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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

A possible explanation for the sudden change in mindset:

Until recently, data was considered "the new oil." Those who sit on vast amounts of it were considered rich.

Now, after the Equifax hack, the FaceBook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and other revelations (such as Grindr freely sharing highly personal data), it seems that data is increasingly being viewed as "the new uranium."

Data, it seems, is becoming radioactive and must be carefully controlled and safeguarded to prevent leaks. Those who sit on vast amounts of it must now handle it with care to avoid societal, political, regulatory, and legal backlash.

The stock market seems to be reflecting data's transition from asset to liability.

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Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal. Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach.

I understand that the HN consensus desperately wants your statement to be true, but that doesn’t make it so.

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal.

Would you care to elaborate? I'm curious and not entirely sure what you mean by this, sorry.

> Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach.

I don't think OP is claiming they did, but rather that it was part of the evolution towards thinking of data as a liability rather than an asset.

Im amazed how sheryl sandberg hasnt been called out. Wasn't she supposed to be adult in the room

No! She is the one who is teaching Mark to play seasoned politics and not come to the townhall.

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford.

Since there appears to be some confusion (it took me a few passes as well), I interpreted your statement as the following:

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a discount from what previously only large nation-state actors could afford.

The implication, if I'm reading correctly, is that any mom-and-pop millionaire could practically launch the same sort of campaign on the platform. Or perhaps more succinctly and dramatically,

Facebook commoditized the weaponization of data.

Am I understanding correctly?

The traditional DNC/RNC campaign-finance and media-buy systems are not very efficient. They're also based on relationships. Candidates must appeal to broad coalitions of donors so that they can afford the TV airtime necessary to succeed. Ads must not be too damaging to the reputations of the career staffers and media companies putting them on the air. This tends to constrain the ideological space a successful candidate can occupy.

We saw a successful candidate from outside that space because the efficiency of Facebook's ad platform, plus a unique and possibly Russian-intelligence-supplied savvy in wielding it, obviated the need for (as much) donor consensus to achieve a winning level of influence. I don't know about "any mom and pop millionaire," but you need less of them in your court than you used to.

That scandal that has everyone up in arms is Facebook's complicity in Trump's election, which is a consequence of its enablement of extremists in general, which is a consequence of its ad platform's cost-efficiency, which is a consequence of its troves of user data. But it's not data that started a drumbeat of public intellectuals calling for heavy-handed intervention in the New York Times editorial section (a fingerprint we've seen before). It's influence. The establishment is (correctly) not trying to engage populism in a meme war. It's fighting back the way it knows how.

Politics are like medieval royalty. A complex inter-generational web of influence, alliances, and quid pro quo. Support of these influencers was required to earn votes, and policy had to repay these influencers - rather than voters.

Through the application of advanced techniques and data, Facebook enabled the circumvention of that at a shockingly lower cost than in the past.

That’s right. The numbers I’ve seen have been 10 million for the Mercer’s initial investment. This is a pathetic amount of money to bankroll an operation with such large scale effects. Assuming the Mercer’s eventual expenditure reached 10 times that, $100 million is like building a library in a middling size city. It’s an incredible return on a pittance of an investment.

This is a pathetic amount of money to bankroll an operation with such large scale effects

What effects though? The idea that CA’s strategies were effective has been disproven [1].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

I think the full amount of money and dark money involved in this will turn out to be staggering. Parscale bragged of spending $90m alone on FB ads. And that is just one highly visible piece of the puzzle.

Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford

I’m curious exactly what you mean by this. If you’re saying that their paid ads system works well, that isn’t specific to political influence. Further, the recent scandal was over data abuse by third parties, and the reported effects of that have been proven to be dramatically overblown [1], so I assume that isn’t what you’re referring to. Finally, the notion that enough votes to change the election results were suppressed/changed by some Russian fake news articles mostly written in broken English is laughable.

So what exactly are you referring to here?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

>Further, the recent scandal was over data abuse by third parties

The most recent wave of Facebook's ongoing scandal revealed that data abuse by third parties was one implementation detail of Facebook's complicity in Trump's election. Facebook's troubles (calls for breakup, regulation, etc) started over its crime of making political influence too readily available to extremist ideologies.

