seen those notifications. Maybe I missed it?

Even so, how do I make sure the data is not going to be misused? I practically not be able to do anything that I think I can to prevent data misuse. They collect my data even after I said no.[1]

Plus, those so-called passive metadata are more objective and valuable than the data you actively submit to them, don't you think? I can hardly fake these kinds of data, just like you don't ask what lab rats think, you run tests on them and then just observe how they are gonna react.

Giving away those data with good intentions doesn't necessarily mean it won't harm others in some other way. I have things to hide, especially with data companies thriving.

[1]: https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

Edit: In fact, believe it or not, I hate to point the Popular Time issue out. I was afraid of Google supporters' hostile attitudes against me or Google might consider this feature could heat up privacy concerns then kill it. (Very unlikely, because I'm nobody. :D) I find this feature is thoughtful and useful, I'm too selfish to watch it die. Besides, killing it doesn't do any good to the public, on the contrary, it will become less transparent how they are going to use user's data. I brought up this issue only because, with this whole FB scandal thing happening, I feel the public is playing favorites.

"To determine popular times, wait times, and visit duration, Google uses aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History." [1]

"Location History and Location Reporting data may be used by any Google app or service." [2]

It looks like you can turn it on or off, and delete your location history. I don't see a way to use Location History without having it also be anonymously used for traffic and other stuff. [3]

I've turned it off on my phone to see what happens. Occasionally I'll run across a permission dialog to turn it on.

[1] https://support.google.com/business/answer/6263531?hl=en [2] https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/example/may-collect-... [3] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en

Thanks for the links, although deleting data from Google doesn't sound like a relief/solution to me because they keep all the data.[1][2] From my experience, after you deleted your gmail account, you are not allowed to register with the same address anymore. They claim it's due to security reasons. Such claim sounds reasonable and I believe them. Anyway, they have the ability to keep the data you think you deleted for whatever reasons, which is enough for me to have doubts. I have no methods to prove that other kinds of data are kept or deleted, i.e. I don't know how to check if they deleted my location history completely, or just archived it for future use. Even the data has been anonymized, it still can be used for statistic purposes, which possibly could be used to influence elections.

I wonder if most of users would read through ToS and support articles before they started using those features. It's just much easier to click on "I agree." I won't call it a trap, but it's pretty close. As a result, users are signing contracts they don't even bother reading. And eventually, users are the ones who get blamed by the company for not paying attention.

And again, we are not sure about how they are actually using our data. Before this FB scandal, some people might still believe FB wouldn't do things like this.

[1]: https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/google-keeps-your-data-...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-you...

Google has contact lists, call logs, real-time location and possibly texts from most used smartphone OS. Google has communication graphs and contact lists from the most used email platform. Google has the search logs from your internet searches. Google has web logs from the most used web analytics platform.

Google knows a lot.

To be honest, if things like this has to happen, I think Google should be the first.

https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...

What's more, I suspect that if this exact same thing had been done by a company working for Obama's or Hillary's campaigns, nobody would have batted an eyelash.

PS - the reason that the regs wont happen during the trump years has nothing to do with the collusion investigation. He's put a mandate in place that for every reg to go into the federal register, two have to come out. His administration is in general very anti-regulation. Therefore, yes, absolutely no way he would ever regulate it ... but not for the reason you hypothesized.

> nobody would have batted an eyelash.

Doubtful, considering the number of scandals from this list that made major media attention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obama_administration_...

Quite literally his campaign invented the tactic of scraping your friends list as a way to persuade voters. The important difference was CA used data that was gathered under the misleading guise of a personality quiz.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campai...

They were the first to deploy it on such a massive scale, but I can assure you they did not invent that concept.

Cambridge Analytica had 200 clients. Now not all of those are major elections but CA is also not the only player who's been doing this. Governments and shady organizations have been perfecting media-based mass manipulation for decades/centuries.

Exactly, I'm pretty sure Assange tweeted Sheryl Sandberg's emails to Podesta and the Clinton campaign stating the exact thing:

1. "Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO to Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, June 6, 2015" --https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/790713289311387648 2."Facebook let us "suck out the ENTIRE social graph" because "they were on our side" -- Obama campaign team leader for 2012 " https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/975847209387380737

The big difference is that the Obama campaign didn't try to hide their intention of having you sign up with Facebook. The 'research' firm tricked people into thinking it was a research study when they were in fact harvesting data for different means.

While I agree that I think the Obama campaign has largely gotten a pass for similar data collection and voter profiling activities, I think that part of the reason its getting such attention now is some of the accompanying scandalous tactics of CA being revealed along with their data efforts. Some of the undercover videos being released, particularly the one regarding the Sri Lankan election, look pretty bad.

> Regulations

Is more government the solution to every problem? Just let people make their choice of whether the product Facebook offers is worth the privacy tradeoff.

What if you can't judge the privacy tradeoff because it's a complete black box?

Nothing black box about it. If you send data to a company, they have that data.

Except...there is data that is not explicitly sent. My mum doesn't know what an IP address is and therefore wouldn't know it's used for location tracking.

I guess. If I send a letter requesting information to a company with my return address on the envelope and the company sends back a package, is it so shocking that they have recorded your address at the end of the transaction?

My mother/family/friends are not even aware there is a trade off. They only privacy 'problem' they know about is accidentally posting something personal in the wrong spot. There's no understanding of the extensive data collection, connection, and trade that's happening behind the scenes.

My problem with this argument is that I cannot surf the web without being tracked even if I have chosen not to use their platform. Even if I stopped using the web completely, their platform would still gather info about me from anyone else that has my contact info and has decided to share info with the platform.

Regular folks have no idea how any idea how any of these systems work. It's hard for most people to understand the privacy tradeoffs.

Something like "nutrition facts" for data privacy seems like a reasonable policy.

I think that this is actually a part of the GDPR so in a months time we may have it.

If that worked, there would be no outrage about this because everyone who would be unhappy would have already not used it, so there would be no 'reveal' and no scandal happening.

Since people didn't know, and are shocked and annoyed, it follows that people weren't able (for whatever reason) to make the decision in advance.

Is more government not the solution to every problem? It's like a legal wikipedia of all the behaviours people have found to abuse each other in society, all gathered in one place and applied to everyone. Sounds good.

Sometimes everything is OK until it isn't. Critical Mass can take awhile to build.

The 'why is this news' sentiment is understandable, but people underestimate how much this kind of public /mainstream attention can matter when it comes to action being taken.

The only analogy I can think of is smoking. IIRC there was already a consensus about their dangers in the fifties, but it took decades, in part by strong lobbying efforts, before the public accepted/internalized this truth.

Similarly, the #metoo thing might cause shrugs among those who were in the know for a while, but I'm sure the public outrage will have lasting effects. I mean, Cosby's crimes were an open secret until suddenly it wasn't (a comedian went viral, or something like that?).

I think the mistake is assuming that time that passes means people are ok with a certain amount of sharing, that it’s a safe investment, whether in cash or in investment in building on their platform or with their data. The reality is that we all know that what Facebook does is unsavory. When the privacy concerns eclipse the Value, whether its in year 11 or year 111, the wrath of society will be severe, as it should be.

The issue isn't the data collection. It's campaign finance laws potentially being broken. It just so happens that data collection was at the center of that.

>but why now?

The two things catalysing the latest media frenzy are first the recent Facebook Russian interference scandal increasing interest in Facebook data stories generally. That’s just a tip king issue.

The second is the Channel 4 undercover recording of CA execs advising on the use of corrupt practices in a Sri Lankan political campaign. Of course the US angle is getting all the press in the US, but this is what triggered a Renewed journalistic interest in the company.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...

To be honest I was not aware that Facebook invited anyone to take out that data merely asking them to delete it shortly after. That's the part that's new and offending to me.

Meanwhile I tolerate political campaigns using targetted advertising. I just wish people were showing more competence when it comes to media consumption and the ability to distinguish between truthful reporting and obvious lies. The media illiteracy is the real problem I see with this issue.

Is media literacy something that can solve this though? A society can educate its citizens (and should do so), but a large group of people simply can't reach the level of critical thinking necessary to fully grasp the nudging and political weaselling they are submitted to.

> but a large group of people simply can't reach the level of critical thinking necessary to fully grasp the nudging and political weaselling they are submitted to.

Isn't that exactly the kind of problem that education can solve? Of course that's a decade long process which doesn't happen over night.

Education can somewhat increase the percentage of people we would consider media literate, but there will always be a group of voters who simply can't reach that level of media literacy — some of whom are literally illiterate (a couple of percent in most modern democracies) and some who are literate, but can't (or won't) fully grasp the subtleties of media manipulation. Those are still a lot of voters.

I've considered the idea of a course for general education that specifically teaches about these psychological traits and the ways they can backfire... a sort of anti-manipulation, bias awareness training camp.

Set up scenarios involving

- fake news about classmates and show everyone how they respond vs researching and being skeptical...

- personal info security vs pwnage / outing / fraud...

- scenarios invoking biases and showing explicitly how they affect decisions and actions

It's not incompetence.

It's an exploit of our evolutionary psychology. Fake news, keep people spun up, etc. We've always known these things about ourselves.

"A lie is half-way around the world before the truth even gets its pants on" -- Mark Twain (probably)

Our susceptibility to manufactured outrage and refined sugars are the same thing. Former survival traits are being exploited for profit.

And the solution to toxic ingredients in food is to make everyone a competent chemist who can analyze the stuff they buy?

While education certainly is a good idea, and helps make society more resilient than relying on centralized authorities, I don't think the successful strategy of collaboration in a society is to make everyone an expert at everything and have no consequences for trying to screw over other people.

> And the solution to toxic ingredients in food is to make everyone a competent chemist who can analyze the stuff they buy?

Well, you obviously don't have to be a competent chemist to buy healthy food in the same way that you don't have to be a journalist or experienced intelligence agent to conclude that Hillary Clinton probably doesn't run a child pornography organization from the basement of a pizza joint.

There's a baseline of minimum media literacy, or food buying skills, you're expected to exhibit and proper education helps to meet and exceed that threshold.

Additionally and in contrast to toxic ingredients, thruthful journalismus often isn't a clear, binary conclusion - it's hard to regulate a problem that is open to interpretation and operates with blurring lines, gray areas, deceiving narratives and ommitted details. I think it's an issue that can't be regulated away and suggest that we find ways to make it less effective by reaching an audience that is able to question those narratives.

> Well, you obviously don't have to be a competent chemist to buy healthy food in the same way that you don't have to be a journalist or experienced intelligence agent to conclude that Hillary Clinton probably doesn't run a child pornography organization from the basement of a pizza joint.

Well, or do you? If there was no regulation ensuring at least a certain baseline of both food safety and correctness of the labeling, how far would you actually get without being a competent chemist? And, well, yeah, it seems obvious to you, but the thing is, to a lot of people, it is actually an intellectual struggle to understand that that is bullshit, because they are constantly fed information that supports their world view and makes it seem coherent to them.

> There's a baseline of minimum media literacy, or food buying skills, you're expected to exhibit and proper education helps to meet and exceed that threshold.

Well, yes, but the question is not whether it is expected, but whether it should be expected. And whether the amount of media literacy is actually comparable to the expected food buying skills. I mean, just think about how hard it actually is to buy outright toxic food. Really, you can go into any restaurant or grocery store and buy anything they offer, and it just won't be toxic, it will almost all be perfectly fine for human consumption. Maybe not extremely healthy, but nothing that will make you ill in the short term, except for rare exceptions. Now compare that to well-known news outlets. It's completely trivial to get your news from a "news source" that is largely fabricated bullshit, it is just everywhere.

> Additionally and in contrast to toxic ingredients, thruthful journalismus often isn't a clear, binary conclusion

I don't think toxic ingredients are that much clearer than any other field of investigation. Yeah, there is stuff that will kill you instantly, that's easy, but what increase of cancer rates makes ingredients obviously toxic?

The thing is that now people see a real consequence of that data harvesting, like voting manipulation.

Do people realise they're being manipulated though?

I think people have become acutely aware that there are lots of people being manipulated through online disinformation and propaganda campaigns. But I also think just about everyone assumes that its others who are being manipulated and not themselves. By definition, you can't be manipulated if you know you are being manipulated.

This is similar to how revolutions happen. The government does something bad, many are frustrated by it, but they are still overall happy with the government, and only a few speak out.

Then the government does more bad stuff. More are frustrated, only a few speak out.

And on, and on, for decades. It seems like nothing will ever change. And one day "something happens" that makes all of that frustration come up, and the people are furious like nothing else, and you may even see riots and whatnot. And the people on the sidelines, who have no clue about how life was in that country wonder "why would people be so violent, and destroy things?! It doesn't make sense!" Yes, it does make sense. It's just not pretty.

And yes, it will happen to Google, too. I've tried to warn them and other tech companies many times in the past on HN, that they can't just screw over their users and piss them off, thinking only a few spoke out, so it must not be such a big deal the evil thing they've just done. Many more people are usually frustrated about that thing, but they usually keep that frustration inside because they would like to continue using Google.

So, yes. Google is definitely next. Just maybe not tomorrow, or next year. Maybe in a few years. My guess is it will be something around how they use their AI, especially now that they've become a war contractor. Maybe they'll sell their AI tech to US law enforcement to target American citizens in various ways. It's probably inevitable.

A Facebook exodus was never going to be linear. It will be drastic, and it will "surprise" people, even at the company, just as this surprises you now (although I wouldn't say that exodus will happen now, but this is definitely a one of the big final steps before that exodus, at the very least).

as the internet has matured, platform exodus has become harder, the 99% tech illiterate will not exodus a platform with years of family conversations and photo albums on there.

Old Media ist publishing negative articles about tech at any chance they have, due to them losing all their advertising dollars to online ads. It's just that this time the message finds some traction.

It's weird. Almost surreal.

We've known all this stuff for ages.

People say that a lot of what you read is just reporters not understanding what they're talking about, flitting from one subject to another with the herd, and perhaps that's true. But hell, anybody that's paid more than a modicum of attention to this issue should know that BigTech tracks people like lab rats. (Small tech too, they just don't have the user base)

I'm all for getting the word out. It's just an odd way that change is happening. It feels a lot like the internet has turned us all into one big mob, carrying our pitchforks and torches from one outrage to the next. That's probably a problem much bigger than what to do with Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Comcast

It's not that tracking that finally put the fox among the chickens, it's the use to which the data was put. I think to the extent that most people thought about it at all they assumed that they'd just get more invasive advertising. Maybe the read about a girl's parents finding out she was pregnant or something like that.

I agree, but I think you're stopping well short of the natural conclusion here that seems inevitable for anybody thinking more than 10 seconds about the issue.

Data is (mostly) free, ubiquitous, and permanent. When you capture data for any reason, it's logically impossible for you to be able to know or control what to what use that data will be put.

I keep seeing situations where extreme examples are used to make the case that data collection is good, healthy, and makes our world a better place. If you were kidnapped, wouldn't you want police to know where you were based on tracking associated with your cell phone? But for every one good example, the universe is literally the limit for the number of ways that same data capture can be used in bad and harmful ways.

Over my lifetime I've consumed a lot of fiction around how people interact with tech. There are a lot of good people who have instrumented up the general public in ways science fiction writers would have never dreamed of only a few decades ago. It seems to me that anybody who's watched The Matrix would think that all of this has gotta have more societal impact than more intrusive advertising.

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps even though they realized what was being captured, they never put together the deep implications, instead thinking it was just about better dancing iphone ads. I don't understand how that could be so, but people seem to have an incredible ability not to see things they don't want to see -- and they love something for nothing.

I'll be honest. I've read enough science fiction and enough warnings from people a lot smarter than myself over the last decade or so to have seen this coming but I didn't. My reaction to the warnings was to think about how much of my own and my family's data I was comfortable letting out and trying to limit our exposure.

What I did not think about much was how I, or society in general, could be affected by other peoples' data and I think other people are reacting similarly.

There's also the political angle. A lot of people are _very_ upset about Trump and the general state of politics in the US today and anything that touches on that gets amplified.

Yea "we've" known about it for ages. "We've" even known or suspected it well before the Snowden leaks ( 2013 ).

But the general ( non-thinking, sadly ) public really has no idea. And is ironically now catching on because the media's been cramming the whole Russian thing down their throats since the election.

On the subject of the media and general public, has anyone recently heard anything about the southern statue madness from last year, or of police shootings? No, because the general public follows whatever the media says. And forgets about whatever they said the minute they stop talking about it.

