Facebook emails show internal concerns being raised about Cambridge Analytica
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the company.
At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by someone more quickly than that.
FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3 months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But multiple people knew, and there were multiple email threads about it.
FB can't claim ignorance here.
My guess (only a guess) would be that the inside of Equifax was a toxic mess where plenty of techies knew of the dangers well before their hack.
And I mean, I'm not trying to exonerate Facebook here. Enforcing data access policies is extremely important, they were wrong to think otherwise, and they'd better have learned their lesson. But we already knew all of that.
- incompetence
- malice
I'd have to chalk it up to incompetence and mismanaged incentives. I reckon senior management didn't have a problem with what Cambridge Analytica did at all considering its the same thing the Obama campaign pioneered (data driven political profiling and targeted advertising) in 2012. Because of how warped company opinion must be on the concept of personal data, they probably didn't care.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I am still not sure if Facebook did anything to move away from monetizing user's personal information. Indeed after "Cambridge Analytica" added "WhatsApp" and "Instagram" as additional personal information collection data conduit.
Still today the only business Facebook earns all it's revenue is providing user's personal data feeds to millions of companies, may be with some additional procedure to fulfill the law on paper not in spirit. So they might just be doing enough, so that they are not prosecuted.
Its not a pro-active effort to move away from economy of selling user's personal information for profit.
Zuck certainly does not review Jira tickets. But at the end of the day he is the ceo and ultimately the responsible person for facebooks actions. This is a failure of facebooks internal processes that management chain failed to handle which he is ultimately responsible for.
It may not show evil, but it does show negligence. (I'd even argue that it shows gross neglicence.)
> It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details.
When you suspect a client of doing something very sketchy with data entrusted to you, allowing the client to continue accessing the data is extremely questionable. And "not being able to figure out how to get more details" makes it even worse; far worse.
You could argue the platform itself did not have proper technical safeguards in place to prevent this, but it's actually quite difficult to automatically detect this sort of thing. I'm not sure how else it would've been uncovered without a manual investigation like this.
You could argue that this is unsurprising given that Facebook's whole purpose is to harvest people's data, but that's nothing we didn't already know. This just feels like a clickbait story to me.
They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.
e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
The military or police don't really play a large role in deciding who's going to be elected though.
That's something very different vs the media. If you break it down to "they can influence somebody", then well, kindergarten teachers have influence over elections.
> so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others
As soon as the military starts a coup and takes power, you'll be absolutely right. Until then, they don't decide domestic elections.
They broke several electoral laws and even if they didn’t. The intent was to target people on the fringe leaving no possibility for dissemination, discourse or even a record of what was shown.
There’s no justification for that, that is poison for democracy. It doesn’t matter if it works or not.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-w...
Most of the money used to pay Cambridge Analytica came from Aaron Banks, who got it from... "somewhere".
I especially find the way they did it in Trinidad interesting. They set up an anti establishment movement saying “don’t vote” which grew into actual grass roots. They targeted it at everyone, because their data showed, that one side of the political spectrum would still vote, despite participating in the movement. At the election their predictions came completely true and only one side refrained from voting.
What worries me is that CA is just one company. Now that the cat is out the bag, everyone is going to do this.
[1] https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1161446789850906624
https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/963804731759038...
Your tweet suggests that a person paid companies that paid humans to tweet.
How is that the exact same thing?
they are ignored because they are aligned with the other side.
The New York Times reported in 2016: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Outrage Machine, Allies Push the Buttons - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary-clint...
It really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.
Until the US government is willing to stand up and nail them to a wall with serious fines and criminal investigations, continue to be amazed because nothing is going to change.
Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands of people telling themselves this same thing.
I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to get into politics. I just want to work on cool code."
He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning.
”Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical ’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department’ says Wernher von Braun”
I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed before every task out of worry, or that we can be morally perfect, but I don’t think we should just throw our hands in the air and pretend that only the person pulling the trigger could’ve done differently.
I don't think that's a universally sound position, unless you hold extremely pacifist views. It's too hard to predict the end game for military technology, given that the world is full of bad guys.
Should techies work on rockets/guns/missiles? Yes - your country might need them to defend itself against an invading force, or even to menace/subdue a threatening force. Perhaps one day, far in the future, your country will need those weapons when it joins a coalition to invade an otherwise peaceful country that refuses to stop burning fossil fuels.