Again, you aren’t explaining your basis for the idea that Facebook actually has political influence to make available to anyone. The idea that CA’s strategies worked to any degree has been disproven.

Also, not to get political, but would you be this upset over it if the other side had won and it turned out that they had employed a similar strategy (even if it had been proven ineffective, as CA’s strategy has)?

Did I indicate I was on board? Absolutely not. I think it's a disgrace that polite society is gearing up to wreck free speech on the internet just because we didn't like the result this time. But of the people calling to punitively regulate the tech industry now, only the tiny minority who've drunk the HN kool-aid are approaching it from a data-privacy perspective. The actual movement here is about Facebook's assistance to Trump and other extremist politicians, effective or not.

You're right, but that's exactly why you're seeing this.

Fact: the "wrong" candidate was elected (according to >50% of voters and >80% of American billionnaires). (wrong between quotes because obviously in a democracy there is no wrong election outcome, and that's a very good thing indeed, even if it is not what I would have liked)

Fact: he did so while being dramatically outspent by the other candidate (and with pretty much all tv stations supporting one candidate with the one exception being Fox, which cannot reasonably be accused of uniform support for Trump)

Fact: The entire bay area is up in arms about this, and has shown itself prepared to destroy people's careers over this.

(and yes, it was the economic situation created by Bush, and (much more so) by Obama, I get it. However, most voters do not get this)

Now you're right. Even if the Russians supported Trump, it cannot have been a great factor. Fake news is another issue that I find hard to believe swayed the election. And, truth be told, there is both democrats and republicans rigging votes, it's not going to make a huge difference.

You're right, BUT, seeing this, as a democrat in California or Florida, requires realizing

1) that they've lost. They were in power and fucked up the economy bad enough that they lost the election. The thing about elections is simple: there is always a change of the guard if the economy does badly. Always.

2) (on the part of large tv stations, newspapers, etc) that they've lost their influence. That Jeff Bezos' money spent on the Washington Post was just wasted money. That the owners of NBC, CBS, ABC ... cannot influence people more than facebook can.

3) Have you seen any interviews with Hillary's election team ? I mean I voted for her (DESPITE the war comments, wtf Hillary ?), but damn, these people are NOT taking a "live and let live" attitude here. At one point I thought she was going to attack the interviewer (for asking "why she failed" after she explained that they didn't fail, they were robbed).

So if you haven't noticed yet, people, especially in the Bay Area, are attacking anything and everything that is even remotely perceived as being on the side of Trump. And of course, Facebook has/had Peter Thiel, and nobody is happy with him.

You are right, the fault is with the democrats and how they handled governing, and how they handled the election, not with Facebook, Russians, Peter Thiel or whoever else will get blamed next month. The fault is with them. They can either admit fault or attack these evil outsiders, and, well, clearly they don't agree the fault is with them.

Any conversation that even veers slightly in the direction of politics immediately gets prefaced with a warning that Trump got elected. And we all know, this is a warning that if you support him, for the love of God, keep your mouth shut (I'm convinced that this merely hides his support, and he therefore has a LOT more support than is generally thought. I mean between 1/3 and 1/4 voted for him in the heart of the Bay Area. Where are these people ?).

Personally I find blaming myself a very healthy attitude to failure. Step 1. It's my fault. Why ? Because what I do myself is the only thing I can change, and that's the only tool I have to create a different outcome next time. So that's where I need to focus my effort. And yes, I can attack who "made me fail", real or perceived, or with conspiracies, but it's not going to get me a different outcome, it'll simply cement in the failure.

Bruce Schneier has been singing that tune for awhile now. Glad people are finally listening.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

What's sad to me about this is, data has in a sense been weaponized. Much like nuclear power, it has potential for both good and bad.

I'm so saddened to see that so many organizations have collected and overstepped their boundaries without justification.

There continues to be so much good, totally legitimate work to be done with data.

my assumption is that anything new is weaponised _first_ and then slowly over time diffuses out into the world and is nett positive (it's like society figures out how to take the spikey edges off) but you definitely don't want to be in the leading edge of the transition...

It’s still possible to completely blow up the world with nuclear weapons.