2 biggest issues in America: 1) current mainstream media 2) uneducated populace

>"developed anything in messenger even today"

I have developed several, your statement is misleading. Messenger user profile API gives,

first_name, last_name, profile_pic, locale, timezone (non precise), gender, is_payment_enabled, last_ad_referral,

Which IMO is much safer than using direct Facebook Graph API. My point being Messenger apps are in-fact better than apps which uses Facebook login when it comes to privacy i.e if you have to use Facebook platform.

One thing I am confused with all the data collection that is going on (and it obviously costing them $ and some reputational risks) is not really helping them to produce decent ad targeting. I am not even surprised by how bad FB ads are most of the time but even Amazon that has 20 years of my purchase history is amazingly bad: I already bought 4 Elixir programming books and looking to buy new books when they come out and yet if I search for Elixir it will keep showing me guitar strings WTF? In 20 years I've never bought a single music related item and I bought a ton of programming books and yet ...

You actually want Amazon to show you different search results?

If I'm starting a new hobby or wanted to buy a present for someone with different interests, I would be very annoyed if results were hidden from me because of a name clash with a product from my purchase history.

A good product search isn't personalized, and doesn't try to predict what I want. It just shows the results in a sensible manner, and lets me use categories and keywords (in addition to user reviews, price, availability, etcetera) to filter the results.

I want it to show me Elixir programming books in addition to strings not 50 string products and 0 books.

Then you may have found a bug in their search algorithm. On Amazon.de I get guitar string and books (and some sort of cologne), and when I click on 'Fremdsprachige Bücher' (for example), I get only books on programming in Elixir.

Surely that's fine?

The Elixir strings people are paying to be in those search results presumably - even when you don't buy they're getting paid. Amazon's infective is to profit, that doesn't always assign with your desire to buy.

Also, they might find that people who aren't searching for what they're shown keep looking and that it didn't reduce purchases. It's like the supermarkets moving products around to make sure you see other stuff - people don't leave the store, they keep looking and get exposed to more products in unfamiliar positions that make them notice more.

I mean, heck, you just talked about a couple of products and gave a product endorsement because they didn't show the results you expected; seems like the system is working.

> I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing.

This reminds me of the OkCupid scandal: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/12/11666116/70000-okcupid-users-d...

A researcher released a dump of 70K dating profiles and people were horrified. But this data was already accessible to anyone (just had to create a free profile) and you can be sure it was already used for analytics purpose.

> Is google next?

I think Facebook has nothing on Google. One trip to the MyActivity console on Google is enough to creep anyone out.

Scandals don't matter until they do.

The bad stuff is an open secret. But people choose to discount the bad so long as it appears outweighed by the good. Eventually the grace period runs out. Voila: Scandal.

Also, scandals are manufactured distraction. There's no shortage of things to be upset about. What percolates up is governed by the politics of attention.

I can't quickly refind the Ellsberg paper about the structure of presidential scandals. But this one is close enough. Obviously, they study presidential scandals, but the lessons apply to all scandals.

The Timing of Presidential Scandals: The Role of Economics, Divided Government and the Media http://file.scirp.org/pdf/OJPS_2016012915363533.pdf

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems http://a.co/dTmg3WC

The general public and mainstream media do not really care about big tech companies harvesting personal data and using it for marketing. Every now and then you'd see someone bringing it up in an article of Ars or Popular Science, but they never gained much traction.

The difference is now there is an example of it helping Trump. And if you can find any story that puts Trump in a bad light, it's almost guaranteed that it will hit the front page of HuffingtonPost/WashingtonPost/NYTimes/Salon/etc.

More than anything it's tied to an existing scandal with Trump-Russian collusion.

If the other scandals weren't there no one would care about this, you are right.

Nothing has changed at all as far as I can tell. It's such a media event right now simply because it was taken advantage of by the President to win the election. Anything that can potentially cast Trump in a bad light is bound to get a lot of media attention.

This is all ignoring the fact that President Obama used almost the same Facebook app analytics tactics to win his campaign (albeit less deceptively).

Regardless of why it is getting attention now, let's be optimistic that the dangers of the silicon valley surveillance apparatus are starting to seep into the public consciousness. I for one would welcome a changing attitude towards how we view and sell our private information to these companies.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

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

I wasn't trying start a political flamewar. I noted in parenthesis that Obama's use of this sort of analytics was less deceptive. I think that the link that CptJamesCook posted validates my original comment on this.

One big factor is that Facebook knew about the problem and lied about it for two years. It’s one thing to know that data is mined and another to learn that what should be a trusted third party is actively trying to keep you from learning about abuse.

Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 = Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw my vote away on Gary Johnson, but looking at the media landscape, there truly is a backlash against conservatives going on in social media, and this is just part of that. Donald Trump won because fake news... no wait, it was Russia and their abysmal social media spending... no wait, its because he gamed facebook! They want to put more pressure on facebook to "do something about this" now that the coin has flipped. I have a feeling though this is going to get out of hand and drag facebook into the gutter.

I suppose Trump hatred plays a role. But superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal, it's the kind of thing that could lead to another extinction level event.

Any of the mechanisms leveraged in this propaganda campaign should receive extra scrutiny.

"superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal"

Which has been going on since... forever? (at least, since elections and superpowers have been a thing, anyway)

It's only a big deal when it's not us or our allies doing it.

What Obama did was very, very different.

The fact that you don't know this (or ignored it) tells a lot about how biased you are.

And yes, there should be backlash against conservatives. They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois

If you're talking about Arthur Jones, you're being very misleading. He won the Republican primary, but it was unopposed, in a heavily democratic district, and he was already denounced by Illinois Republicans.

If they were serious about denouncing him, why not put up an opposing candidate?

I don't know, but I imagine nobody else wanted to spend money, time, or risk their reputation on an election they have almost no chance to win.

> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

I know nothing about American politics or what's going on in Illinois. But that you jump straight on calling someone you disagree with a "Nazi", while also saying how different what Obama did with no explanation and a lot of insults, does not give me much confidence in what you are saying here.

Just letting you know in case you were trying to convince anyone of your viewpoint.

No, a literal former leader of the American Nazi Party party ran in an uncontested GOP primary and so will be a candidate in an upcoming election (he will lose, any GOP candidate would lose that particular election). No one is being called a Nazi for the wrong reasons.

I guess the local party would have been smart to put someone else on the ballot, just for the look of things. Really that's the problem with the comment, characterizing the failure of the party to stand up someone respectable as support for the Nazi.

Here is the first sentence of his wikipedia page.

"Arthur Joseph Jones (born January 1, 1948) is an American neo-Nazi, white nationalist, perennial candidate and Holocaust denier."

What would you call this person in order to be polite?

He actually is a Nazi. That is not hyperbole. His name is Arthur Jones.

He just won his party's primary, which means he has been elected to be on the ballot as a member of his party. Not anyone can run as, e.g., a member of the Republican Party. You need to be nominated first, and you do that by winning a primary. The position is in US Congress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/us/politics/arthur-jones-...

Didn't call anyone a Nazi, except the Nazi, who just won a Republican primary.

Try again.

Sorry for that - you can't believe my surprise that you really do have an actual Nazi running. That's honestly unbelievable. I hope you can understand why I assumed you were being hyperbolic.

So I'm uninformed on the subject -- what are the differences between what Obama and Trump campaigns did with Facebook?

I'll be honest: There's plenty of information out there that will help you make that comparison. But I don't think it's super-useful unless your goal is to participate in these pointless "but Obama/Hillary did it" debates.

It's happening now and it happened during the Trump campaign (and others -- one massive difference is that Cambridge Analytica used this data for elections around the world). And you should be questioning whether that sort of exploitation of personal data is something that's a good or bad force in the world, whether it scares you or whether you're okay with it.

It's bad, but it should be bad uniformly, not just when the president is disliked by the technocrats. Same with the Russian meddling. Both sides of the aisle are in the Russian pockets, but only Trumps' admin gets the focus. If we are going to clean house, we need to clean the whole house.

> Both sides of the aisle are in the Russian pockets, but only Trumps' admin gets the focus.

This is 100% bullshit. Trump's apparent relationship with Russia goes lightyears beyond whatever made-up conservative fever-dream about Obama or Clinton is floating around out there.

It cannot be complete bs if the Clintons are selling uranium to Russians.

They aren't.

Highly questionable money transfers from the Russians to the Clinton Foundation, but I'm sure there's no foul play :)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-uranium-ru...

"The Hill also reported receiving documents and eyewitness testimony “indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow,” although no specifics about who those Russian nuclear officials were or how the money was allegedly routed to the Clinton Foundation were given. In any case, none of these revelations prove that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participated in a quid pro quo agreement to accept payment for approval of the Uranium One deal."

That page has a giant red FALSE on it and a point-by-point breakdown of why the story is bullshit.

No, the Clintons did not sell Uranium to Russia.

Is it? I'm sure I will get chided for bias quoting a hill article by Ben Shapiro, but as a Libertarian you really need to read both sides perspective to get the true story here. It highlights how the tactic was almost EXACTLY the same: Access facebooks data to build a database of possible supporters and target political messages to them. Obama's operation was only slightly less deceptive about it than CA and their scummy personality quiz chain mail.

My point is not the tactic though, my point is that the ONLY reason this has suddenly gone critical is because Trump is associated with it. It was ok then, its suddenly not now.

http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-fo...

The key takeaway:

---

" “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “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.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. 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.”

Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm. "

---

Consciously or otherwise ...

Another HN user linked to the opposing opinion:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

I agree with this article also, Obama's team was slightly more above board with the original source of the data. After that it looks pretty similar. Remember that they chided Romney for NOT doing this and being behind the curve.

A question I'm asking myself: Would this have still been a scandal if CA was less scummy in their modus operandi?

Obama's campaign didn't do what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing.

It didn't do what _Cambridge Analytica_ is accused of doing, but it did do what a lot of people are freaked out Facebook can do; namely provide third parties with detailed user information.

Using this information in 2012 was lauded as a great idea that helped drive Obama to success. _Cambridge Analytica_ did it in a more slezy way that violated Facebook's Terms of Use-- they lied to Facebook in terms of what the data was used for and the fact they were harvesting it to form a database.

Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here, because now the idea of using your "likes" to target ads is not applauded, its frowned upon. And yes, Obama also did the whole whole "friends who didn't explicitly use the app" thing (which has since been disabled from Facebook's APIs, I think since v2.0 in 4/30/2014):

> The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.[1]

[1]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

> Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here,

They failed to disclose the issue (which they knew about for quite some time) and in fact continued to profit form the relationship with CA. I don't seen a reasonable expectation that they should be considered a victim.

I actually agree with you, this could be handled better by them. I'm personally a little confused by the details and timings though; where did you read about them profiting after they knew about the issue?

I'm working under the impression that they were aware of the specific "breach" some months ago, and only terminated their dealings with CA once the matter became public (so cutting off the revenue stream was done CA as a reaction to bad PR, not because of any moral rightness or a reaction to any policy or contract breach).

Oh, I was under the impression that business relation was with some university researcher and finished a while ago. The researcher didn't delete the data, and instead brought it to CA (Facebook didn't deal with CA directly). Facebook found out some time ago but did nothing more than tell them to delete it and trust they would, without really informing anyone or pushing further.

I think it's more that all of these things are gaining traction and people are trying to relate it to Trump.

There's been a growing discussion about data collection and shady advertising practices for a long time. It's not about Trump. And this isn't the first time I've seen distrust raised towards Facebook or Google about this stuff.

The Russian propaganda was mostly divisive messages surrounding things like race / guns. People keep trying to make it about Trump but investigators have been saying that it's more broad the whole time. Regardless of him it's still something we need to investigate.

Anything that seems scandalous or sketchy will probably be tied to Trump by people who don't like him if possible. But the same behavior has been going on for longer than Trump (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues.

PS: Get ready to see everything being related back to Trump. All actions of government, law, etc. The positive and the negative. Because that's how this always works. The current administration gets more credit for change than they deserve.

> (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues.

Accusations are one thing. We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling.

In addition, I'd argue that if Trump wasn't such an incompetent, bumbling, authoritarian moron, the backlash absolutely wouldn't have been as bad.

But the fact of the matter is that this is absolutely something new. Unless you're trying to suggest that both Obama and Clinton engaged companies who had a history of generating fake news, emotionally charged propaganda, and outright honeypotting political opponents with hookers and blackmail.

That's what makes this different. I'm absolutely flabberghasted that this point isn't being driven harder, instead defaulting to "well both sides...".

It's false equivalency, pure and simple.

I don't think you got what I was saying.

All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it.

And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right now, people will point the finger at him like he's to blame for it all. That's why I mentioned Obama (because people did the same to him).

It looks, to me, like Trump sought help from shady people in multiple cases. And that's worth noting but it's irrelevant to the fact that those people were doing shady things in the first place.

> We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling.

No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer.

We know that the Trump campaign hired them, but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew. They had many other customers before Trump.

PS: I'm not a Republican and am not supporting Donald Trump. But trying to spin this as real evidence is stooping to their level of misinformation. We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product. But yes we absolutely need to investigate both of those possibilities.

> And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society.

Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing. He was not. Nor was Clinton. So the fact of the matter is that it may have come up, but there's been literally no evidence to suggest it's happened in the past by any of the winning Democratic campaigns.

That's the false equivalence I'm talking about. You're shifting blame away from the Republican party, the Trump campaign, and placing it solely on Facebook and unscrupulous data collection parties, when the issue should mostly be on the fact that a political campaign not only engaged said parties but won using them.

> No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer.

And the words/documents provided by the CA whistleblower. That's immensely important.

> but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew.

Steve Bannon knew. Unless you're now claiming that he, as VP of CA, didn't know what his own company was doing.

> We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product.

That's because you're removing broader context that shows that we should probably err on the side of "they probably knew about all this" rather than "there's no way they could have known".

The fact is, CA was testing phrases used by the Trump campaign literally years before they approached Trump. The Mercers pumped money into the Trump campaign at a critical time (June 2016), and forced all campaign processes to go through CA. This is all documented. In August of that year, Bannon left CA (which was already running Trump's campaign) and joined the Trump campaign directly.

You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

EDIT: The latter half of this article goes in depth on how the Mercer's money shifted from Ted Cruz to Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer...

> Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing.

No. I didn't say anything like that. I literally said "people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff" and my point was to the parent post who said "Its purely Trump hatred driving this".

You missed the point because you don't like that I'm not blaming this entirely on Trump.

I want an investigation into all of this. And other sketchy behavior surrounding the Trump campaign.

But I was stating that I don't think the parent post was correct in saying that this is all about Trump.

> You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

You're trying to pretend like there's more certainty than there actually is and that this is somehow all Trump's fault.

I think that's dangerous because the Trump team keeps claiming that there's a witch hunt going on so when all new scandals are pinned to him it actually helps them as far as optics go. We need to investigate this all and get to the bottom of it and I hope Trump is exposed for the scam artist that he is in the process.

> I literally said "people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff" and my point was to the parent post who said "Its purely Trump hatred driving this".

Right, but that's still comparing the current amount of information we have on what the Trump campaign and CA did to mere baseless accusations. The comparison is implicit.

> because you don't like that I'm not blaming this entirely on Trump.

No, I don't like the fact that you're trying to cast this as mere accusation like the many false accusations against other prior campaigns.

> But I was stating that I don't think the parent post was correct in saying that this is all about Trump.

And I agree with that bit. Which is why I didn't engage it. Instead, I engaged the implicit false equivalence that the parent post was outright stating and that you were merely suggesting.

> You're trying to pretend like there's more certainty than there actually is

And yet you haven't refuted any of my statements, sources, or facts.

> and that this is somehow all Trump's fault.

Just like how it's the fault of the person composing and releasing doxxing info, not the fault of the person the dox is about for putting it online.

So if it isn't Trump's fault, whose is it? Bannon's? CA? The Mercer's?

> the Trump team keeps claiming that there's a witch hunt going on so when all new scandals are pinned to him it actually helps them as far as optics go

Are you seriously suggesting that we not use new information as it comes out to paint a larger picture, simply because of the optics on the part of Trump?

> We need to investigate this all and get to the bottom of it

We are. The media is. And this is what is coming out. What, are we not supposed to connect the very obvious and extremely public dots? Are we just supposed to pretend that the Paradise Papers don't exist and don't show money being moved around from sanctioned, Kremlin-owned finances, through shell companies residing in tax havens, and finally on to various American/European companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

We have different approaches but we're on the same side in case you haven't picked up on that.