Once you have confirmation that what you build will be used for harm I think you should reflect on that. Sure, it might be that the technology is used for so much good that you can defend building it even if it’s also used for harming people, and that’s good. As long as you actually did some thinking and didn’t just say ”I don’t really care about all the bad stuff it’s used for, I just want to make cool code”.
I think a good rule of thumb could be: Ask yourself how you would feel if the software you are writing were deployed against you? In other words if the designed purpose of your software application results in winners and losers, put yourself in the shoes of the loser. I think we would have a lot fewer people willing to work on weapons if everyone thought about this a little.
If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior.
Feeling bad about it usually has the outcome of avoiding the person making them feel bad about it, not changing behavior. And while I don't have any hard scientific data, the consensus in the world of negotiation is that overt guilt tripping is often less effective than not discussing the topic at all (i.e. guilt tripping increases the chance the undesired behavior will occur).
>If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
Putting the particular case of Facebook aside, my recommendation is always to avoid people who force politics onto you because of where you work. They are usually the least objective.
That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences. My point was that feeling bad is the mechanism that guilt-trippers and shamers are trying to utilize.
I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends. Personally, I don't do it because that's not how I want to treat my friends.
I understood it well. What we both agree on is that it will make them feel bad. What we disagree on is this statement of yours:
>This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company.
Now I don't want to claim 0 correlation. There sometimes is a weak correlation. There is also often a negative correlation (they'll stay longer at Facebook with guilt tripping than with no peer pressure at all). I'm not an academic, so I don't have the studies at hand.
>I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends.
It's a fallacy to treat negotiations as distinct from friendship. I think you're confusing bargaining with negotiations. You engage in negotiations with almost every person you interact with - friends, spouses, children, parents, coworkers, charities, etc. Want to have dinner with a friend? When and where? That's a negotiation. An ordinary person will negotiate a few times a week at a minimum. The discipline of negotiations encompass these interactions.
Negotiations courses/books often spend time on how your negotiation strategy will impact your relationship with the other person, and which strategies may help or harm the relationship. They don't suggest one never use guilt tripping - they merely suggest not to use it if you want to maintain a relationship with the other person.
Marshall Rosenberg on the subject - "We all pay dearly when people respond to our values and needs, not out of their own desire, but out of fear, guilt, or shame. Sooner or later, we will experience the consequences of diminished goodwill on the part of those who comply with our values out of a sense of either external or internal coercion. They, too, pay emotionally, for they are likely to feel resentment and decreased self-esteem when they respond to us out of fear, guilt, or shame. Furthermore, each time others associate us in their minds with any of those feelings, we decrease the likelihood of their responding compassionately to our needs and values in the future."
The more productive way to do things is to just focus the conversation on your needs and values. And leave it at that. Don't bring judgement/blame/demands/guilt/shaming etc into the picture and then watch the difference in how people respond to your political positions.
Maybe if we want people to stop working for Facebook we should run a Facebook ad campaign micro-targeted at Facebook employees using the personal information they shared with Facebook.
He said that there’s a lot of internal conflict and debate about certain scandals, but that he doesn’t get involved.
In a fairly benign way, maybe. But if you want to take the moral high ground then you should be careful not to steer people, friends and family especially, into an us vs them trap which inherently forces them to militarize their position. Myself, I have no issue with people who aren't for me or against me and I have no idea how the 'for me or against me' phrase could maintain popularity in any civil society. Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies into fighting their personal battles for often petty reasons. I get militarizing against big threats, I served my time, but there's just so many petty battles out there that's not worth wasting energy over and better left to more productive energy.
Sure. Everybody wants that. But not everybody gets it. And if some people are getting paid because other people are getting exploited, then their peace is coming at the expense of other people's pain.
If the Facebook guy is comfortable with the fact that he is making a living working for a company that is morally dubious (even ignoring that they make their money selling their users up for manipulation), then he should own that. But we aren't all obligated to pretend that isn't happening just so he feels better about his fat paycheck.
I used to make a lot of money working for financial traders. But I don't do that work any more because it was at best zero sum, but in practice I think it was mostly parasitic on society. Now I do work that I think is more valuable, even if it pays less. Nobody owes me the difference in pay, just like if I had stayed, nobody would have owed me participation in the fiction that I was doing something worthwhile.