And you think it's not with information?

Information has been a weapon since the dawn of man.

Right, but much in the same way that muskets and nuclear warheads are weapons... technology has changed the calculus on how powerful the weapons we have are.

The Springfield musket has probably been responsible for roughly about as many deaths as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but I suppose the nuclear weapons have more shock and awe to them.

Still, suffice to say, we've been slaughtering each other quite capably despite the level of technology we've been at.

What?

This was obvious. The only people who didnt see this in tech were the tech optimists.

Anyone else who has had to deal with humanity at large has warned that whatever was created would be used to help the powerful retain power.

The time for revolution was back in the 1990s. But that got lost in the baggage and dreams of being a unicorn.

This is just reversion to the mean, if anyone missed this, they havent developed the right balance of cynicism and optimism which helps identify the koolaid from the water

I'm an optimistic pessimist in a realist's body.

That is to say, I agree, it was obvious for a long time and information asymmetry has always been a tool of survival, advantage, control, etc. and not just in humans.

However, having lived through and been a tiny part of the "data revolution", and having seen some of the bad parts personally, as well as what we could do with data if everything was done in the open with good, clear intent and permission... that part of it still makes me sad.

I mean, the way the human race is going in general makes me sad, so yeah, perhaps I should not be surprised to see reality affect this area.

But, I'm still optimistic that some of us really are doing good and honest work with data and that there is still much more to be done.

There was a good quote in the Cloudflare post yesterday about 1.1.1.1, that said something to the effect of "we don't want to store any personal data, because it's a liability, not an asset".

The sooner companies understand that data is a liability (hopefully with some "help" from governments - GDPR is a decent step in that direction) the sooner they will start implementing a "least data collection" principle and adopt end-to-end encryption for as many of their services as possible.

I've never heard it expressed this way, but GDPR is essentially a tax on collecting data. Not in a revenue generating way, but definitely in a "discouraging behavior" way. It increases costs for companies to collect and store user data.

It’s ridiculous that a one person startup with no revenue has to spend time dealing with GDPR regulations. This should have been structured to deal with the kinds of entities that lead to the law being written in the first place. This is only going to tax small startups and stifle innovation, giving an even bigger moat to the large incumbents. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

Not collecting data is cheap and easy!

I assume you don’t run a web startup.

No, the way GDPR is written, the cost is null for most small startups in europe. And for the startups in need of personnal data, either the ammount of data that need protection is small (like a birth day field) and will need at most ~4 day (counting deployment) to be corrected, or they are working with state-related business (at least in France).

Source: i'm currently paid to create ML and data analytic clusters for startups and to give some advices on regulation.

It was one data scientist at Cambridge who supplied Cambridge Analytica with the data for 50 million facebook users.

The size of the company doesn't matter. One person with an API and a database can do as much damage as a massive company.

I look forward to using GDPR to solve nasty technical questions about data retention and sovereignty. Like many saas companies, we probably tend towards keeping data around in case our customer can make use of it at some time in the future. Now we'll be able to just be more hard core about not retaining data "just in case".

Much as I'd like to believe otherwise, I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle. Ever. There's too much money involved and our systems of governance are too fundamentally corrupt and unreliable to permit that.

I'm not a fan of "big government" in principle, but one of the things I've been feeling lately is that it's pretty clear we need something big enough to push against increasingly giant mega-corporations, something whose primary goal is the welfare of the populace, and not some profit motive.

Government, for the most part, seems to actively promote giant mega-corps, particularly with all the mergers they've allowed happen over the last 30 years.

Company: "Merging this and that will benefit the customer." USGov: "Ok, good enough for me!"

> ...something whose primary goal is the welfare of the populace, and not some profit motive.

It may not be a profit motive but governments' motives are sporadically focused on the public welfare at best.

That (failure to keep the public welfare in mind) is not the goal of the system though, but rather a failure case due to antagonist agents both within and outside the system.

It comes down to money in politics, where said money is a necessity to maintain an agent position within the system. This motive alone is enough to turn protagonist agents within the system into antagonist agents against the system.