I agree with you on most of these points but until the proper investigations proceed not much will happen. And this administration will attempt to block or obstruct any investigations that they think are part of a "witch hunt" so putting too much emphasis on Trump himself seems risky in the meantime. Let the investigators put those dots together.

Also, Trump is just the tip of the iceberg in this story of corruption. Companies like CA and groups like Internet Research Agency need to share this blame because Trump didn't create them. He just benefited from them (because he has no morals).

PS: If you haven't contacted your representatives (or candidates) to ask them to support ongoing investigations into these particular issues (like the Special Counsel one). Do it please. Especially if you have a representative up for reelection.

> We have different approaches but we're on the same side in case you haven't picked up on that.

I did. I'm just more concerned with giving an accurate picture of what happened than trying to pass off some kind of false equivalency.

> but until the proper investigations proceed not much will happen. And this administration will attempt to block or obstruct any investigations that they think are part of a "witch hunt" so putting too much emphasis on Trump himself seems risky in the meantime. Let the investigators put those dots together.

On the contrary, its necessary that we connect these dots. IMO, it's an insurance policy against the eventuality that Trump decides to fire Mueller or stall/block the FBI investigation. We the people need to democratize this information and disseminate it whenever possible.

This is not normal. This is not business as usual. This is a tale of a corrupt political campaign using every dirty trick in the book, the likes of which we've never seen before, and winning because of it. Every party involved deserves to be punished, but the fact of the matter is that while we can't do much to stop people from putting together intel via publicly available data sets, we sure as heck can do something about corrupt politicians using said data sets.

In much the same way, we punish the doxxer for using the dox, not the target for putting said information online in the first place, or the social networks for giving them the outlets to publish said information. Obviously Facebook deserves some blame, especially if they were somehow complicit in this (in as far as investment money/advice from Russian sanctioned industries/individuals).

> IMO, it's an insurance policy against the eventuality that Trump decides to fire Mueller or stall/block the FBI investigation.

We really do need to make sure that doesn't happen and make sure they don't grab any more power while they have the upper hand.

As far as getting people to see realize this stuff... You can't convince a Trump supporter of the sheer level of corruption as long as they think there's a witch hunt trying to make this stuff up.

First the evidence has to be established and legitimized without being attached to Trump at all or the premise of the evidence is compromised in their mind. Does that make sense?

Suppose a report came out that shows how drinking soda is actually good for you. But it was published by the sugar industry. Even if they had some good points you'd probably be skeptical. That's how these people will feel as long as the narrative of this being a witch hunt is perpetuated.

> This is not normal. This is not business as usual. This is a tale of a corrupt political campaign using every dirty trick in the book

I agree.

> Obviously Facebook deserves some blame, especially if they were somehow complicit in this

I think we need to look into them for their data practices in general. Way beyond this case.

> First the evidence has to be established and legitimized without being attached to Trump at all

It already has been. The bread crumbs have been laid out for years now, and all it takes is looking back at all the legitimate outlets that were at the time slightly mystified by the occurrences.

We have outlets like Tech Crunch, The New York Times, Wall St. Journal, etc. all reporting on these things as they happened (as early as in 2009), and we are now able to piece them together thanks in part to the Paradise Papers.

> I think we need to look into them for their data practices in general. Way beyond this case.

Absolutely agreed.

What Obama did is not nearly the same as what Trump did [1].

Also, it's important to keep in mind that this entire argument about Obama is one diversion perpetuated by Cambridge Analytica. They brought up this idea and it has been bouncing around the more surreptitious parts of the internet as a tactic to avoid criticism. I wonder why a place like CA would attempt to change the conversation?

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

They leave out a critical fact, which you can find buried in The Hill article they deride:

Consciously or otherwise...

It was the same exact tactic, maybe only slightly less deceptive than CA's methods.

Please don't spread lies. What the Obama campaign was doing in 2012 was nothing compared to what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump.

What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did?

>How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did?

The other company didn't spread fake news, conduct honeypot blackmailing schemes, and wasn't funded by one of America's largest geopolitical foes.

> What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did?

The Obama campaign engagement was overt, users knew they were connecting to a political campaign and whose, and the entity with API access didn't transfer the data for radically different uses than the overt ones to a third party.

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

Director of the Obama campaign seems to feel they did very similar things, with the tacit support of Facebook (at least after the fact)

> Its purely Trump hatred driving this.

I would agree that the election of someone so woefully unfit to serve has scared the shit out of a lot of people. And so many people are putting a lot of thought and energy into trying to pick apart how things could've gone so wrong. Thus, we're having discussions like these.

We tend to question things more after they go wrong. Whether or not you liked his policies, Obama was a fairly straightforward politician who at least knew how to operate the office of the Presidency and wasn't nested in an extensive web of shadiness and criminality.

Obama didn't use an entire fake news infrastructure coupled with hackers leaking the opposition's emails... Your equivalency is misguided or misleading, you can't compare Obama 2012 to Trump 2016. You present the topics as separate when they are all linked. The damage comes from data + fake news + Russian APT.

This. There's a lot of false equivalence going on in this thread.

I'm not sure how authoritative it is but this tweet [1] claims otherwise.

[1] https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

What changed is awareness. I would like them to provide a resource which allows users to know which microsegments of facebook audience network they are showing up in, without spending any money.

> I don't get what changed?

Momentum. Sometimes people won't do stuff unless they know everyone else is too. If you quit Facebook and your friends still use it, you're missing out. But if all your friends delete it as part of the #deletefacebook trend, it'll be easier for you to do the same thing.

> I don't get what changed?

He made his billions.

I know you mean in a more general sense, but I can't let go of the hypocrisy of this. He sold out millions of users to Facebook, basically the most anti-privacy thing you could possibly do other then just dumping all that information out in the open, becomes incredibly wealthy and now he gives a small amount of that to Signal and is all like #deletefacbook and it's fine? Give me a break.

>Regulations should have sprouted in Obama years

If people voluntarily want to give away their data, who are we to stop them from doing it?.

I don't use facebook, because I value my privacy more than I value "being connected" or whatever facebook is using to convince people these days, but if my neighbor is happy giving away is data, that's fine, it's his data.

People didn't want to believe that FB and Google (and the rest) tracking and collecting all that data would really cause harm. Denial (because something is really useful and/or a large part of communication with all your friends+family runs through it) is a strong force.

What changed is that this breach made it harder for people to pretend all that tracking and data harvesting "will probably turn out fine".

I feel this is just an opportunity for the conventional media to bring down social media, because the latter has certainly hurt the former's powers to control narratives and agenda, affecting and this affecting the ad revenues. (any surprise why $TWTR and $SNAP took a hit along with $FB?)

Facebook has eaten into Mainstream Media ad revenues, and literally is controlling how news is published, because its platform is so powerful.

When Cambridge Analytica stories first broke out, even I had the same reaction. I hope people stop overreacting as if this never happened earlier.

So I want to cut off an argument at the pass here. Specifically: "Everyone knows Facebook already gathers all of your data."

We, as people here both on HN and people in the tech world take for granted the fact that we both know and understand how our systems work (mostly). We know that companies package and sell our data, that if something is 'free' the real subscription fee is what they collect on us during each use. But there is a significant population that simply doesn't know, think it's too much of a 'conspiracy theory' or don't care.

My parents, as much as I love them, are absolutely hair-tearingly bad at anything related to computers. They've had issues with scammers and Microsoft phoning them up so that they can upgrade their computer's ram. When I tell them about what kind of things Facebook does, they don't understand. They don't get why their data is so valuable ('well so what they get my phone number not like it affects me') and a lot of the time they have trouble understanding what they actually do.

Breaking stories like this is not necessarily surprising no, not to us. But it raises awareness and makes people wonder what companies actually are doing with their data. I doubt it'll result in the bubble that is Facebook finally popping but opportunities like this are always great times to pull aside your family and let them know why things like this matter. And in this current environment people are hyper-aware of things like this possibly more than ever before.

So I don't think the argument should be based around normalizing this sort of behavior by Facebook and other companies but rather revealing it to those that might not be aware.

To add onto this, I believe a large amount of consumers of these products assumed they were only accessing their own data. This story is highlighting how these companies further connect dots between you _and_ all your connections. This is where I feel people didn't recognize the larger scale of all of this, especially with progmatic programming for ads. Any time you try to outline how ad networks work w/r/t to "FB is recording us" you're met with "yeah buts". I think a lot of people didn't want to believe this was possible, but now have no choice but to accept it is very much happening.

It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's getting behind the #deletefacebook movement.

He started a company, and made a delicious exit. Him becoming a privacy advocate maybe was his secondary goal yhat now became primary. Or maybe with his founder he had disagrements but he sold anyway because what else could he do if everyone but you wants that exit?

He owned 20% of Whatsapp, so its possible he didn't want to sell to FB. Only 50.1% of the shareholders presumably had to want to sell to overrule the others.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton

I think if he was against the sale he would have said that.

Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have believed in it strongly.

That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge, because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M?

Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the acquisition happened. Conversations took place, but I'm not going to quote anyone.

So you’re saying they believed in privacy strongly but believed in getting rich more. Got it.

Nothing wrong with that. I’d do the same.

He's saying there was social pressure both external and internal, but yeah - of the type you're talking about.

Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into. If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100% ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your shareholders.

Yes, within the institutional role, eg as CEO of a company, a person is obliged to make certain decisions. Eg a CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company, otherwise the shareholders will fire him.

So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.

> So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.

This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism. Any political or economical system that has institutionalized roles will have the same conflicts between duty and personal principles.

And history shows us, in fact, that capitalism has much fewer of such conflicts than any alternative.

> CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company

This is not even close to true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...

Lot's of engineers work their asses off for far less than $100M.

What's the point of working hard if you aren't even going to be paid $100 million?

As Scott McNealy has said; once you have investors, your company is for sale.

So not only would you have to deprive that engineer but you would also have to explain to Sequoia why you weren’t going to give them a gargantuan return on their investment.

Supposing Signal had a larger userbase, and got offered a similar deal. Well, it basically did happen; Moxie's previous company Whipser Systems got bought by Twitter, Moxie left after a couple of years, losing his options in the process. I doubt it would happen again.

Craigslist did it.

It is very possible to turn down money and avoid becoming a corporate animal.

Does it happen? Yes.

Does it happen very frequently? No.

Craigslist was self-bootstrapped, no?

No outside funding.

I get that it's hard to pass up on the money. Once you take it though it's hard to not look hypocritical. Especially since he gave them a large amount of the data that was abused.

I wrote a draft of an essay: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-essa... I hasn't even mentioned Urchin/Google Analytics and Mozilla yet.

> I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues.

You would refuse $16 billions from Facebook?

What if he were given the option today of selling WhatsApp to Facebook (all other things remaining equal)? Do you think he would have refused?

One thing one might speculate about is that there was a "change it from the inside" motivation. For example, WhatsApp did add Signal's encryption protocol, which I think has been fantastic. Having lots of money available as a fallback to now sponsor alternatives is a nice addition to that.

But of course, all of this is speculation - I can't look inside the man's head.

While I agree with you, he's exponentially more powerful now to champion privacy now beyond WhatsApp with the billions he got from that sale.

The big problem with the whole post-privacy thing is in my opinion, that it is asymetrical.

I mean, if everybody (could) know everything about everybody else, ok, strange, but fine. But the big powerful players know much more about the private lives of the average citiciens(or also politican), than the Gestapo and KGB could ever dream of, but we know not so much about them. This is very dangerous.

As it gives the people with all that (potential dark) information much power. Especialy when there are so many ridiculous laws around, disconnected from reality, like that Marihuana is still mostly illegal. And while for most it would not matter, but someone working in health sector for example, can get in serious trouble(at least in germany), if he would found guilty of smoking sometimes. This makes people vulnerable to blackmailing etc.

I can only hope, that there are also enough righteous people, like Snowden, involved, to blow the whistle, when things get overhand. But I believe there is something fundamentaly wrong, with the current direction.

Yes, but that is all of modern tech, and people give them their data willingly for the convenience. No one is stopping that any time soon.

All of this Facebook hubub and broad public outcry is really all owed to the election of Trump. If Trump handnt leveraged CA, we’d still all be happy and fat on out individual bliss boxes – patting ourselves on the back – because our side [a la Obama] was smart enough to use this technology to our advantage.

Now when the enemy has (and use) the same technology, we’re forced to cry foul. Demand oversight. Demand regulation.

The greater public is OK with this technology. They’re Ok with sweeping data collection (Snowden Files). They’re OK with mining personal data (Facebook, Google, etc). Thy’re OK with 1984, so long as it’s their sides version of 1984.

It takes a Trump for your side to realize how shitty things got while you were enamored with charisma on your bliss box.

Edit: typing on my phone. Fixing grammar.

I think the best thing that has come out of the election of Donald Trump is that many people are now excited about the idea of constitutionally limiting the power of the executive branch. That idea seemed to have been forgotten for the past few administrations. Even when I agreed with Obama or Bush, I was very disappointed when they would use innovative methods to single-handedly override the will of congress or the judiciary.

I wasn’t. If Congress is being obstructionist and petty, as they undoubtedly were during the Obama years, the executive branch still needs to do its job, which is to lead the country forward.

That said, I agree with the spirit of your post, which is that every now and then we should scale that power back.

The courts need to reign in the use of Executive Orders.

Not really. Remember that whole, "Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes" thing.. Yet instead of actually doing this, they continue to essentially outsource their power, and responsibility to the administrative state. I mean DT almost blatantly came out and said, well these new tariffs aren't exactly because of national security..

Don't kid yourself, both parties are essentially the same, who feeds them just look different. On top of that, Congress continues to cede more powers to the administrative state.. It becomes all about control really..

The primary reason no one should have been worried when DT got elected is that for a great many years, the system was designed that no matter who is driving the ship, they won't sink it because they don't have that power (same goes for BO & GWB). But for years we've been pushing for more centralized authority with power resting at the figurehead, that really ramped up after '01, and later BO put it on steroids.

As private institutions fall away for newer generations, the govt becomes "something we all do together", and the primary solution for having someone else take care of societal problems for us, after all, it's what we pay taxes for...

Congress keeps outsourcing it's responsibilities to the president, no matter what letter, R or D is behind the name on the office door. Tariffs, wars, weaponized govt agencies, privacy rights, drone strikes, surveillance, and on and on...

This isn't a problem of the system, it's merely a symptom of the current state of our society and I personally don't think whether it's tariffs or privacy, little will change in a direction that we would like. The people want easy solutions, they want someone to take care of problems for them. That's exactly what we are getting.

What's ironic is that Trump didn't use CA to win the election. CA was used a bit in the primaries but after that the campaign only solicited a bid as a hedge in case the RNC didn't share its data. CA wasn't used for the general election.

On the other hand, the Obama campaign used sneaky Terms and Conditions to suck up friend lists and create a national social graph for the sole purpose of winning the General Election.

Where did you get that information? Channel4 is reporting that Mercer donated to the Trump campaign on the condition that he would take on Steve Bannon and hire CA. Steven Bannon joined the Trump campaign in August 2016, after Trump won the primaries in May.

I have no idea who could conceivably be taking issue with your concise and correct post (given the apparent downvotes). The dates don't lie. What was Felix Sater's role at that point, too?

They did hire CA in order to get Mercer's support and donations - they just didn't actually use their data once Trump had access to the more accurate (and more old-fashioned) central RNC database, and apparently never used the psychographic data at the heart of the controversy at all. See e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o...

Like, I know the news media have spun the fact that one of Trump's big, important donors made them hire CA as proof they relied on CA to win the election, but really it should be the opposite - it should call into question whether their hiring was justified by what they offered the campaign.

According to CBS, the trump campaign didn't use the CA data ( they may have in the Primaries):

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o...

In late September 2016, Cambridge and other data vendors were submitting bids to the Trump campaign. Then-candidate Trump's campaign used Cambridge Analytica during the primaries and in the summer because it was never certain the Republican National Committee would be a willing, cooperative partner. Cambridge Analytica instead was a hedge against the RNC, in case it wouldn't share its data.

The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump's digital guru on the 2016 campaign, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica's, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump's campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC.

> the trump campaign didn't use the CA data

That might be technically correct, but CA was unquestionably working with SuperPACs[1] behind the scenes to get Trump elected in November. CA was particularly proud of it's crooked Hillary campaign ("the OO of crooked was a pair of handcuffs").

