Comment by SolarUpNote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SolarUpNote | Hacker News Reader

Compare ad tech that news websites use to what Cambridge Analytica did.

1. Ad tech:

As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

The result: when I visit a news website, I might see an ad for tennis racquets (because of interest), or a local bank (because of location), or DigitalOcean hosting, because I recently visited that site.

2. Facebook's platform, used by Cambridge Analytica:

I install a Facebook psychological quiz app (supposedly from the prestigious Cambridge university), and give it permission to access my data.

Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

They hire designers and writers to create fake news websites, and get their propaganda stories to appear in her Facebook news feed, where they appear to be legitimate right next to the news about the local sports team.

The result: when I visit for Christmas, I have to try to calm her down, that Hillary Clinton isn't actually running a late term abortion clinic out of a pizza parlor. And she won't believe me.

You are normalizing data collection by third party companies. The article is about selling our data to third party by both Facebook and other websites.

Truth is we don't know what any of those companies are doing besides showing ads. Maybe today they are not doing it, but tomorrow they can use it for other purposes. They know what people are browsing and what their interests are for a location.

Also they can pinpoint users by ip, canvas fingerprinting, fonts installed etc.. https://firstpartysimulator.net/tracker

Can we please keep the reddit style hysterics on reddit? I pretty much left reddit to escape the fake political nonsense. And with all due respect, you are doing exactly what you claim cambridge analytica did. You are pushing extreme fear and agenda. But for what end?

> As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

You are forgetting installing cookies and fingerprinting ( amongst others ) to track across platforms. You are forgetting using that data to target customers with tailored fearmongering news articles to better clickbait.

> Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

I hate to break this to you but everyone does this. Obama did this. The democrats did. Hillary's campaign did this.

I love how you excuse news websites when they cause hysteria and panic over nonsense like campus rape crisis and pay gap in male and female sports. Not to mention the hysteria over cambridge analytica. Seems like the news has done far more harm to you than facebook did to your grandmother, assuming your story is legit and not made up.

I recommend you go watch the 13th on netflix to see how news and media can be dangerous. The problem now is that news has access to tons of data about us ( just like facebook ). The biggest difference is that facebook was pretty much "neutral" whereas the news/media are highly biased. Facebook allowed both trump and hillary political ads.

You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don’t make any of the them better.

In Brazil we have the same mentality of “sides” and I believe that this is destroying the good sense of some people.

It’s not because everyone does it that it should be the norm, or that is not evil.

Our true challenge is how we can stop this type of propaganda without hurting any freedom?

In Brazil All the big publishers are in someway connected to the people in power, so our non-fake-news were never really impartial or independent. Some even say that the media should be controlled by the government (which is to me a 1984 scenario, but not so much different from what it’s today).

I believe that the only way to end this fake-news madness will be a truly anonymous p2p communication, but this would generate another kind of problem.

(Sorry for my english, I’m still learning how to write properly and an argument is kind hard to do, I may sound like provocative but that is because of my lack of vocabulary not my intentions)

> You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don’t make any of the them better.

(Both sides refer to the broadcast/online media & commercial/political ad campaigns)

Blame can only be placed on either party if there exists the prior assumption that people should believe all things which are presented to them as fact. If this assumption does not exist and without facilities responsible for fact-checking then it's only the individual that is responsible for dividing fact from fiction.

> You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don’t make any of the them better.

He wasn't saying this, he was calling out someone who, in a very dishonest manner, attributed a commonly perceived as bad trait to only one third party of his choosing. This, of course, while ignoring the fact that those he was trying to defend did the same and so rendered his argument useless and turned his deliberately included emotional cues into something short of deception.

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