Sure. But even if we removed the money, there would still be power, tribalism, fame, hatred, and all sorts of -isms to fill in the gaps and corrupt officials and regulations. I am pretty skeptical that empowering officials to regulate money doesn't just result in a new form of corruption.

I'd rather we make the government more focused and responsibilities more specific. We need to remove the incentives for throwing money into politics rather than try to play corruption whack-a-mole.

Counter to that would be to make things smaller again. Eliminate the corporation as a long term legal entity. Revert it back to what it was, a risk mitigation/investment technique for specific, short lived ventures.

This will never work.

Look, corporation etc. etc. are just tools for humanity to deal with complexity. To break it down into parts which we can manage.

IF we had larger brains we would have bigger corporations.

If we were a hive intelligence, we would have different configurations of corporations.

But we would always create a tool to expand into complexity for the efficiency gains or productivity gains we get.

In short - EVERY tool made that gives an advantage moves the system onto the next level of complexity till we fail.

If you have small corporations, then they will band together to become quasi corporations.

In a completely free competitive system, cheating becomes necessary to survive. This applies to almost any industry. In a weird way, you can't blame companies for cheating so much as the government for being too poorly structured/equipped to regulate effectively.

Cheating can take the form of: pollution, privacy violations, abuses of human behavior, exploitation of natural resources, corruption, etc. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a single F500 company that isn't benefiting from some form of cheating that is inadequately regulated at present.

Hell theft is the best form of business. Theres no reason to be so enamored by business as the best form of organization - it has its uses and weakenesses.

You're right in that the genie will not go back to the bottle, but we have other models for aggregating social data / building networks on the horizon that don't involve a central entity (state or otherwise) so the future is likely to look very different and I'll bet very "weird" to us now.

FB's leak was tied to Trump, whose election has many, many people outraged.

That's the only reason why the media at large cares about FB's data leak right now. That's especially not something to trade over today since the leaky API was fixed in 2014 or something.

Considering all of the leaks/breaches that happen, FB is an outlier and not indicative unless something changes with regulations and the law.

I'd agree that the outrage is fueled by the election, but I don't think that diminishes the significance of the shift. I think it was the force that was required. Previously, the trade of "all your personal information" in exchange for finding out which harry potter character you were most like seemed reasonable to people. They didn't see the value in their data, and they trusted random 3rd parties with it. Now people are seeing it.

It's like one of those 3d pictures. The "hidden" image was always there in plain sight. People just overlooked it until they stared at it hard enough.

Until FB faces real penalties or suddenly every company starts doing security correctly, there isn't a shift. Just congressional testimonies and FB trying to save itself, which is basically how every other breach usually goes. It's how Equifax went and before FB, that was the breach to do something about because of their position within the banking sector.

Equifax is worse because it is a true monopoly. Cannot rent a condo buy a house do anything without dealing with those government backed extortionists. Whatever nyt or the left want to say you can absolutely live without fb, using it is a choice

You're being downvoted because this is not the narrative the typical HNer wants to believe - but you are absolutely correct. And the public somehow realizing the inherent perils of collecting personal data is not why the stock market has been on a downward trend. It's trade war fears, professionals taking profits, and panicky concerns that we've reached the top of the market or peak of the economic cycle and the inevitable downturn is now upon us.

You're both probably wrong or right, who knows. No one knows why the stock market does what it does most of the time, they're just guessing.

This is true, but some guesses are better than others ;-)

It's an interesting point but it's worth remembering that Uranium is far more valuable than oil by weight. Many people wouldn't mind sitting on vast amounts of Uranium.

Also, keep in the various oil disasters. Dealing in oil also comes with it's own risks. No need to switch from that analogy. In this light, likening data to radioactive materials seems to me like spreading fud...

I think you were reading too much into the analogy.

Personal information should be viewed as toxic waste.

If you can avoid it, don't collect it.

If you must collect it, destroy it as soon as possible.

If you must keep it, prepare to fork out for the best security and insurance against breaches.

And never, ever, share it.

> The stock market seems to be reflecting data's transition from asset to liability.

I always thought this to be the key difference between the treatment of data in the USA and Europe. In Europe the culture of personal data protection is much more developed. In the USA it looks like citizens don't care and corporations abuse it to an absurd extent.

