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Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
- mozumder 9y agoAny tech site that provide private user data via an API needs to make sure that data is guarded like it was their own site, as if their own employees were accessing the data. Maybe what's needed is a PCI-compliance standard or a HIPPA-act for general user data?
- objclxt 9y agoIsn’t this the intent, if not the implementation, of GDPR? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...
- riantogo 9y agoGDPR is coming. In my opinion it has flaws and I'm personally not a fan (big corps will have resources to comply and small ones will find it to be a barrier to entry), but if you want regulations this is as strict as it gets. https://www.eugdpr.org https://www.eugdpr.org
- evrydayhustling 9y agoAs a startup founder, GDPR is an enormous pain in my butt. As a human, I think it's terrific. A lot of the adoption pain reveals just how much we built businesses that couldn't care less about what individuals would like done with their data over time. If GDPR had been alive early in the web, I think we'd see different and more human business models, and technology to support them.
- adamson 9y agoThat seems like the only way out of this mess. Reading this, there's not a good reason to not sell user data to interested third parties if the only consequences are getting your app removed and your account suspended.
- rvo 9y agoGood. We can expect such behavior from vile conservative companies like Cambridge Analytics, funded by Mercer and the cause for Brexit. Why are they even allowed on FB? Such extreme groups should never be allowed.
- kevingadd 9y agoCA's political stance is basically irrelevant here, they're mercenaries. "Liberal" companies of this stripe would easily do the same thing if given the opportunity. The sort of work they do is intrinsically compromising unless your business is operating with a very firm moral/ethical code and it really hinders your ability to chase opportunities and maximize revenues. It's not a coincidence that Google ditched 'don't be evil', and doing that doesn't indicate a twist to the far right or anything of the sort: It's just the reality that being a wildly profitable advertising firm can require a lot of moral/ethical flexibility that leads to outcomes like what we have here with CA & SCL. The significance of CA's politics is specifically that they gave their services for free to a political campaign that aligned with their goals, which is already of questionable legality - and in this case, likely expected and possibly already received regulatory kickbacks in exchange. But that doesn't really matter in the context of FB deciding to enforce rules. EDIT: To clarify, Trump's campaign did pay CA but sources have claimed that they received a deep discount.
- hedora 9y agoNaming a liberal-leaning political consultancy that is this slimy would help. (The DNC’s behavior during the primaries comes to mind, in fairness to your argument)
- kevingadd 9y agoThis is an especially egregious case because it was well-known a long time ago that Kogan extracted a lot of really sensitive user data via the Facebook APIs that could be used for precision ad targeting. It says a lot about FB that they took this long to take any significant action other than getting a pinky promise from multiple companies that they deleted the data. Even if they deleted the data, they could have retained information generated using that data which would allow them to effectively abuse the original data for ad targeting - which they did years ago. FB had opportunity to know this long before now. It's bewildering that they knew this huge amount of sensitive data got into the hands of unauthorized third parties and were willing to treat assurances as a sufficient remedy. At the very least, all of their ad targeting should have been carefully vetted, but it seems ridiculous to let these third parties continue operating on the service when they had already demonstrated a willingness to blatantly violate the FB ToS and use unethical tactics for ad targeting. In practice FB users aren't informed enough to know what this means or care about it, but missteps like this really demolish any argument that FB cares about user privacy or ToS enforcement. They had a huge amount of time to realize this was happening and take action on it. At this point it seems unlikely that CA and SCL are the only companies doing things like this - it's not exactly a secret that these techniques are effective. If they wanted to make it clear to third parties that this wouldn't be tolerated, they should have cracked down years ago.
- maxerickson 9y agoFacebook employees worked with the campaign to help with their digital strategy. Directly. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/facebook-google-twitter-trump-244191 https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/facebook-google-tw... I guess there would still be advantage to targeting adds even more directly (using RNC voter data combined with the FB profiles).
- xienze 9y ago> It's bewildering that they knew this huge amount of sensitive data got into the hands of unauthorized third parties and were willing to treat assurances as a sufficient remedy. What exactly should they have done? It’s data, once someone has it, game over. It’s like trying to unring a bell.
- lalos 9y agoWhat stops them from creating a holding company and getting access from that? Seems like a rat and mouse game and feels like more a PR move because of recent bad news exposure.
- nawtacawp 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised if we see a mass ban on all FB analytic tools. Perhaps FB can create a new source of revenue where they either use that info for their own political aspirations or sell it to others they support.
- manigandham 9y ago> What stops them from creating a holding company Nothing. Just like the adtech industry in general. So much of the spam and fraud could be stopped if there was even minimal regulation and actual consequences, but there isn't, so these actions are usually little more than PR, especially once all the damage is already done.
- IAmEveryone 9y agoThis is big enough that Facebook is likely to stay on top of it. The company had become somewhat famous in its field, and they can’t easily turn that into new clients without alerting Facebook and the media.