1. According to the Cambridge Analytica CEO in the Channel 4 undercover documentary https://youtu.be/cy-9iciNF1A?t=6m21s

I agree that Super PAC's need to be eliminated. One funded by George Soros was particularly effective in the anti Ray Moore campaign in Alabama:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/how-democrats-use-...

Roy Moore had lots of issues. Let’s not pretend he was taken down by Soros.

> I agree that Super PAC's need to be eliminated.

Did you mean to reply some other comment? I never volunteered my opinion on SuperPACs one way or the other (for you to agree with). In that light your comment is an off-topic non-sequitur.

Among other things, CA and Bannon tested out slogans such as "deep state" "drain the swamp" on the Facebook accounts in 2014 to see what would be most effective in motivating voters for Clinton opponents and discouraging Clinton voter from going to the polls. This shows that one should not be limiting a query to when they started working for Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-oversaw-cambr...

Obviously CA was not infallible, they could only get Ted Cruz to second against Trump among GOP candidates in that initial mad scrum, Cruz thought he could win with only evangelical voters in the primaries based on what they looked at with previous GOP primaries and was blindsided by Trump coming at the primaries from a different angle.

The data collection isn't the concern. The criminal concern is federal election finance laws potentially being broken, as well as foreigners working for the campaign. There are very real and very serious potential issues here that are being brought up.

While the criticism directed at social media is certainly warranted. I feel compelled to take exception with your reliance on false equivalence. It's kinda qualitatively different when you're actively engaging in illegal activity while working hand in glove with a clandestine foreign intelligence service to undermine your own countries democratic elections on behalf of an adversarial foreign nation state. If you can't see the difference, then keep at it. I assure you it's there. But if you already know that then you go ahead and keep explaining to folks how apples and oranges are the same things because they're both round fruit.

> undermine your own countries democratic elections on behalf of an adversarial foreign nation state

Citation needed.

Not really, it's common knowledge. There are a pile of dead Russians ex-IC people all over Europe, the existing Mueller indictments, the Crowdstrike DNC Russian APT attributions, all of our own lying eyes...

Funny, I must have missed the Mueller indictments relating to collusion or coordination of any kind (it's coming any day now, though, right?). I've seen a number of process charges. I've seen a handful of Russians charged with, essentially, social media ads and trolling and setting up a Michael Moore rally in NYC. And, of course, Manafort, who is dirty AF (right up there with the Podestas, the Clintons and the rest), but nothing relating to the Trump campaign. And if dead men do tell tales, as you seem to imply, I would think Seth Rich would have quite a story indeed.

> And, of course, Manafort, who is dirty AF (right up there with the Podestas, the Clintons and the rest), but nothing relating to the Trump campaign.

Manafort served as Trump's Campaign manager from June 2016 to August 2016, but I guess that has nothing to do with Trump's Campaign.

Created an account to attempt to derail this conversation into being about Seth Rich and Hillary Clinton. lol.

But your opponent is correct. Manafort indictment is about laundering money he made in Ukraine before 2014. It really has nothing to do with him being a campaign manager in 2016. Moreover, I bet this activities as a campaign manager were examined under microscope, and nothing shady was found, otherwise he would be indicted.

Lets stay rational and stick to facts.

> Lets stay rational and stick to facts.

Sure, let's do that:

1) George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

2) Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

3) Paul Manafort was indicted on conspiracy, money laundering, false statements, and failure to disclose foreign assets, not just money laundering.

4) Rick Gates similar to Manafort, but has taken a plea deal.

5) 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian companies indicted on conspiracy charges and identity theft.

6) Richard Pinedo pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and is cooperating.

7) Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his connections to Rick Gates.

And let's remember they are not 13 random Russians, either.

Perjury != collusion or treason.

Both of those are specific legal definitions. Could you please elaborate on what your point is?

We can only speculate, but if you lie to the FBI, I would assume it's very likely that you have something to hide. Whether those plea deals led further down the rabbit hole to people who were guilty of further crimes we don't know. Maybe a few of them were on that list. Maybe some will get revealed later. I'm hopeful we will uncover the truth in time.

>I bet...

>stick to facts

okay.

FACT: You bet Manafort isn't a traitor.

Bob Mueller would appear to have a different opinion.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1038391/download

Guess who my money is on.

The one without something to prove?

Manafort was just a covfefe boy.

>"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

-Jean Paul-Sartre

You created an account just to tell me that?

@dang, sir, I think you have a problem. Don't let HN be used as a platform to spread disinformation. Emerdata is starting up as speak.

I didn't believe it at first. There's no running from this war.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download

what a classic deflection by bringing up Obama and some how trying to connect him to this travesty.

Um... you can’t say “whataboutism” when you are comparing two directly hypocritical reactions to the same scenario.

CA sold data to Trump, Rubio, and others - pitchforks!

FB gives data to Obama and Clinton, marketing awards and praise.

CA sold stolen data and bragged about blackmailing politicians.

Gonna need a citation of Obama being even remotely involved in something like that.

Classic deflection.

Look at Wikileaks and Assange's tweets today. The screenshots are more concrete evidence ( fake or not ) than I've seen related to this CA thing.

If the most concrete evidence you've seen for either accusation is screenshots then you should check out the Channel 4 videos.

Exactly my point

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai...

Story contains tweets from his campaign manager.

The dailymail, really?

Are you saying the tweets in the article are not genuine or the article is untrue? It would probably be better if you engaged with the content of the story rather than virtue signal.

If a dailymail story about facebook giving data they own to obama is the best you can do, you've only proven my point.

Did you even read the story? It contains screenshots of tweets from the Carol Davidsen, Media Director at Obama for America. Do those screenshots magically become true when reproduced on a different website? The fact that you can only complain about the website I linked to, rather than the substance of the story, only proves my point.

But here, have a link from somewhere else:

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/03/19/why-are...

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

CA sold stolen data. CA paid out bribes to win elections.

Why are you bringing up facebook giving away data that they own?

Facebook gave preferential access to data, breaching their own ToS, to a political party they supported.

With all due respect, I think you are missing the point altogether. Tools are created for most part with good intentions. What you do with those tools is what separates good from bad. Obama used the same tools to inspire a generation. Deeper penetration of technology is inevitable and there will continue to be bad actors who will exploit those tools to their benefit. Unfortunately, the negative narrative won over inpiration this time. Making tools the scapegoat is not the solution. We need to be more connected as a society than ever before. We have a bigger fish to fry, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity and without being connected it will be impossible to work together.

But he didn’t use the same tools. Obama had people via an app that was a campaign app, so people understood what they were installing. CA took a psychological test admin’d over mechanical turk, expanded it to people beyond those they paid, and ran with that. No one knew it had a political purpose.

Are you sure about that? People were not happy with Wikileaks revelations and Obama was forced to end or strip down some NSA programs.

Also, your whole argument says “People are not happy with what’s going on only because they are facing the consequences of it”.

Duh?

It was never easy to explain why privacy matters, the argument that if you are not doing anything bad then you don’t have anything to hide was good enough for many.

Now, things are different. We have demonstrable implications of the privacy violations.

I think it’s not a Trump thing, if Hillary was the smarter one to use computational propaganda we would probably still have an expose considering that the population of Democrats and Republicans are roughly the same and all have been done by a state funded British TV anyway.

I don’t think that you’re claiming victimhood rightfully. The privacy discussions didn’t start with Trump.

The outleash regarding collecting personal data for election fiddling started with Trump and Brexit.

Obama's campaign team bragged openly about doing the same thing, nobody cared.

For example: "mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us... (2012)

>The outleash regarding collecting personal data for election fiddling started with Trump and Brexit

Definitely false, Apple even built business model around it and actively promoting it's privacy as a selling point over Android.

But surely Trump amplified it because, unlike Obama, he is very divisive.

Anyway, if you happen to have a time machine I will happily jump in with you and go back in time and warn against the dangers of data hoarding and privacy violations but I doubt that it will be effective because it's Obama and his campaign wasn't divisive so we will end up with the argument that if you didn't do anything wrong there's nothing to hide.

We wouldn't be able to demonstrate that with privacy violations you can divide a continent(Brexit) or make Trump a president.

Besides, I'm really not happy to approach the problem from the "What about Obama" angle. Is "what about" even a useful argument? What's to be achieved if you are right that Obama indeed did the exact same thing? Should we just go ahead and fill out the missing information on our Facebook profiles because Obama did it too?

To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.

I reacted back in 2012 to the fact that Obama's campaign bragged openly about doing same thing. Back then the problem statement was a bit newer to me, I guess I was a bit more sensitive to back then.

The few articles back then praised them about this.

Disclosure: I don't really mind that Trump became president or that UK decided to leave EU - wouldn't have cared if the outcome was the opposite either. It's just different approaches of running countries with different pros and cons.

Look, using data to target audience is nothing new. That's the promise of... everyone in marketing? Does Nielsen ring any bells?

"Obama and Trump both used user data" is equal to "Reddit and Hacker News are the same, both use upvotes".

The way that data is used is what all matters. The risk is to hoard and distribute data, the disaster is to use that data to manipulate the population to do something horrible(I'm not necessarily saying that Trump is horrible but there are many people who see it that way).

And...

>To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.

You'll need to prove that one because we had multiple products and a giant corporation(Apple) targeting privacy cautious audience before all this happened.

Exactly. The sad thing is that Indians are still oblivious or in denial about such tactics being used by our PM.

I agree somehow with you, but Obama didn't push it that far though (probably because that wasn't possible yet at the time).

This is typically what I cannot stand anymore in American politics, it has become so much "We" against "them" that each side gets the pitchfork out for things they would be perfectly fine to do if their side did it

Let's not forget that Facebook gave the Obama campaign privileged access to data because they agreed with them politically:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai...

Please don't cite the Daily Mail as a source. It is not at all credible.

Are you saying the tweets in the article are not genuine or the article is untrue? It would probably be better if you engaged with the content of the story rather than virtue signal.

Brian Acton's post[0] about the Signal Foundation[1] makes it sound like they could play in the same space as Facebook:

> Of course, this is just the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to make our dream a reality and we will continually be asking our peers, our community, and ourselves if there are more effective ways to serve the public good. In the immediate future we are focused on adding to our talented-but-small team and improving Signal Messenger. Our long-term vision is for the Signal Foundation to provide multiple offerings that align with our core mission. That will come in time.

The tagline on the foundations splash page, To develop open source privacy technology that protects free expression sounds like it could mean a facebook type thingamajig, since what is FB but providing free expression to the masses?

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/ [1]: https://signalfoundation.org/

That would be an interesting pivot.

Facebook has been using Signal Foundation's protocol in Whatsapp since last April

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067468/why-open-whisper-systems...

At this point I am sceptical that any communication platform can succeed beyond niche communities unless they go after the teenager market.

I find it very hypocritical of all these people who already have vested their shares in Facebook coming out and criticizing the company.

As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp.

I'm pretty sure most people are not fond of Facebook basically monopolizing people's private data and monetizing, but you don't get to criticize if you are the one who contributed to creating it, no matter how detached you are from the company anymore. And if you really cared about this, why didn't you just come out and say it before all this?

I see this with the recent trend of all these "former early Facebook employees" who obviously got to where they are now by working for Facebook and made tons of money by exploiting users. Now that their shares have all vested, they criticize Facebook about how they're so "unethical", etc.

If you really care about user privacy, just shut up and start your own company and see if you can fix it from scratch, instead of using the fame you gained by working for the company you're criticizing.

It's hypocrisy at worst.

Financial independence is more important. Once you attain that you can seriously fight back, it's about picking your battles. With the money he made in the sell he can do some SERIOUS investment into what he believe's in that's going to create magnitudes more mass in the direction he wants to go then piddling around without it. FI should be everyone's primary goal, because only then can you put your effort to what you truly believe in and be able to back it up no matter what.

So where do you draw the line? What if your way to achieve financial independence turns out to outweight the positive effects you could posssibly achieve later with FI?

That's a tuff line to find, but I'd say it probably relates mostly towards age. The older you become FI the less potential you have to effect a larger change using your FI. This isn't 100% though, because the age would pay dividends with wisdom and networking. I don't know what evidence I'd need to see to change my opinion here. My main idea is based on once you achieve FI you are only reporting to yourself, thus you can now set your goals first and foremost and don't have to do the song and dance of aligning your goals with your funder/employer and seems so freeing.

> As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp.

As mentioned nearby he apparently owned 20% of the shares so he may very well have been against it yet falling short on voting power.

I wouldn't call it hypocrisy, more like having to deal with the unintended consequences of your action.

He and others that have come out to publicly criticize Facebook knew what they were building, they just didn't see how powerful Facebook would eventually become in programming people en masse. The way the last election turned out was the wake up call.

Sean Parker himself admits as much in an interview with Axios:

"When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, ... 'We'll get you eventually.'""I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'""And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."

"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

[0] https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...

I think what Sean Parker said was sensible. I'm talking about other people who cross the line.

If these people were such a saint enough to come out and say "Delete Facebook", they had years of opportunity to do so. It's not like Facebook's user exploitation is something new. In fact this breach of user privacy has been the general theme of Facebook from the beginning, even years and years before Facebook acquired Whatsapp.

The appropriate reaction should be them sharing their opinion but in an apologetic sentiment (since they clearly contributed to it AND profited from it) instead of suddenly pretending to be a saint on the other side now that their shares have all vested (and in this case he's working on a competing product, which adds another layer of distaste in my mouth since he's basically leveraging this social justice theme to get more users to use his signal app)

I feels ya. If they were truly contrite, they'd forfeit their ill-gotten wealth.

That said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

"Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the then eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a World War II Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to serving as Secretary of Defense for presidents Kennedy and Johnson (including his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War)."

I will always hate McNamara and what he's done. But I respect his mea culpa and attempts to prevent future such mistakes.

Crossposting what I said on Twitter:

> My contrarian impulse is that I want y'all to stop dunking on Acton for this tweet. (Context: One of the WhatsApp cofounders who sold to Facebook and made lots of money.) People's views change over time and it can take years for a conviction to form and then crystalize.

> It's very possible that Acton is burning bridges with that tweet. Don't assume that he loses nothing by speaking up now.

This is true. He could have just sailed off on his social media yacht and laughed at everyone.

If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?

you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet, just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

i am only partially sarcastic here.

you lost me after openbsd.

Definitions:

bitchx - an IRC client: http://www.bitchx.com/

efnet - one of the oldest IRC networks, founded in 1990

IRC baby, and efnet is an old network you can connect to. Bitchx is an irc client, free last I checked. To GP, are eggdrop bots still a thing?

I believe they are, though I haven't checked in a long time. Seems to be semi actively maintained.

https://github.com/eggheads/eggdrop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

ahhh, Yes... I remember IRC. I used a different client though.

I looked at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_C...

mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid. Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk to all the l337 h4ck3r5.

I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days. I also miss multiple search engines. Yahoo/Lycos/Hotbot/Dogpile/AltaVista all give you different results and you could have fun searching around.

The current Internet is a monoculture

You do realize that DDG is the modern incarnation of Dogpile?

Also, why are we pretending that Bing, Yandex and Baidu don't exist?

Because Yandex and Baidu give your data to some of the worst governments in the world.

NNTP, so awesome until 95% of its resources were consumed by its abuse as a file sharing platform for (naughty to nasty) images and pirated software and until power-hungry local group moderators started abusive banning/deleting practices against people who disagreed with their opinions on politics etc.

People want their own fluffy & safe social bubbles, not open, distributed networks.

you can afford a dedicated openbsd system?! i'd have to use a friend's free shell account and hope i don't get klined (again)

irssi

Back in my day we walked uphill to the vt100 terminal both ways, used ircII, and irssi didn't exist yet.

lol touche

IRC, so awesome, until local server admins began k-lining people for disagreeing with them.

An aside and coincidentally, WhatsApp runs on FreeBSD.

It's the wrong question.

Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions.

The real question is how do you fix society ?

The same can be said about a lot of things like littering, gun violence, etc, but there’s still things you can do to treat the symptomz

I think both questions are good.

People ask for tools and then the tools shape them.

Having access to the detailed user data of billions of users is definitely something new and it's being used for efficient propaganda worldwide. FB has again completely naively unleashed a beast they had no intention or intuition on how to control. Anyone who remembers Facebooks early days should not be the least bit surprised that they are playing fast and loose once again.

The digital economy at large is based on the mass manipulation and abuse of negative emotions. Profit over people.

"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Dr. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967)

http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...

Mastadon

Mastodon or other decentralized platforms. Or nothing. That's a pretty good option too.