You can witness this by using any service for the first time: an American start-up will immediately subscribe you to their mailing list without asking any questions - the relevant info is (probably) in their Terms and Conditions. In Europe, you are most likely presented with a separate box that even cant't be selected by default. In some countries you need to have separate boxes for different scenarios of personal data use. These regulations clearly favor the user and upset the marketing folks. People often criticize the EU for bureaucracy, but I'm not even sure the USA has an office responsible for cases like this one, someone who cares and can intervene on behalf of the citizens.

Once there is a leak it's very hard to contain. It's going to travel across the globe in clouds.

Its half-life is very long, even decades after you can still find traces amount of it in the (under)ground.

The analogy can be taken further: like uranium, data can be and has been weaponized in a narrow sense, and despite the toxicity and trouble still remains incredibly valuable.

Uranium isn't very valuable. It's around $20/lb.

That unless you enrich it to the point that you will be considered a rogue actor if you're not a member of The Club already.

To Facebook, you're only worth around $1.50. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...

I don't. I'm not on it.

You hope...

I don't and have never opened a Facebook account... but I've very little doubt that Facebook knows me as a 'shadow profile' reported by the friends and family that have tagged me without my permission in many photos.

THAT should be something that an individual can sue Facebook over.

As far as I know, you can’t tag a non-member.

Yes you can, up to end of 2017 when I deleted my account. You just fill in a name in the tag field and it displays the tag as text, instead of a link to a profile.

That's besides the point of the original comment though. I'd assume even if they know stuff about you they can't make money off of you since you're not watching ads.

Demographics information can still be monetized. It's not as valuable as being able to show you targeted ads, but it's not worthless either.

Ah, true I guess. Good point.

How much is oil per pound?

standard barrel is about 42gal, oil is about 0.9 specific gravity, or about 7.1 lbs/gallon, barrel is about 300 lbs

Current price of Brent crude is $67.57, per ~300Lbs comes to ~22.5 cents per pound, or about 4.5 Lbs/USD$.

So you'd have to give about 100+Lbs of crude for your pound of Uranium ore

What about in contained energy?

E=mc^2, so oil ;)

I think this blog post is relevant .

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...

Lovely analogy.

Like so much other information, it sits on both sides of the balance sheet: Both an asset (if used correctly) and a liability (if collected and kept carelessly).

A client of mine was pulling his hair out the other day over GDPR compliance and its demands on his small business. The business doesn't actually depend on customer data at all; they just... have some of it, I guess. Sure sounds like a liability to me.

If that data is not important to the business then delete it.

I've sat in several meetings where leadership folks are looking for a data warehouse strategy and plan. The topic of importance for data almost never came up. It was "store now no questions asked, mine value later". This was in line to other buzzword sentiments like "data is the new oil" (people believe it, seriously).

If anyone would like an elaboration of this metaphor, I highly recommend these slides from Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

One important takeaway here is that if you think the "worries over tech firms" and their data are bad now, just wait until there's a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl level incident with all their data, like millions of identifable browsing records or grindr logs being dumped on an onion site somewhere.

I picture Maciej reading this thread while drinking a nice hot cup of "I told you so".

That's a great comparison, and is a concept bolstered by the coming GDPR rules in the EU.

I think that would be amazing if true.

Nothing will focus the mind of Facebook more than a declining stock price (and personal fortunes).

Until today you could leak users data and nothing would happen to the stock price.

This is going to be an interesting shift, and I think a lot of startups are going to grow legs because of this.

Or, data is so slippery you don’t need to own it, you can just sip leaks.

The problem isn't the data. The problem is people who think bad things will happen to them if any of their precious data is ever leaked.

Like if Grindr sells your HIV+ status and then instead of hiring you an employer picks the other candidate because they know you'd raise the group health insurance rates?

Let's not pretend that there's no way to misapply this data and that a lot of people won't be incentivized to do so.

Regulation exists to prevent this kind of thing.

Your example perfectly illustrates the power of data, and the potential for revenue, negative and positive.

And part of those regulations are the ones that prevent data from being captured (and subsequently leaked) willy-nilly.

Post your credit card information on here.

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