Then there was a war in the middle east and there were TV images of dead and badly injured people being pulled out rubble on the news. They'd been put under the rubble by the missiles he had helped design.
He changed jobs not long after.
But it would be misleading to reduce this to a moral binary. He wasn't a bad person in most ways, and like most people who aren't bad people in most ways he ended up in that situation through a disinterest in anything outside of his domain, and also because he was allowing economics to do his moral thinking for him.
He was doing work that interested him, paying his bills, and keeping on top of the mortgage. What more can you ask of someone?
If you're working on Facebook, the question is whether you trust Zuckerberg's moral leadership. It was plausible to be unsure in the past, but at this point, you know he's going to do something unethical and post another "sorry-not-sorry" message online when he gets caught. You know your code will be misused, and that's on you now.
To take responsibility for the effects of their actions? That doesn't seem like too much.
Hardly anyone ever does this until they have to, on either a personal or business level, and those that do are seldom rewarded in this life.
This is why external accountability is so important.
If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at stake?
This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that Facebook is responsible for the election of the president.
For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.
That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it communicated?
> Thursday, April 7, 2005
> 4:12:44 PM EDT
> Mark Zuckerberg starts a conversation with Aaron Greenspan on AIM
>
> [...]
> ThinkComp: i don't care who wrote it
> ThinkComp: or where they are
> ThinkComp: it's your responsibility to get it done
> zberg02: yea but it's also my responsibility to get other stuff done as well
> zberg02: you know how it is to run a business
> ThinkComp: believe me, i totally understand that :-)
> ThinkComp: i'm drowning in taxes
> ThinkComp: and have 20 other projects going on
> zberg02: yea
> ThinkComp: but those projects affect maybe 30 people collectively
> ThinkComp: and there's no danger element
> zberg02: and i really do get that you care about people's security
> ThinkComp: you could have opened yourself up to another lawsuit had you left it open longer
> zberg02: not quite
> ThinkComp: oh yes
> ThinkComp: very much so
> ThinkComp: FTC code section 5
> [...]
But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...). This is even more scary!. FB is a shady organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other free biggies as well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.
I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign.
Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians.
This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians.
The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it.
It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
At the end, it states that neither campaign were able to persuade many voters. If that's the case, why do we care?
The reality is that Americans have historically been quite relaxed about the US interfering in others' elections - they do it more than any other country.[1] At least they're consistent if they're relaxed when it happens the other way round.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-his...
Both subvert Democracy.
Russia is really a non-issue. They have a pittance in terms of economy and a handful of bots and phishing attacks didn't really do anything to change the election.
The stadiums of people that still come out for Trump supports this.
We should be worried about big tech. They are altering our elections through massive censorship of opposing views and search result tampering to change the definition of the 'truth'.
If the Ceos of these companies were Republicans, there would be endless lawsuits.
Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become influencers.
I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids.
I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.
There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.
Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.
In case of"Cambridge Analytica" it's not advertising or targeting but personal datafeeds access provided by Facebook. It's the same feed they offer to large MNC's.
It's not an anonymous system but a system based on personal and private information of individuals including their address or contact books and their communication history.
I do not think Facebook provides advertising and datafeeda from anonymous data. I believe there system is based on intimate personal data they collect not the anonymous data respecting user's privacy.
This is the only way they make money using private and personal information including communication history, photos and videos to provide specific target audience feeds at an individual level with numbers to MNC customers. If it's an anonymous system and they follow the privacy laws in spirit not just enough to avoid prosecution, no one will pay them the premium. Since those anonymous statistics, company can collect on their own.
Maybe he can, but I've never seen or heard about a bank doing anything like this. I'd be fine with a bank tailoring their products to fit my needs better (I have spectacular credit scores, good salary and quite modest credit needs from time to time, which would be very easy and safe for a bank to serve if they were interested) - but that never ever happens. I get surveiled up to wazoo, get tracked on every site I visit - and the dream of "personally tailored services" that I've been told about for over a decade now is still nowhere here. What the heck are they doing with this information? Sell it to each other to serve me poorly targeted ads which I block anyway? Eventually leak it to criminals so that they can sell me credit monitoring services? Sell it to politicians which try to convince me to vote for some guy who I never heard of but immediately hate once they start talking about him? Seriously, what that whole industry is doing and could it do at least a little to provide some useful stuff? I mean, if you killed my privacy (or at least tried very hard to), can I please get at least some spoils from it?