Post to your .plan file

Scuttlebutt, a decentralized social network. ( http://scuttlebutt.nz/ )

> I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days

Plus, a lot of new people on there have described it like that. https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25WJZGMingRgdlOTrZJjOz7GHnS1D9...

I've been using MeWe recently, it's basically like classic facebook (chronological, not full of crap you didn't sign up for) but sadly doesn't have a critical mass of users yet.

As a ham radio nerd, packet bulletin board systems should really make a comeback. They fell apart as the internet came about, but in an effort to re-invigorate the now-unused spectrum and hardware TNCs[1] all over the place, APRS[2] was created, which has this nifty feature[3]. We also have a type of email system called Winlink[4] (which runs using the ARDOP protocol[5] or VARA[6] replacing Winmor[7] and Pactor[8]).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_node_controller

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...

[3]https://aprs.fi/

[4]https://www.winlink.org/

[5]https://www.winlink.org/content/ardop_overview

[6]https://rosmodem.wordpress.com/

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winmor

[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACTOR

Why but just use Facebook to announce you're nuking your FB account and Twitter to announce the same

I wonder if the Americans freaking out about this whole foreign influence thing have any idea what their nation has done to other countries' (both democracies and otherwise). What's happened here is a complete joke in comparison, and everyone is losing their head. Do people have any idea what the modern world has been like?

Strong nationalism implies hypocrisy towards the rest of the world.

It's mostly a way of targeting Trump. No one bats an eyelid when Clintons have Russian ties.

Because Trump's ties are legitimately scary while Clinton's are trumped up bullshit.

Which you should know, Donald Trump, Jr. You were in some of the meetings.

Random comment but I see so many people talking about regulation. Why do we want to hold the wolf by the ears here, continuing to use a service that doesn’t respect us while trying to force them to act like they do, when instead we could be advocating the use of user friendly services that truly respect our freedom? Why if Facebook has proven to be focused on things we don’t want (deep profiling), would you think any regulation (from politicians who are seemingly all bought by campaign donations) would somehow redeem Facebook?

For those advocating regulation, why do you advocate that over the development of services that genuinely respect user freedom?

Thanks all who comment thoughtfully.

Cynically, it's beyond comprehension or willingness to learn for most. They'd rather complain to the Government than do something about it. Unfortunately, we've found ourselves in this situation. And why people look to the Government as some panacea of trust and integrity is beyond me.

>And why people look to the Government as some panacea of trust and integrity is beyond me.

Blind allegiance to authority and the government is indoctrinated on us from an early age by state mandated school curriculum, the media, implicit fear, and other factors.

My extended family is "well distributed", living in three different countries around the world.

Facebook has been an essential tool for keeping in touch and keeping track.

What do I tell them all to use instead? Migrating to anything else, even if we all agreed, would be a huge pain.

Telegram or Signal for messages, create a "Family" group there and proceed to receive inspirational quotes from your aunt there.

Telegram collects your messages just the same by default (and inevitably collects them if you want a group), it just doesn't monetize the data in the open. Yet.

this. it is easier and more intuitive to have a telegram family group than facebook. The interface is cleaner, the messages are clearer. Your aunts and uncles will (might?) thank you

For keeping in touch and keeping track, what's wrong with e-mail?

I used to think this way, but I've realised that email is crap! It's the minimum, but it has so much friction.

People click "reply" instead of "reply all" so others get cut out of the conversation, attaching photos on a phone is a pain. You have to fill out all those fields (subject, To, CC). The subject is always garbage ("Hi" or just empty). Then you have the message buried 2 clicks in, with random chunks of quoted reply appearing again - and this is with everyone on gmail, that mostly clears up the quoted text problem. And if someone dares to change email address, forget it. That's it, you may as well give up trying to contact them because you'll never get the right address any more. And there's all this old-skool formality that people expect with email ("Dear Mother, ..., regards, Derpface"). Emojis don't always render correctly, it depends on the email client on the other end.

I don't use Facebook, but I do have a couple of Whatapp groups, and whenever my parents can't update Whatsapp because their ancient Android phone is out of space, and Whatsapp requires the update due to some protocol change, they end up going back to email... and it is like the stone age again.

if its only keeping in touch with your family then i would say that facebook isnt really that essential since there are countless other services/apps that you could use for that purpose. but if you also want to passively keep up to date with what other people are doing or posting then thats a bit harder to do without facecheck

Whatsapp groups? (I know Whatsapp was bought by FB)

You can use email, groupme, etc..

Facebook is like the roommate you all agreed to have, but then you find out that he's eavesdropping on every conversation and writing down notes. Wouldn't you want to kick him out?

Signal.

It has messaging and video calls.

This will get downvoted but whatever. I predicted all of this a decade ago and I refused to be part of it. All my friends laughed at me and said I was crazy.

Maybe I am but I don't do all that social media shit because if you don't know where they are making money, they are making it off of you.

And that's creepy. I'm willing to pay for value, but I'm not on board with them making money by looking over my shoulder. It's not about me doing something illegal, I don't do that, I'm fine, it's just creepy.

That social media stuff is like dopamine, feels good, but is not good for you.

It's funny seeing the New York Times and others rail against Facebook like this and yet they still don't have the conviction to #deletefacebook. Many of the excuses read like those of drug addicts.

I'll take it but I'm still somewhat confused about how sudden this pushback against facebook has been.

What did people think they did before now...

The effect on democratic processes ceased to be hypothetical.

With the way they create shadow profiles for non-users, I'm a strong believer that the opportunity with facebook is to feed them as much bad data as possible and let them deal with filtering it out.

This is probably the most pathetic PR move we've seen this year so far.

Acton sold off his userbase to Facebook in 2014, with full knowledge of the Snowden revelations of 2013 where we learned about Facebook's involvement in PRISM.

Alert: this comment may be seen as self serving.

I work on an app that has been gaining popularity precisely because it's a way to keep in touch with family and friends with no social media aspect (called Marco Polo, a video walkie talkie). I'm curious if there is going to be enough of a backlash to return to more organic face to face (and actually interactive) communication versus broadcast mode and pretending to be something that will seem impressive. That seems to be true of our users anyway.

No. This is a fad and will blow over in a few days. No one cares that this happened outside of the security community.

> No. This is a fad and will blow over in a few days.

I'm not sure you're right. This is spilling into all areas. We don't even know if CA has done all the damage it is going to yet.

> No one cares that this happened outside of the security community.

This has very little to do with security and very much to do with Facebook's policies.

Policies that were ended awhile ago.

My family loves this app but I've heartily resisted due to privacy concerns. What data do you collect now, and what data do you intend to collect in the future?

That was part of Snapchat's charm, I think. No pressure to perform, just do silly things with your friends. Then Snap needed to make money, so they got into the content and the advertising and added Stories and 'influencers,' and it's basically the same as any other social network now.

I would be very curious to learn what sort of non-disparagement clauses existed in the Whatsapp/Facebook purchase contract. And how exactly they were worded.

I don't think anyone at Facebook has the bandwidth to deal with a mean tweet from an old employee right now. If rumors are to be believed mass resignations are coming.

Probably not, but it can mean a great deal if it gets media traction, and Acton would go in the category of "founder made into a billionaire" rather than "employee". It's not like he was some random engineer in a pool of a hundred engineers.

> If rumors are to be believed mass resignations are coming.

Is this just inside knowledge, or has it been published anywhere yet?

No I have nothing to do with facebook despite this randomly generated username

Where did you hear this, and what's the reason? Just various rats taking their millions or billions and getting out while the getting a good?

unlikely

Facebook is the new Uber.

The main thing I don't get from this approach is the idea that deleting Facebook somehow frees you from this level of data mining.

In reality, it's well-known (not just by techies, but everyone) that when you "delete" Facebook, you're only really deactivating that account. Your data has already been mined, your data has already been sold and moved onto another server, and even if Facebook wanted to get rid of you, the Channel 4/Guardian expose has illustrated that data has been sold. The damage has already been done.

Instead of trying to get people to leave, there should be pressure on sanctions from affected governments. The only way to stop this level of data misuse is to ensure that Facebook is fined adequately. Instead of trying to crash the stock price, fine them $10k for every user breach, to the tune of several billion.

My biggest worry from this scandal is that the anger will die down, and the world will be told that you can get away with this level of data breach. Equifax have largely got away with their breach, but if Facebook and CA can get away with outright giving data away for profit then all we'll see is that the line hasn't been crossed yet.

I guess maybe it is time to re-evaluate Web 2.0? User-generated content was supposed to be empowering.

But we have ignored the powerful amplifying effects of positive feedback and "echo chambers" artificially induced by such "customised news".

Maybe it is a bad idea to present customised news, what we need are diverse views. Maybe it is a bad idea to tack on voting systems and like buttons with every comment and tweet.

Instead of requiring Facebook and google to improve their ways, if we all started using ad-blockers more aggressively, setting up things like pihole for our family members and friends, wouldn't this solve the problem since companies won't have any incentive of collecting the data? It seems to me to be a much better idea that expecting multi-billion corporations to act against their interests.

Not really, the companies would then start asking for the information they want directly from the users. Take for example the quizzes you see posted on your facebook feed. "Find out what kind of potato are you?" and if you wanted to know a user's name, ask a question like, "if one potato year is 10 human years how old are you now?". I mean ask the question disguised as something else, in this case a stupid joke. Ad-blockers alone wont fix this issue. I think its us developers who created this problem and its us devs who has to come up with an answer to this.

But what are they going to do with this information if they can't show us ads based on them. Collect and target all you want, I am not seeing any ads. If 60-80% users does this, what will be the point of collecting data anymore.

They can sell the data to a 3rd party. This 3rd party can be an unethical company that doesn't care about undermining democracy.

Delete Facebook? Then what about WhatsApp? Isn't it owned by FB now ;)

I quite remember the day when my name appeared on the comments section of a website I visited (through facebook widget I believe). I freaked out. But when I discussed about this with my friends back then almost every one seemed to have a cavalier attitude towards this(meaning they were completely fine with it). I wouldn't be surprised if my friends still have the same attitude.

People are okay with sharing their information online if it provides them convenience. Facebook provides them with the convenience of staying in touch with people. This combined with "I have nothing to hide anyway" & "so what if?" thought processes and monetary benefits on corporate side seems to have led to this huge data bank that is Facebook today.

I am really glad people are talking more about this. Never too late. People need to completely understand their actions online have consequences.d

Will deleting Facebook actually remove your data though?

I’ve deleted mine a few times and then inevitably have had to use OAuth for some random site I’d auth’d to and lo-and-behold it works and all my data is back. Last time I went through that flow was maybe a year ago.

I always assumed they did some sort of paranoid delete or “anonymized” the data.

Nope

The only way to win is not to play

Not even. They create shadow profiles for non-users.

I think it actually does delete your data now. They added that in response to upcoming GDPR regulations.

I never signed up for it and they probably have a profile on me simply because of the connections to people who have FB. That always creeped me out. Wonder if there is something in the GDPR legislation to get all the info they have on me and make them erase it.

I only originally signed up because I was single and dating and girls found it “creepy” I didnt have a Facebook.

Peer pressure, man.

You know it is almost impossible to get arranged married in India without a fb profile as average joes think i have something to hide when i do not have an active profile, i have not even deleted it completely yet i am apparently 'suspect' in the eyes of the urban society that overshares

Have the offline social networks (parents & relatives) really ceded screening to online social networks? Or they consider online profile as one of many signals in their offline matching algo?

Smart tactic since Facebook is on fire and Whatsapp is directly pulled into discussions concerning privacy and whatnot.

Curious if he can dish out some facts to backup that tweet or it's just a "convenient" time to shed some light over your new product which is basically another..Whatsapp

We are in the connected world. News can be generated by anyone and travel very very fast. That's the reality. In the fast you have to talk to people knowing what they think, now you can do it quickly and at massive scale. We will have more and more information out there anyway, regardless how many researchers working on cyber security and other problems. The only way to go back is to unplug electricity grid? Really? There is nothing wrong with Facebook. And that's how technology can empower people to do both good and bad things. Yes, US people are not happy with the election, journalists now have a revenge, but blaming technology? really?

I just tried to delete the Facebook app on my Samsung Galaxy S8 and it looks like that's impossible. It's so embedded in the OS that it cannot be deleted, but only disabled.

For several years, I've been pontificating the somewhat abstract idea that a software app will one day hack the human psyche on a massive scale. And by "hack", I mean to do us harm by tapping into the same pleasure mechanisms as addictive drugs. It never occurred to me until today that perhaps Facebook is this app.

"Pontificate" implies a pompous demeanor, I think you meant pondering?

Both. My friends hear it as potification ;)

I personally have always viewed Facebook as being in the business of mind control and have said as much to anyone that would listen.

In May, once GDPR becomes mandatory, we'll all be able to issue data requests to the likes of Facebook and Cambridge Analyitica etc, to find out just what they know about us. The requests are free, so with social media, you could almost mount a denial of service attack against a business if enough people make a request!

Deleted it long time ago on my mobile devices. It is not enough though. Facebook javascript is everywhere.

Tech companies should bear responsibilities to NOT embed facebook javsascript on any of their websites. More shame need to come when those javascripts get embedded somewhere.

I've fallen in a deep, deep hole. One I can't get out of (meaning, deleting my Facebook account), because I've used "Login with Facebook" on quite a few sites and platforms.

What do others recommend in a situation like this?

Consider whether any of those associated sites are still useful. You can enumerate these on Facebook itself, it shows you which sites have access to your account.

Secondly, make a list of these sites. Ask yourself: "if I lost access to these sites today, would I care?" - remove the ones you don't care about.

Lastly, separate each one from Facebook one-by-one. Some will be easy, log-in, set a password, unlink Facebook. Done. Some will probably require getting in contact with the site's support team.

Don't worry about doing this over night. Just rest in the knowledge that every step you take, is getting a bit more control over your data.

Eventually the list will shrink, and then you can start the mammoth task of doing the same things with:

* Your post history

* Your likes

* Your check-ins

* Your reviews

* Your event history

* Your employment history

* Your photos

* Your wall posts

* etc.

Good luck!

Keep deleting it after you enable it to login to whatever site and the delete it again after you changed your credentials on said site. Eventually it will stay deleted/disabled and lost at some point.

Thats what I did and the Facebook account is gone now. Haven't encountered any problems so far.

If you go to https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications you can see a list of everything you've signed up for using Facebook OAuth, then determine from there what sites you still use and adjust logins as necessary

While I agree with the co-founder, I wish he'd also suggested deleting WhatsApp given that it's become a tool for many people spreading lies, disinformation, propaganda, faked photos, fake videos and hatred.

If this isn't the opportunity for Diaspora* to become a thing in the public's mind, I don't know what is. We have to use this in order to move to a better platform for social media.

Diaspora is a non-starter.

Look at their getting started page. Step one - choose a pod. You just lost 90% of the people that might be interested. They need to get rid of that step.

This would likewise affect Mastodon. One of its arguable strengths is also a weakness, in that regard.

So many bloody apps and websites require or ask for fb accounts to sign up, tinder, coffee meets bagel, bumble, etc etc. everyone empowered them.

Note I never got a fb account, so some sites I just can’t use.

I guess what Snowden said is true. FB is a surveillance company under the guise of social network. FB is not the only one in this case. All companies which store info could be suspect.

Every company has its ups and downs. Some downs or negative things warrant their demise. I don’t think what FB did here is worth calling burn the witch on them or actively trying to kill them, and I do hope FB are able to learn from this and change for the better.

Now, that said, I do think there is an underlying point others ops have alluded to: The disdain for Trump and everything that could have helped him win ( legitimately or illegitimately ) which I am not sure is the best way to react. I think that approach is not a very rational one. What needs to be done there w.r.t Trump is probably worth a separate discussion, but I disagree with knee jerk reaction here from the whatsapp founder.

Why the hell are my non tech friends and acquittances so surprised by this? What did they think? That Facebook will not sell their data for profit? How can people be so fucking naive?

I deleted my facebook accounts years ago, and never looked back. Nobody in my fried group even really uses it anymore. Most people just check in once a day for 3-5 minutes.

>Most people just check in once a day for 3-5 minutes

Actually, that's a huge thing.

There's a group of rich people mentioned in this post and now they are telling their followers to delete FB _after_ getting rich. If we were to ask them how FB plans on making money when they started their involvement with the company, then monetizing user data would have been the answer.

This is something the world will just have to get used to. We're past the point of no return. As individuals, we can do a lot to protect our privacy, but it's a lot of work.

technically he did start a Facebook competitor (loosely speaking), he just happened to have been bought by them!

