Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> Everybody has known this about Facebook forever.

This is not even remotely true, especially when it comes to the general population. I'm not trying to slam you here, I was of same mindset too, since at least 2009 (I stopped using API in 2013 and assumed things were clamped down).

I don't want to be a nag on his, e.g. Mustnt assume everyone knows what you know! Rather, I think this is an advantageous mindset to have. Anything you know in your profession, especially when it comes to tech or data, you can assume plenty of people (including future customers) don't have a damn clue.

View on HN

I think the point here is that the media has failed in its responsibility to inform. If we knew, they knew, and the reason the public didn't know is because they media didn't turn this into prime time news, the way the Cambridge Analytica story has been positioned. That matters.

Did the media know? The attention being given to the Cambridge Analytica story by the media suggests that this is a new finding to them.

I think one of the societal problems we have right now is an overwhelming lack of tech literacy. It affects the media but also (and more importantly) government. People simply don't understand this stuff, and the problem isn't going to go away, because if you do have tech knowledge you can make far more money as a developer than you can as a journalist or politician.

The media most certainly knew that Facebook data was being used for political campaigning.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

From the article:

> Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.

Also

> Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

> "If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.

This attention is too close after the moment when fb decided to promote your friends posts instead of media posts. Media knew about this, reported on it at the time, but since they were making money, they didn't give a shit. Now, since fb switched the news feed algorithm, they are not making that much money anymore and are using whatever means they have to "fix" this. This is not about media caring about the general population, this is about media wanting revenge.

In fact, the media has a direct incentive NOT to inform people about this because they often use Facebook and Google advertising.

That's less true for the old school media companies, but most new media companies are very tied to advertising networks for their revenue.

How many people, let's say specifically 18-29-year-old in America, keep up on national and/or world news every day? Consider that just about 100M of 236M eligible voters did NOT bother to vote [0][1]; that is 42% of the eligible electorate who either didn't care at all, or figured that Trump and Hillary were the same, or that it didn't matter to their own lives, or that elections are a sham, or that their own district or state would go a certain way no matter what. But from my own experience, the first of those reasons is the most common; anyone I know who doesn't care about political news (even while they may avidly follow sports news or entertainment news or human-interest news about the latest viral YouTube video) responds to me bringing up politics, whether face-to-face or online, with a comment like "Who cares."

[0] Washington Post: About 100 million people couldn’t be bothered to vote this year

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/12/about...

[1] A reported 137,100,229 people voted:

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

Great privacy is already here...it's just not evenly distributed yet.

I think that sort of statement applies here. Some people have known about what this data can be used for and truly understood the implications of it for a long time. Those people are also the type of people that have stopped using Facebook years ago. Most others are just now starting to realize it.

I think the point is that users had to consent with Facebook. Maybe they didn’t read or understand. Maybe Facebook should directly ad “this will fuck you” to the consent form. But people would still ignore.

My issue is that they’ve always been transparent about collecting and sharing data. They just say it in a friendly way.

There’s a whole episode of South Park with the Eula. And people stil don’t read before clicking.

This happens in many places. Check out the effect of unnoticed binding arbitration clauses - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-supreme-court-californ...

I’m happy if laws change to improve this. But I’m surprised too.

I think the big shift happening now was about this. People realized they shared there information when THEY played a stupid app game like Candy Crush.

But almost no one realized that there employment history was being shared with the Trump Campagin, because THEIR GRANDMA took a personality quiz to find out "Which Golden Girl She Was Most Like".

And where did we consent to this actually? When I signed up for Facebook 3rd party apps didn't exist. When my friends started installing them, I thought I was protected because I stayed away. I consented to sharing my information with Friends obviously, but with 3rd party apps they install???

I'd really like to see how that language was written, for a condition that didn't even exist yet.

A very common pattern of discussion is

Nerd being a nerd: Foo is terrible for privacy!

Nerd trying to look non-nerdy: Nerds say this, but ordinary people don't care! So Foo will win, get used to it.

This scandal however, makes it seem more like ordinary people would care, except they don't know about the terribleness of Foo.

Actually I think the it's a confusing mishmash of the two. People don't learn about stuff because they don't care. And its rational not to care about something if there isn't something you can do about it.

But when a scandal like this hits, more people decide to care because "join the bandwagon of protest" becomes a thing you can do. And that makes more people know about it, which make the potential bandwagon bigger, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com