everywhere, I talked to a Palantir guy once and he said "every time someone paints us as a Bond Villain the stock prices go up", have you already forgotten how Cambridge Analytica marketed itself to clients?
Odd how that works.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-co...
And the entire FB app industry was doing it.
The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.
But shadow ads can be a problem too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSMr-3GGvQ (you can be pro-Brexit but ads like this are still a problem)
It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.
As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.
Also one can look bad to the general public while also appearing technically excellent. When a significant fraction already vaguely dislike you that could be quite an attractive proposition.
If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you. If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter. It's a curious practice and I'm not sure where I stand on it.
What?
> If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter.
To the best of my understanding, Unit 8200 is filled with military conscripts, i.e. is primarily 18-somethings doing their mandatory service. You get assigned to it based on an aptitude test. The widely held idea that it’s a uniformly elite entity rather than the IDF’s space camp is a triumph of propaganda.
According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
Unit 8200 alumni have founded NSO which provides the Pegasus spyware.
Meanwhile, Lahav, the CEO/founder was in Unit 81, another Israeli military incubator for tech firms, basically.
If you believe the IDF has no involvement in what Irregular is doing then there's very little left anyone could say to convince you.
(The problem with “alumni” is that it means very little in mandatory systems. Unit 8200 is where Israel parks its dorks, and it stands to reason that dorks are the ones who tend to start tech firms.)
Kevin Mitnick? Marcus Hutchins? Robert Tappan Morris?