And then he quit his company to work on another competitor!

He gave 40 million dollars to and works on Signal, the app that WhatsApp is basically a skin of anyway.

50 million, i believe.

Is this the Same WhatsApp that demands unfettered access to your entire contacts list before it will work?

FB users are 'unknowingly' revealing sensitive info that could be detrimental to their future

Calling out the company that made you a billionaire is such a brave move... inspiring.

To repurpose what I was thinking of posting as an Nth-level comment, and leaving this long because I don't have time to shorten it (and because I'm trying to phrase it with so many preemption pieces that it won't immediately attract some kinds of detractors which I want to try to advance this argument beyond/around), yada yada:

Making it purely up to the individual to decide these things when they have to decide in a coordinated way or else connections break down results in unhappy situations. Right now, we have enough coordination anarchy in digital social networks that it leads to some combination of entrenchment, pseudorandomness, and fashion cycles (at least as far as I can see).

In the US, mail became a regulated monopoly, and the telephone network has regulation to try to give newcomers a better playing field and avoid capture effects (not that this always works—but things like “in this metro area, all ten digits must always be dialed so that the new numbers being introduced don't become the lower-class numbers that everyone fights to avoid anyway” have happened). Structure and usage regulations for physical shared community spaces have enough difference in focus and constraints that they don't seem to get applied the same way, and the localization and nature of enforcement mean they don't have the same kind of massive leverage. It is my strong suspicion that the lack of a single consensus “physics” in shared digital spaces (and attendant shared approach/instinct; cultural differences and training aside, human bodies have substantially similar baseline physical capabilities and constraints across the world) means that even with arbitrarily “benevolent” (whatever that means) government intervention, the idea of a level field doesn't work the same way to start with, and there's a panoply of little technical decisions that have “already been made” that combine to make things amazingly awkward on that level as well.

We've tried “just stop using it!” since Stallman started saying it ages ago, and it doesn't work in practice for a lot of people (“because not everyone does it!” is of course the exact coordination problem I'm calling out above). Regulation seems almost untenable from this position, at least assuming pace-of-advancement continues to be a serious concern and expectations haven't globally converged, though I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly fluid kind of regulation popped up (especially from the European sphere) that would break logjams better. What else can usefully be tried if we don't want to wind up in the Big Social hegemony world?

One that I rarely see is “capitulate in an accelerationist manner, let them become governments, and then push to make them good ones”—interesting as a thought experiment, but I wouldn't want to try to put that in practice from here. Can we extract useful information from that, though?

A related observation: to some extent, the success of Mastodon (within several communities I'm part of, enough so that I can use it as part of the primary “social network” set in the same way many people use Twitter and observe a lot of jumping ship there from Twitter along the way, even though in terms of absolute popularity it may still be far weaker) mimics what's been called the Amish-congregation government model to me (you are heavily bound by your choice of instance but it generally remains practical to switch), and instance leaders seem to be taking a much more active and community-centered role than Big Social allows. But that's still ultimately based enough on the Twitter model of interaction that there are lingering social problems (at least I find them to be problems) from that, and the currents of code changes are still a coordination/effort problem of their own, though that's partly mitigated by several instances running interesting forks already while leaving interoperability intact. I'll be very curious to see how that evolves.

In calm seriousness:

Can sb compare the technical feats and the scope of the data collection by the obama campaign and the trump campaign?

did he leave after the acquisition? or is he still involved in the company?

> In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation.

It's in the first two sentences. Action is one of the co-founders of WhatsApp

What he was asking is the last sentence. He quit WhatsApp to help make Signal.

Acton recently donated $50MM to Open Whisper Systems (Signal) and is now involved with their board.

Deleted comment.

that's a scam and a fake account.

Jan Koum Is entertaining. He was a frequent flyer and wanted to build an app that could tell people what time zone the person they are talking to was in, that they were on a flight, etc

He posted on flyertalk about it and got a "meh, you have to install something? Why bother?" response

5 years later, as a frequent flyer he was into collecting miles and using them on tickets, and he had managed to get business class flights to mobile world congress in Barcelona, but while the deal was going through to sell whatsapp to Facebook there were a couple of delays. Nothing major.

He thought to himself "these are non changeable tickets, they'd better get a move on", then reflected how absurd a position he was in.

1: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...

Hahaha, I love some of the replies when he revisted the thread 4 years later:

" Isn't this one of the apps that take all your contacts from your device and upload them to a remote server? Since I have many non-contact entries in my address book (e.g. a contact card with DOB's, passport numbers, etc.), I'm reluctant to use such an app since it would indiscriminately take all this personal information and store it on a remote server.

I stick with Skype b/c basically, by logging in with a distinct login/password (as opposed to a MS ID linked to my other MS programs and accounts) and saving only limited information in Skype's address book, I'm limited the amount of data Skype would have and could take and save."

Odd to think some people used to believe Skype was more secure than WhatsApp, though to be fair, WhatsApp used to send (and store I believe) messages in plaintext.

It's really funny when you look now at what are the default app permissions in a standard consumer configuration of Windows 10 Home. And what Microsoft by default allows Skype to use. It's basically fully enmeshed with peoples' contact lists, and for business users, whatever other features of Office365 they keep squeezing skype into.

I think you're reading a lot into the single response he got.

For anyone who doesn't want to click through, the reply said:

"It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?"

There's nothing that could be even remotely translated to "why bother" or "meh" in the response. It's a simple question.

It was more the lack of reaponses that made me think it was a meh. Also I hadn't read the thread for a year or two and was going if memory when I wrote the post, did a search later.

I overheard a billionaire say he got worried when the market for his primary stockholding dipped by 20%. “I lost $200M. I actually started worrying I might go broke. Then I realized I still had $1.2B...”

I suspect people who transition from working class (and I mean it in a sense that you have to work to earn an income to keep a roof over your head, be that $30k/yr or $300k/yr) to capital class (meaning their assets fund their dynasty without sweat, in good times and bad, $100m+ type people) struggle to realise what it actually means to not have to worry about money, and that money is just a way of keeping score.

Likewise a lot of the wealthy people have no real concept of the fact if you don't work, you don't eat. Maybe you've got savings that tide you over for a year or two, or even a 401k that keeps you going for the rest of your life, but that's not really the same thing.

Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump.

I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to explain why they voted the way they did - from Russian hacking to white supremacy to Facebook ads to Facebook data. This is just one more in a long line of justifications when the most likely reasonable explanation is that he is beloved by millions, not just in the USA but around the world.

The same goes for Brexit.

"Your side won because the Russians and this data company and Facebook made you vote that way. We're going to make sure this never happens again!"

It's unfortunate that in the aftermath of polarizing and controversial decisions like these, this kind of rhetoric will now drive people further apart, because one side refuses to accept the reality of the other's opinions, and dismisses them with conspiracy theories.

Today people are pretending to be shocked that Facebook shares data with apps through the developer API. Most of the permissions being talked about were removed a long time ago. What is happening now is basically vindictive hatred for Facebook from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by electoral results that they lost fair and square.

> What is happening now is basically vindictive hatred for Facebook from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by electoral results that they lost fair and square.

I'm not saying that's not part of it, but it's only part of it. There's plenty of other bad stuff about Facebook that people don't like: children experiencing isolation and depression; cyberbullying; addiction; shallow, empty interactions; clickbait mental junk food replacing content from actual friends... It goes on.

One note: fair and square by your interpretation of "fair", maybe. But the country as a whole uses its laws to interpret fair, and the important allegations are that the Trump campaign broke those laws by directly communicating with this agency.

"In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends." [0]

The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was represented to the users.

[0]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

In terms of law, I think they key is that (presumably) the Obama campaign didn't have direct access to that data. Not a lawyer, but saw enough of the Jon Oliver / Jon Stewart SuperPAC skit to get the general idea that communicating directly with your funding source is a no-no.

In terms of ethics, the key difference is mentioned in your article:

The only difference, as far as we can discern, between the two campaigns' use of Facebook, is that in the case of Obama the users themselves agreed to share their data with the Obama campaign, as well as that of their friends. The users that downloaded the Cambridge app, meanwhile, were only told that the information would be used for academic purposes.

This is big. If a university researcher asks me a few questions and tells me that my answers will be used purely for research purposes, I am much more likely to engage than if a campaigner did the same. It would be unethical for a campaigner to present themselves as an academic in order to get more information.

> The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was represented to the users.

That is an incredibly important distinction. There is a vast gulf between "these people asked for my data and I consented to its use" and "these people surreptitiously collected my data for purposes other than those which they disclosed."

A couple issues with that statement:

(1) The issue is not getting the data of the people who used the app, it's the millions of their friends who were included. This is what's being implied should be thought of as a "breach" (with the media trying its darndest to make it look like Trump himself downloaded all the data into a big CSV file while laughing)

(2) Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked, the resulting dataset was collected in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind.

> Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked,

This seems...insane.

Informed consent makes all the difference in cases like this. How can you feel that it's irrelevant whether data was obtained under fraudulent premises, versus with explicit consent?

It would be like saying 'It doesn't matter that company A had a real product with real traction and raised $10Mm, while company B lied to investors about the amount of user activity and raised $10Mm. The resulting funds raised was the same in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind'.

Now, I don't mean to imply that you believe the quote above, but what you said sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

> How can you feel that it's irrelevant whether data was obtained under fraudulent premises, versus with explicit consent?

Very simply: None of the millions of friends were asked for their consent in either case. There was no consent requested or premise given, the data was simply "obtained" in both cases, by the same means.

> but what you said sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

Maybe because it has nothing to do with what I wrote? Allow me to make up a statement that does. "Hey, Bob, can I have access to your account so I can understand you better to advance the Obama campaign? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's your friend, so I get his information also. ....... Hey, Bob, can I have access to your account so I can understand you better to create a personality profile? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's your friend, so I get his information also."

Now, you are Tom. You were not contacted in any way whatsoever. You were not presented with a reason for accessing your account in any way whatsoever. Your data was simply pulled, and that is why I equate the two. I am indeed quite sane.

From the perspective of the friend (Tom), I better understand your point.

I was looking at the situation from Bob's perspective, where I think we can agree that there is a significant difference in the two formats of collection.

> (2) Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked, the resulting dataset was collected in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind.

this just seems like being reductive for convenience - stripping away context in the pursuit of finding some broad way to describe two things and propose some false equivalence.

> "these people surreptitiously collected my data for purposes other than those which they disclosed."

They didn't collect it surreptitiously. They collected it openly, for purposes other than those which they disclosed. Which is an unethical but not uncommon, unfortunately.

The other major difference (and reason for the uproar) the data was potentially given as a campaign contribution which would have violated Federal election laws. That's the issue. That wasn't the case with the Obama campaigns app.

Nah, it's just hypocrisy.

All candidates take such data from social media, and have done for the last 2 elections at least, but, Trump being not that popular with the Republican establishment/deep state either (him coming from outside to steal the party's favorites thunder and not 100% controllable by the party bureaucracy) only one side has enough media stronghold to hammer the other side 24/7. The other can at best spew its own BS on FOX.

Please include citations and an explanation of a bold claim like that. How did the campaign break the law here? Otherwise you're just stoking partisan fires.

You'll note he used the word 'allegations', not proven facts.

Are you asking for evidence that the law was broken, or are you asking for the evidence that leads to the allegations? There's a significant difference in standard between the two.

The allegations revolve around campaign finance. If this data was shared with the Trump campaign, it was a campaign contribution, which has real value, which is limited to $2700 iirc. The data on 50 million Americans is worth well more than $2700. It really depends on if that data was shared, and if it should have been shared.

There is also the question of whether foreigners were working on behalf of the campaign.

There are a number of allegations that should be explored. Do a search, and you'll find these reports fairly easily.

I mean, I know why people love him too — he is entertaining as fuck and if you’re too poor or too rich to be affected by government policy, who gives a shit about the president?

So again, you attempt to hand-wave reasons why people would vote for Donald Trump.

Not really, I think that for a certain subset of the electorate, voting Trump was highly rational from a game theoretic perspective, and the worse Trump is, the better he serves this purpose. So I don’t need to hand Wave the emotional reasons.

I'd like you to elaborate more on the game theory aspect. My personal opinion along those lines is that people looked to Trump as a bull in a china shop. The "system" was so corrupt that the only solution was to send someone in who would wreck it from the inside. It would be disingenuous to be upset now that he's broken some plates. While I don't think this is the majority of Trump voters it anecdotally appears to be a significant portion of the avid/vocal supporters. I still think most of his votes came from the people who show up and vote R no matter what. But there was definitely a shade of, "FUCK YOU" from the voters to the government this election.

Imagine you live in a room with an investment banker. Every day, $100 appears in the room and the investment banker decides how much you get to keep. Every year, you get to decide whether or not to push a button that sprays rancid feces on both of you.

On Day 1, the banker lets you keep $30. He keeps this $30 for another 10 years. Then, he starts cutting your share by 2 pennies per week ($1 per year). It’s annoying but not too bad, but you don’t want to be covered in feces so you don’t push the button.

A decade later, you’ve only got $20. A decade after that, $10. Five years later, only $5 out of every $100.

At some point, it becomes strategic to push the button. Sure, your life sucks and having your tattered clothes covered in feces doesn’t help. But the banker in the bespoke suit is harmed more, and might rethink his allocation tomorrow.

And when you do push that button, the stinkier the feces, the better.

Not "FUCK YOU," but as a vote of no-confidence and of optimism for a reset button.

Source: that was my vote.

He basically ran a campaign of "People in Washington suck and I'm going to ruin their day" and that is the one campaign promise he's knocked out of the park. Every time the media gets bent out of shape about something he does, his base feels vindicated.

Exactly, but it’s not just people in Washington. It’s anyone who gets to sit at an air conditioned desk for 8 hours a day and make twice as much as a coal miner with black lung.

To answer your question. Me, as a European, I like a POTUS who doesn't drag us into a war with Russia, thank you.

I thought the narrative was that Trump was on Russia’s side?

I don't talk about US-partisanship in the media, but of reality. I am not a DC insider, all I know is that at this very moment I am living in peace.

During the debates candidate Clinton suggested enforcing a no fly zone in Syria which prompted the moderator to ask her whether she would shoot down a Russian plane while she armed "moderate" rebels.

Meanwhile Candidate Trump said he thought they could get along and co-operate to defeat ISIS.

Personally, sitting thousands of miles away from the USA, candidate Clinton said everything that I'd never want to hear. Also Russia has been a great ally to my country for many years so culturally the russophobic impulse has never been there.

>What is happening now is basically vindictive hatred for Facebook from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by electoral results that they lost fair and square.

I'd say that a lot of the articles are driven by the news medias hatred of facebook.

It used to be that facebook would drive upto 80% of the traffic on some news sites from shared articles between 2012-2017. Then when they started to tweak the news feed a lot of news sites found their traffic dying.

There are definite reasons to hate facebook, but news sites hate them for controlling their very existence, and lately pushing them into irrelevance.

Between facebook and google the views news sites receive from other sources are/were a rounding error, before we even start talking about advertising.

That everyone is attacking facebook now is good. From a purely tactical point of view killing it or strangling it with so much regulation they need to ask you 5 times if they can access your data for every picture you upload will be a huge net positive for humanity. I only wish the same happens to google asap.

I wonder if the news media's reaction to Facebook explains Google's $300m effort to save online news.

$300m buys a lot of good will, and maybe some favirbale coverage.

That's a huge part of it. Seems to me every NY media story about SV the last few years has been a hit piece.

The election was won by a very slim margin. The core of Trump's support may have been with him regardless but they weren't enough to win. It's the actions on the margin that matter here.

Also, as other's have pointed out, there are a lot of other problems with social media in general and Facebook in particular. Russian meddling in the election is the spark that is lighting the fire but the fuel was already there. (That last sentence optimistic to an extent that might not be warranted).

Exactly, he won the election thanks to 80000 votes in three states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

Even applying such retroactive analysis to determine the smallest set of people who could change their votes so as to alter the election result, that doesn't imply anything about why Trump voters voted for Trump. That doesn't mean they were brainwashed by Facebook, that they're all white supremacists, etc.

> That doesn't mean they were brainwashed by Facebook, that they're all white supremacists, etc.

At the risk of engaging in a debate I don’t want to participate in, is this not building a strawman?

When I purchase a product after viewing a targeted advertisement for that product, no reasonable person would claim I’d been brainwashed. One might, however, claim I’d been influenced by the advertisement.

This should probably be a response to fareesh's top-level post. My comment was just to say that Trump's margin of victory -- however you want to analyze it or state it -- doesn't have any bearing on what motivated Trump voters and isn't even relevant in the context of fareesh's comment.

Actually, he won thanks to ~63,000,000 votes. You’re also trying to make it sound like there was something uniquely nefarious about his campaign. He used the same marketing tactics that all recent campaigns have used. The same tactics that Obama was widely praised for in 2012. He won because voters liked him more.

* he won thanks to 304 electoral votes and ~3,000,000 less popular votes.

Neither candidate was campaigning for a popular vote, they were both campaigning to win the electoral college. Which Trump did because ~63,000,000 Americans decided, purely of their own free will, that he was the better candidate. No matter how much you try to retroactively gerrymander the outcome, both candidates were playing on a level playing field, one of them won and one of them lost. It’s really a testament to democracy that an outsider candidate can prevail over the amount of establishment support Hillary had.

There's so much wrong with this comment. Correct, he received ~63m votes. Hillary received 65.85m votes. He won because our presidential election system is based on an electoral college (which may be debated as a plus or minus). But that also means certain states have a disproportionate amount of representation with respect to their population.

Please don't delude yourself or at least attempt to be honest. Races at the county and state level matter a lot. It matters that outside of a couple of states, the winner take all electoral system can have a significant impact on elections.

Yes, those are the rules that have been established, that both parties are privy to when developing their campaign strategy.

But let's not reduce that to "oh, one person won because people liked them more."

Nobody complains about the electoral college when their candidate wins. But when they do complain about it, you’ll notice they tend to only mention the shortcomings that support their point of view. For instance, you’ll never hear a Democrat talk about all of the Republican votes that are suppressed in the large liberal states.

Both candidates entered a race to win the electoral college. The race was fair and one of them won. You can’t claim some moral victory by counting the popular vote, because every candidate would campaign very differently to contest a popular vote.

I think you’re correct about one thing though, it is an oversimplification to say that people liked him more. It would be more accurate to say that they thought he would be a better president.

There was no “Russian meddling” in the election. Stop parroting nonsense without evidence.

Hillary did cheat though. Her campaign directly collaborated with correct the record - last time I checked coordinating with a super pac was illegal. She also directly worked with the media to spread progaganda.

Thank god Trump won. Hillary would have been more of the same.

Also, it’s hilarious that we’ve all stopped caring about Citzens United now. Corporations influencing our elections is A-OK!

We've established beyond a doubt by now that there was, in fact, "Russian meddling" in the election. It's incredible that someone could still deny this.

Really? Cool! I’m sure you won’t have any troubles pointing me to some evidence then! Let’s see it...

Also, I’m not alone in this, notable journalists such as Glenn Greenwald are also asking for evidence.

Are you just not paying attention to the Mueller investigation? There's like five guilty pleas by now. Is that just a nothing burger? Seriously, what do you think that's all about?

If you want a timeline of events you can go here[0] or here[1], but something tells me you won't accept these...

[0]: https://www.politico.com/trump-russia-ties-scandal-guide/tim...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/05/a...

Can you spell it out? How did Russia "hack" the election? Please try to be specific. If I wanted random news stories, I'd google them.

The topic at hand is "meddling", not "hack"ing. Please don't try to change the topic.

Whatever adjective you prefer. But can you answer the question? You're being purposely obtuse.

Can you read? Those lists are very detailed and deal exclusively with this topic.

I have read and didn't find anything concrete. That's why I asked. No need to be rude.

Crossing into personal nastiness will get you banned here regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.

All: Please keep garden-variety partisan flamewars far away from this site, too.

Your timeline is a list of accusations. You’ve provided no evidence to support your claim of Russian’s interfering with the election.

More importanly: why should I care about Russians interfering with elections when we let corporations do that to a far greater extent?

The timeline contains confirmed events which are in fact evidence. They're not accusations; the point of the timeline is that these are things we know happened.

How, exactly, are you defining evidence?

I assume you don't mean in the P(A|B) > P(A) sense?

I bet 10 bucks nobody here is going to reply with what you asked for. Because there is no "evidence" of any sort of "hacking".

You're the first person in this thread to introduce the word "hacking".

My point still stands. Whatever adjective you prefer.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download

"From in or around 2014 to the present, Defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016."

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments."

People can say anything. Anything proven in the court? To me all this sounds like partisan activities against the President. I skimmed both documents, but couldn't find any proven fact. Only allegations. Did I miss something?

Also the DNI report is too generic. They literally have screenshots of Russian news channels. This is bordering on cold war era style propaganda.

PS: thank you for taking the time and effort to have a conversation. I haven't seen anything convincing me that Russia meaningfully interfered in the election. And I'm wary to jump to conclusions since there are a lot of people who seem to be hell bent on undercutting the President using any means.

I provided those two documents because they currently bookend official public activity on the subject.

The indictment I provided is from the investigation headed by Robert Mueller, special counsel, former FBI director, and Republican. Dismissing it as "partisan activities" suggests either that you are extremely uninformed on this subject (in which case you should do your own research) or that you've already decided in advance to dismiss the results of a nonpartisan investigation.

Even the highly contested House Intelligence Committee report acknowledges that there was Russian interference in the election (they simply claim that there is no proof the Trump campaign was involved). There is a bipartisan consensus on this subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

There is enough evidence to substantiate beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia deliberately interfered with the 2016 presidential election. It is hard to determine the degree with which that interference influenced voters.

When all the stories first started coming out about U.S. torture around 2005 the first stage was denial by supporters of Bush. The number of intelligence officials, the number of investigative reports, etc. is such that someone denying Russian influence is being willfully naive. The question isn’t if they did influence the election it’s just how much the influence really was. It is beyond question that the Russians were involved in shenanigans. The U.S. has regularly unduly influenced elections in other countries so I don’t begrudge the Russians for what they did. I do begrudge those of our leaders who don’t care.

They also organized anti-Trump protests after the election : http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/16/indictment-reveal...

Who did? The Russian government? Russian citizens? How did they organize these protests? Where’s the evidence?

Also, this is a completely different claim, separate from the “Russia interferes with our election” claim.

Agreed, Russian citizens doing stuff may not mean Russian government ordered it

I'm a strong Trump, and even more so Putin, hater, but I don't really get why Russian "meddling" is so bad. I kind of expect them to do this. I am sure the US is supporting candidates it wants to win in other places.

If it is hacking polling stations or other illegal activities, that is pretty bad. But still the responsibility is on the harmed country to make that harder, detect it and show proof.

Of course it would make Trump appear illegitimate, but I don't think it should be unexpected by Russia. Can't really expect them to be silent and do nothing when they know Hillary has strong negative views (for good reason!) of their country.

> I don't really get why Russian "meddling" is so bad. I kind of expect them to do this.

Here's an analogy: We expect belligerents to kill each other's soldiers during war. It's the responsibility of each side to minimize their own losses. That doesn't mean that war isn't bad.

You might be able to win an argument with smart, but you'll never win an argument with stupid. t_d has arrived, so the correct response is:

FREE JULIAN!

It's the actions on the margin that matter here.

Just think of what this whole story (Foreign meddling) says about these marginal voters in that case: That they were so easily swayed, that they decided to vote ostensibly against their own better judgement simply by being shown a series of ads to influence their emotions.

Something is very wrong with voter education if it's that easy to sway a certain influential population of voters.

Or they really disliked both candidates, so a small push could send them in either direction. Just as an example.

It's pretty difficult to make meaningful wide-ranging inferences about the voter populations this way.

...or it's not that voters were swayed by anything at all, and lots of people voted for an unproductive celebrity for their own reasons.

In the months and weeks approaching election day, I was struck numerous times by the reality that each political faction was profoundly disconnected from the other, in media consumption silos so different that if you happened to drift from one conversation to another, it felt like crossing an ocean and entering a distant country.

And to me, it was obvious that this social rift had calcified during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow, amid the victory of the Obama presidency, left wing democrats simply felt as though their job was done, they could die happy, and anything else they imagined as natural was a foregone conclusion of the retirement they were set to sail into.

I don't think the media silos I noticed are the root of the problem. You cannot blame cartoons, talk radio and memes. I strongly believe that complacency, assumption and tone deaf, willful blindness among democratic party consituents led to the results we have watched unfold. I don't think it was New Media manipulation, and I don't think "fixing social media" will solve for the chaos we now see.

Ah yeah, totally. I feel similarly to you. I was talking about a smaller contingent of voters who might have been caught in the middle. I should have made that more clear.

I always love people who tout the "how could those feeble minded simpletons be so easily swindled; I would never fall for that" slogan.

Have you considered it might be happening to you, right now? How would you tell, if by definition we are talking about pressing unconscious psychological buttons?

You may be very well educated, but you've never the less the same monkey brain as everyone on this earth.

Note that you are attributing to me a sentiment that I don't hold. Rather, the argument that a significant number of voters were swayed to vote for Trump through targeted ads on Facebook, if taken to be fact, must imply such a state for the average voter. Not a very kind argument to be making.

Your comment adds nothing but a personal attack on me where one is not warranted.

For some reason whenever negative stories come out about Trump or about Facebook or about some political figurehead in today's environment, people drag themselves out of the woodwork to pull out the tired argument that people are just 'jealous' that Trump won.

Could you explain your justification for trotting such an irrelevant point? We can argue all day that everyone knows that Facebook does all this scary stuff (and the nearly tech-illiterate people I interact with have no clue about this sort of thing while being barely able to use Facebook) but I'm more curious as to where your main point comes from.

1) What makes you think I am from the woodwork?

2) Can you recall a time when a Facebook privacy story ever received so much media and government interest?

There was a time when apps would blindly request a bunch of permissions. Users would blindly accept them. Devs would store tokens in the database. One shoddy exploit later on the application and an attacker had all their photos, friends' photos, and could post and comment on various things impersonating the user.

I can't imagine how much harvesting was done by popular Facebook apps and games in those days.

Because I've noticed in many of these threads about Facebook there is constant whataboutism relating to Obama and a constant attempt to deflect discussion away from the actual contents of the article.

You've been making the unsubstantiated argument that the only reason people care about Facebook nowadays is because they're sore losers. If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, I would love some citations.

I'm really torn in how to respond to claims of whataboutism.

On one hand, if something is simply business as usual, despite any misconceptions otherwise, then cries of whataboutism can be a bit misplaced.

On the other hand, if some sort of tide has shifted, and business as usual can become business of the past, then I think dismissing similar past offenses from others could make sense.

I have hard time attempting to evaluate this, to say the least...

Absolutely. Trump got the true American feelings in every issue out which have been suppressed for far too long. The media will move on to the next Trump tweet tomorrow and face book will regain lost value in a week.

Wow, what a spot on comment.

> tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump.

People voted for Trump, but that is hardly an indication of love. Consider that this prior election was between two of the most despised (and possibly incompetent) candidates in US presidential history.

If you don't want to repeat this fiasco stop supporting a divisive two party system. Yes, it was the internal mechanics of each party that picked candidates from the primaries opposed to actual voters. This has been proven with evidence for the Democrats and is likely true for the Republicans as well.

> stop supporting a divisive two party system.

I wish we could move to a constitutional republic with a dose of direct democracy a bit like Switzerland.

Otherwise even with more parties we would see parties forming coalitions and continuing to sideline a significant minority of the population. See the anti-immigration parties being ignored in Western Europe for a good example.

> stop supporting a divisive two party system

among other things, the voting system itself ("first past the post") tends to encourage a duopoly.

> from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by electoral results that they lost fair and square.

Are you not doing as exactly as you are highlighting?

If there were underlying forces at work that were foreign would that not mean it wasn't fair and square?

Citizens United vs FEC[1] unfortunate decision in 2011 led to infusions of foreign funds[2] that outnumber what US citizens are legally allowed to contribute. Too much money and now foreign money that is the real problem, it reared it's ugly head in 2016 no matter who won.

We have to backtrack on Citizens United vs the FEC decision or else foreign countries and oligarchs will be deciding every election. If that becomes the norm, it was a good run for the United States but it will be ending.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-...

The winning candidate spent significantly less money in this instance.

Also I tend to agree with Citizens United. Unions and Corporations should be allowed to express their views on a candidate.

If there is someone running for office and making a BS claim about steel workers, I would want steelworkers unions to have the right to advertise and inform me that it is BS.

Also if you get into issue based stuff, it becomes extremely overzealous to prevent unions and Corporations from being able to speak up during an election. Planned parenthood, for example, has a lot of misconceptions about it, they should have the right to do something about that.

I also understand the scope for abuse with citizens united, but I don't think curtailing first amendment rights is ever a good idea.

Probably worth noting that I'm not American, my opinion of this case is shaped by my listening to SCOTUS oral arguments of the case on YouTube many years ago.

The winning candidate won by something like negative three million votes. What other country would consider that a democratic outcome?

In Canada the Government is occasionally elected without the majority of votes. It is also where the Prime Minister is simply the "first among the caucus" and not elected in a separate election.

These are referred to as "minority" Governments.

Any other country where the election isn't based on the nationwide popular vote.

Because it was not a popular vote. And people voting were aware it was not a popular vote.

You cannot divine now how many would-be Trump voters in blue states stayed home versus would-be Clinton voters in red states.

AFAIK basically all other democracies function this way - using voting districts - never using direct representation to elect representatives [1].

One similar example of this is the recent German election - I believe AFD had like ~10% of the popular vote, but only won 5% of seats in the parliament.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_representation

Germany (and NZ) use MMP - everyone gets 2 votes one to select someone for their local voting district - that provides half the seats in parliament, the other vote is for a party, these votes are used to choose the other half of the seats which, taking into consideration the parties of the local representatives who have already been elected, are used to pad out the party representatives to match the country wide party vote.

In both countries there is a threshold (5% party votes) that a party must get to get party seats ... looking online in 2013 AFD (spit) got less than 5%, below the threshold, and got no seats, in the recent election they got above the threshold and were awarded 92 seats (14%) - seems to me that the system is working as designed.

But just because they got seats it doesn't mean that the other parties are required to stoop to form a government with them.

MMP is a far better system than the FPP system used in many other places, most people end up with someone they voted for representing them, unless they are in an extreme minority (<5%), and it's pretty immune to gerrymandering. Personally I'd argue for reducing the 5% threshold to the size of one seat so even more people are represented.

Plus the two million eligible voters who were denied their right to vote.

But who’s counting?

It’s more fun to argue about facebook, benghazi, email servers, value voters, likeability...

> The winning candidate spent significantly less money in this instance.

Possibly, or political systems are ripe for misdirecting where funds originate now.

> Unions and Corporations should be allowed to express their views on a candidate.

Totally agree, the problem becomes when those are shell corporations or money funneled via foreign entities.

I am sure any sovereign nation would not want the majority of the money influencing their own people's choices from external sources to the country.

It just wouldn't be best for quality of life and making sure what is done is right for the country if the actual citizens have less say in the direction of it. So much money is in now that targeting and manipulation of votes from foreign wealth is the absolute norm, that is poisoning democracy and freedom, the very thing we want to protect and are sworn to uphold.

Trump received billions in free advertising in the form of “earned media”.

I don’t know if one could even account for all the third party spending.

Money is not speech, corporations are not people.

Any one who cares about free speech would advocate for restoring the Fairness Doctrine, so we know that angle is just rhetoric.

> Money is not speech

What does this even mean? It costs money to put advertisements in mass media. Either you believe everybody should be able to do that, or you believe that only some people should be able to address the public at large.

Why do you assume public political discourse should cost money?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

The fairness doctrine enforces two sides of view, aligning nicely with two parties. But, most issues don't have two sides. Some have three, four, or five and some have just one side. The fairness doctrine is gone because it wasn't good, not because of some conspiracy around money and speech.

How did you make the leap from pay-to-play to conspiracies?

Sure Unions and Corporations should be allowed to express their views on a candidate. But np more than any other individual - that's the real problem, money amplifies people's (or corporation's) voices and corporations have a lot more money to spend on elections than the median voter

How do you frame that kind of thinking today though? Pewdiepie can reach 3.2 million people with a YouTube video. As can hundreds of podcasters. That's more effective than any ad. If Joe Rogan does 50 podcasts with folks pushing one narrative, and the corporations and unions who support that narrative donate to his patreon page as a result, how do you enforce this?

If The Young Turks do 3000 hours of pro Hillary content, which is watched and shared by millions, how do you propose they be regulated? If unions simply give them money instead, rather than buying ads on TV, is that now illegal?

If I am a billionaire and my fellow billionaires and I want to start a TV channel where we do 24 hour marathons promoting clean energy and encouraging voters to vote for candidates who will bring us clean energy, my right to do this is taken away?

> Pewdiepie can reach 3.2 million people with a YouTube video

Yeah, but how many of them are old enough to vote? :-P

> The winning candidate spent significantly less money in this instance.

Citizens United likely isn't the only fix that's needed, but it never should have been reversed regardless. That said, perhaps if CU was still around this analytics company would have never got off the ground to begin with.

We have to backtrack on Citizens United vs the FEC decision or else foreign countries and oligarchs will be deciding every election.

You are saying that the dollar amount spent decides every election. Do you really believe that democracy is nothing more than rule by whoever spends the most money?

You are saying that the dollar amount spent decides every election. Do you really believe that democracy is nothing more than rule by whoever spends the most money?

Not entirely but is has a very big impact, are you saying that money spent in an election doesn't have an impact? We don't even know the true dollars spent anymore...

Follow up, do you want MORE foreign funds deciding elections for your nation over what citizens and national companies contribute?

This isn't just for elections either, this is for legislation after election... I don't believe anyone would want foreign money deciding their leaders, best interests and laws.

foreign money deciding their leaders

Again you assume that money directly decides who our leaders are. The best evidence says it works at least partially the other way around: the leaders most likely to win attract the most money. And as was pointed out already in this thread: the winning candidate in this election was the one with less financial backing.

Furthermore to the extent it is true that money influences elections, we need to solve that problem first - rather than suggesting, as you do, that our leaders ought to be "bought and paid for" by our own home-grown evil corporations and special-interest groups. What kind of improvement is that?

Um, what? The whole point of this is whispering hundreds of half truths and individually targeted propaganda into voters ears. It’s all a fabrication even the “Cambridge” connection was faked! What the hell is going on with Facebook running their own investigation and turning up at Cambridge Analytica’s office? Why is Facebook asking to see this whistle blowers laptop? All seems very strange as if there is something to hide here...

I'm not sure and I might be mistaken, but I think you also advocate a little about this "people have rights to their feelings" line of argumentation. But people's feelings can be manipulated with things that aren't true.

Say somebody told you that your coworker of similar skill level was earning twice as much as you, because they cheated somehow. You would get angry at them. If it then was revealed that no such thing happened, they have the same salary as you, would you still stay angry?

In the case of this election there were so many genuine incidents where wrongdoing was committed by both candidates so I'd be less inclined to buy into the theory that fake incidents were what caused the anger.

One candidate stole a primary, was under FBI investigation for most of the campaign, was chastised by the director but then given a pass, had a trove of emails leaked wherein she was called incompetent by her own team, and cheated in debates due to a highly inappropriate relationship with the media.

The other candidate was crucified in the press almost daily with a slew of controversial and crass, lewd statements, each of which was dissected, repeated and debated during the 24 hour news cycle as well as the late night talk shows.

"It's unfortunate that in the aftermath of polarizing and controversial decisions like these, this kind of rhetoric will now drive people further apart, because one side refuses to accept the reality of the other's opinions, and dismisses them with conspiracy theories."

That's the rub. The side that doesnt go with the trumpers keeps looking for justifications that dont boil down to "Those people innately agree with those policies after a reasoned and thoughtful approach to the problem."

That's because the beliefs they espouse are an anathema to their core understanding of a civil society, and the only way they can continue to humanize them is to pretend they were tricked or stupid.

Honestly, I pretty much feel the same way myself. If you earnestly understand the consequences of America's current president and you are still gung-ho, I find you to be lacking in about every important moral and ethical measure.

#deletefacebook is not about "conspiracy theories". It's because their personal data was exploited to aid the election of someone they hate.

Whether it actually moved the needle enough to elect Trump is open to debate, but that's not a "conspiracy theory". Even the very idea that their personal data can be exploited this way, against their will, via friends who were tricked, is unsettling. That's more than just being mad about the election. They do not want a service that can exploit them that way in their life.

Maybe Facebook has locked down the API, or maybe there's some other way to exploit it next round. People are realizing that trusting Facebook with their personal data was a bad idea to begin with and not in their best interests.

Which is my point I guess - Facebook apps have had much more intrusive access to user data in the past. The only reason people care now is political.

Well no, you said more than that.

> "Your side won because... Facebook made you vote that way"

#deletefacebook doesn't mean that people think Facebook made people vote a certain way. It's about Facebook being a poor custodian of personal data and allowing it to be exploited to guide adversarial campaign efforts.

Guiding where to invest efforts and dollars in an election campaign is extremely strategically valuable intelligence. That's different from just changing people's minds.. it's where to push for more voter turnout, for example. So at a minimum Facebook helped identify the psychological profiles and locations of people who were prime targets -- thanks to just a handful of friends who were exploited.

My comment is about the coverage of this story, not the story. The story is being covered in the way that I've described.

Facebook privacy stories never get this kind of coverage. This story is everywhere right now, for political reasons.

People want to delete Facebook because of trust and that reasoning is perfectly sane. As far as the coverage is concerned, this is the same story with a Facebook flavour today.

> ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it

Same happened in USSR, Yeltsin was accused in almost all of the above, and won - not so much despite of this, but to a large extent due to this. When the entire establishment gangs up against one, the normal human instinct is to support him. And the effect is so well-known that I'm actually suprised Trump's opponents acted this way.

How do you explain lower turnout for Hillary Clinton when compared to Obama's two turnout numbers?

For me, one of the most memorable moments during the campaign was when one of my liberal friends told me that he suspected Melania of being a Russian spy. I was so relieved when it was over - people were acting nuts.

Well said. No matter the influence of Russians nor widespread manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, the reality is that people chose to believe these things without their own personal endeavor into critical inquiry. And I'm not talking about that white working class "base" that people like to attribute as Trump's secret weapon.

I know plenty of people, truly well meaning individuals, who are not the dumb animals most outlets like to paint the Trump supporters as. They were just conned into it all, and I'm sure shady Facebook ads had a hand in it, but ultimately it was just trusting people suckered in by a television personality (or character, even).

If this election is the spark that eventually instills a sense of proper analytical reasoning skills in the United States at large, then I'll be satisified. And I say this as a person who, if I could vote in this country, would certainly have not have entertained the idea of Donald Trump at all.

Who the hell are you to talk about Trump voters being conned or voting without critical thinking? You have no idea why people voted for him.

I believe you missed my point. Those that cry foul over those targeted Facebook ads also fail to realize that people were still willing to drink the Kool-Aid.

Of course, it would be asinine to paint with broad strokes. But one can't disregard that it takes two to tango in exchanges of ideas and information.

Edit: my horrendous spelling

You're implying that we all were conned, yet I'm still a happy supporter of Trump and will continue to be, yet here I am not a redneck, extremely tolerant, not a racist, incredibly kind, etc. Maybe you've been conned on who a Trump supporter is.

Perhaps I should have been more explicit. I was intending to refer to those who regret their choice after having realized that not all of what they read or heard was true and so made their decision on effectively just an emotional impulse.

Thank you for enlightening me on why the previous user was so aggressive in his rebuke. I can see how, if somebody is happy with their choice, they may have felt slighted and assumed I implied that they, too, were conned.

I can appreciate that somebody's personal calculus is different from my own. However, those whom I have encountered that regret their decision articulate it in such terms that "con" really is the proper descriptor.

> Maybe you've been conned on who a Trump supporter is.

given trump's nature, it's unlikely one who isn't a fan will give much credence to such self-attestations.

for example a trump supporter may say they are "not a racist", but many see that trump supporters simply do not talk about race in the same way, so the expression doesn't mean much.

> They were just conned into it all

Were they conned?

The truth is if the US doesn't fix illegal immigration and put a general slowdown on legal immigration then conservatives are done for and their way of life is going to be slowly destroyed.

All indicators show first and second gen migrants overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

Yes, the conservatives are done for. That is, the party itself will fail to stay relevant.

This doesn't matter to voters. They ought to pick whoever will best serve them. So in that sense, I would argue that yes, they were conned in some respects.

> Yes, the conservatives are done for. That is, the party itself will fail to stay relevant.

I think it's the opposite - the people are done for. The party will just shift its stances. In many respects it already has - Trump faces almost as much opposition within his own party as from the Democrats.

If Trump doesn't sort out immigration expect the US to shift closer in laws and accepted practices to the UK.

Ah, I see. That's certainly an interesting hypothesis. Makes me wonder who the Republican party would target if their typical base evaporates. What would incline center-leaning individuals to continue to support the party after the shitshow that was the 2016 election?

Now you've got me looking forward to how this all turns out even more! :)

It could go a couple of ways - Trump could fix immigration - if "they" can remove the anti-Trump Repubs in the house or pick up a few extra seats then he has a good chance.

If he doesn't then I see a shift to socially conservative (in the religious sense) but pro-welfare.

New immigrants in general are socially conservative. As are a big chunk of current Dem voters - my extended family are all catholic and vote Dems.

some of this is the hostility immigrants feel from republicans and republican voters. as such, the gop and it's constituents contribute to (or perhaps even principally cause) this.

the premise that all/most immigrants "are liberals" (by apparent virtue of their immigrant-ness) is almost hilariously a stereotypical position to hold. i wonder what a gop explanation for why that is true would look like.

> some of this is the hostility immigrants feel from republicans and republican voters.

A little. But it's not one of the big three drivers -

The first is social welfare.

The second comes down to ideology - American conservatives have a unique brand of beliefs.

For example the value placed on:

- Freedom of speech - Firearms - Individual liberty over collective safety/feelings/effective policy

These traits are not shared by conservatives in the rest of the world. In the U.K. for example the majority of conservatives are happy with strict firearm control.

The third is personality - American conservatives are loud, proud, straight talking, and rough-edged - this rubs conservatives from other countries the wrong way.

I do agree, but it's also annoying that people keep using this to try and downplay stories like the Russia investigation and the fact that shady practices are going on at places like Facebook and in our political campaigns.

People did vote for Trump. Without someone twisting their arm.

But there is still merit to these other stories (even if the perspective that they got Trump elected is false).

Are you saying that hundreds of years of ad business has never worked and the billions upon billions of dollars spent on ads were wasted?

Because if you're not, "People did vote for Trump. Without someone twisting their arm." is disingenuous, at best.

All of our arms are being twisted by that standard. And all candidates were using ads.

I'm saying that the people voted how they voted without the use of anything that seems outside of the norm.

We should investigate these data-driven ad campaigns if they do have that much influence over our democracy.

And we should investigate Russian meddling because it looks like there was a divisive propaganda campaign and a bunch of shady business deals.

And we should investigate the Trump campaign because it looks like there were a bunch of shady business deals with questionable ties.

My real point was that the fact that these things involve Trump shouldn't impact their seriousness. We know there are people trying to find dirt on Trump but that doesn't mean all of the angles they're looking at are purely about Trump.

> All of our arms are being twisted by that standard. And all candidates were using ads.

But there are rules regarding how and how much can be spent on ads.

My initial post was to establish that we agree that ads work, the next issue is to establish whether campaign finance laws were broken, and if spending (foreign or otherwise) were not disclosed.

There are tens of millions who would vote for trump no matter what, and I literally mean no matter what. No candidate has ever got less than ~40% of the popular vote in recent times. So that fact, that "tens of millions voted for Trump after all", tells us squat.

And besides that, the allegations being made are extremely serious, an utter threat to democracy, and they are to be taken so independently of any other factors.

I can't vote in the US election. I don't give a fuck who wins. I still think Facebook is shit.

I'm not sure that's true. I think its just people realizing the power and reach of internet media giants like facebook.

Nobody wants Russia to spam American news. Nobody wants to filter through media coverage and wonder which one is fake or not.

People I think are looking for a bit more liability. Show me content truthfully, validate its source, don't change the order of my news feed, don't purposely remove some content and add others because you've learned my ad click habits.

Trump is trump, I don't think he's the reason for the outcry. He's mentioned in it, because it can be seen as an example, but people on all side of the political spectrum I think have issue with propaganda, and the power that lies to whom control the internet mass media. So Facebook is scary to all party, and I think only now do a majority of people have woken up to its potential destructive influence. It's not known to what extent that potential is, and the debates will probably focus on that. How much/little regulation is needed to mitigate its applications that can affect our free social democracy, while maximising our capitalist ambitions.

This is even with most of the global mainstream media supporting Hilary and party. And now the media wants to divert their failures to some social media effect - as if FB only showed pro Trump news.

I don’t think Brexit really falls into the same category. At the time of the Brexit vote there were a lot of stories in circulation that were incorrect or not telling the whole story. If people were given the real facts, I find it very unlikely that the majority would have still voted leave.

Yes I agree there are some real arguments for leaving, but most people were voting leave for reasons like the NHS getting an extra £350m a week, which turned out to be just spin. Maybe a company like CA was invoked to promote stories, and maybe they were funded by powerful people, but that’s not really a conspiracy.

Even now it’s still unclear on what is going to happen on some major issues, like what will happen to British citizens living in the EU.

The British media has been reporting on CA and its links to the leave campaign for some time now. I watched a video in which an incredibly snarky reporter interviewed someone from CA and demanded to know why they were at an event being held by the leave campaign if they weren't working together.

Perhaps the reality is two things. One, there may have really was been collusion and manipulation of peoples psyche as the data seems to be trending towards.

But two, as you suggest, perhaps some people really do like him and what he represents. And maybe the "other side" would rather believe Trump voters were tricked then believe the alternative, that Trump voters really love Trump and what he represents.

The thing that posts like yours seem to silently imply is that if "the other side" would just accept Trump and his ideology, the country will be fine. But perhaps two peoples can become so divided that they would rather take up arms against each other then accept the ideology of the other group. This is the possibility that really scares people the most, and is something that no one wants to talk about.

There's no reason to accept the ideology, just the fact that the election was won and that a very significant number of people want that ideology. Ideally now is the time to engage with them and reach a compromise.

Unfortunately the reaction has been incredibly childish.

Exactly. And in the US I have a hard time believing the Democrats have done anything to remedy why they lost. In fact, they've made it worse.

After selling his customers to Facebook for $20 billion. Cool story bro!

How could he have denied that much money?

let's be honest, everyone would like to become a billionaire.

That is ungrateful on his part.

Much like #deleteuber this #deletefacebook tantrum is about Trump. Facebook was roundly lauded for helping Obama get elected.

Don’t let billionaires tell you what to do.

the whatsapp cofounders strike me as accidental billionaires, it's not like we're talking about standard oil, jp morgan, the louis dreyfus company or a typical old money davos-attendee billionaire.

>accidental billionaires

Not sure if you were being clever but that’s the title of a book about Facebook’s history.

You weren’t alive for the founding of any of those companies.

like all my mom does on her phone is facebook

Serious question, the US constantly states what side of a vote some lame senator or rep is on, but you never here anything about who is the makeup of the electoral college in msm - what their tax returns look like and who is paying them off. Why?

So, have one electoral college rep release their finances, and then you know the true state of politics

> but you never here anything about who is the makeup of the electoral college in msm - what their tax returns look like and who is paying them off. Why?

Because electors are temporary and almost completely symbolic. In the vast majority of states if the Republican candidate wins, electors nominated by the Republican party go to D.C. If the Democratic candidate wins, Democratic electors go.

The respective parties pick hardcore supporters who will almost certainly vote for the party that nominated them, and in 29 states they are legally obligated to do so.

No one cares about them because they never change the outcome. There have been a handful of times when electors have voted against the will of their states, but they've only changed the outcome once, in 1834. The Democratic nominee for Vice President should have won that year, but 23 electors chose not to vote for VP, so it went to the Senate, who voted for the Democratic nominee anyway (so the electors didn't actually alter the outcome).

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the vast majority of people really don't care what data Facebook collects. Addresses, phone numbers, etc are all publicly available already. Products you like, your political affiliations, etc, not a big deal to most people, not because they aren't aware, but because they don't care.

So ask yourselves, if the vast majority don't care, perhaps it's not really that big of a deal.

And maybe, just maybe, Cambridge Analytica has a target painted on its back because it helped get Trump elected, and we're being manipulated into hating them now by media that is engaged in all out war with the Trump administration.

> So ask yourselves, if the vast majority don't care, perhaps it's not really that big of a deal.

That's not the question to ask. They question to ask is how do we make them care?

Why should they care? I'll be honest, it doesn't bother me much. Why should I care?

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