- hedora 9y agoI don’t understand why it was legal for trump to hire Cambridge Analytica, which is foreign owned, to influence the presidential election. I also don’t understand why Russia gets all the news, when this foreign election tampering was so much more effective and done in the open. [edit: Downvotes. Wow. My comment is certainly on topic, so I guess “Foreign corporations shouldn’t participate in our elections” is controversial(?)]
- sigmar 9y agoHiring Cambridge Analytica is legal (just need to declare it publicly). Receiving contributions from foreign sources is illegal. Not too tough to suss out.
- hedora 9y agoSo, he pays putin $1, and then russia gate goes away? He publicly asked for Russia’s help with the election... That doesn’t sound like it would hold up in court.
- greglindahl 9y agoActually, no, when a political campaign buys something, they have to pay a fair price, or it's illegal. You can see that issue invoked many times during every election.
- colordrops 9y agoWhat I wonder is why Israel is so ignored when they have orders of magnitude more money and influence in Washington than Russia. One of the top lobbyists in the US is AIPAC, giving money directly to politicians. The hypocrisy is absurd.
- hedora 9y agoThat too. Trump’s son-in-law apparently took a $30m bribe from the Israelis while working for the administration to broker a Palistinian peace deal, but that’s a bit off topic (since the article is about how he accepted foreign aid during elections, not his open corruption while holding office).
- neuronexmachina 9y agoSome additional context on Cambridge Analytica. I'm guessing Dr. Aleksandr Kogan (who also had his FB account suspended) was Cambridge Analytica (and the Trump campaign's) source of data on individual Facebook profiles: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/26/cambridge-analytica-used-data-from-facebook-and-politico-to-help-trump https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/26/cambridge... > Cambridge Analytica used its own database and voter information collected from Facebook and news publishers in its effort to help elect Donald Trump, despite a claim by a top campaign official who has downplayed the company’s role in the election. ... In another case, in the late stages of the November election, Schweickert said the company acquired data on voters who voted early – data it collected from local counties and states – and linked the information to individual Facebook profiles.
- kbaker 9y agoI urge everyone to watch this video from Cambridge Analytica about their techniques with big data and psychographic profiling leading up to the 2016 election. Very dystopian, it almost feels like a seminar with a Bond villain. Quote from the video: > "we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America." https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc Edit: also this article is a good read about how they used Facebook likes to build up profiles. Also contains a summary of the video: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...
- alexdong 9y agoThe video above was 7-week before the Trump campaign and this one is after the result and a sort of review of the "success": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo
- natestemen 9y agoWow everything about this guy just gives me the chills.
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- mbid 9y ago> Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do Thanks for striking down the bad guys, Facebook, our ever vigilant guardian of personal information.
- killjoywashere 9y agoExcuse me, I think you dropped this -> "</s>"
- Stratoscope 9y agoJust as a great comedian doesn't laugh at their own joke, great sarcasm is best served without a sarcasm tag.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoMost insightful thing I read today.
- colordrops 9y agoAll my favorite comedians laugh at their own jokes... Dave Chappelle, Chris D'elia, and Bill Burr.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoI disagree when the medium is text; it's harder without tone to hear.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Stratoscope 9y agoYou have a point there. It is definitely harder to hear tone in text. But does that mean one should always put in a </s> tag? It may ruin the joke. As an example, this was one (or two) of my highest-voted HN comments ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893 If I'd added a '/s' tag to those comments, it would have spoiled it, wouldn't it? Part of what made it funny was that I played it straight, and people believed I was sincere almost to the end - or beyond. But now I fear I have led us far off topic. Back to our regularly scheduled discussion of Facebook, watchful defender of our privacy.
- IIAOPSW 9y agoAnyone else suspicious that Zuckerberg may be gearing FB to ban the analytic tools of his competition if/when he runs? If Zuckerberg does run, I wonder to what extent FB will be his personal tool? Could you imagine if an old school news paper baron ran for president and his journalists always wrote in his favor?
- bmpafa 9y agoHe's got full control right now, and opinions of him seem pretty negative overall (esp. wrt privacy/trust). I can't imagine it'd be any easier to manipulate opinions en masse if he were actively seeking office.
- jadedhacker 9y agoPeople aren't that dumb, but it is still pretty scary that he'd be able to scientifically design an electoral campaign that can be updated in real time using various FB tools. No other politician has access to power like that. I can't imagine what kind of coalition he could assemble. I don't know if it would win, but if he takes whatever position his data tells him, the only obvious thing that would sink him would be his lack of authenticity. Imagine a candidate that always had an appealing take to a slim to large majority on whatever issue (for people that don't know too much about the issue). In the previous 2016 race, HRC was perceived as inauthentic and lost. DJT was perceived as authentic to a substantial fraction the right (not the media class, though that has changed with the direction of the wind) and inauthentic to the left.
- xienze 9y agoZuck is a Democrat, he’d get a pass on all that, especially if it meant getting Trump out of office. Let’s not kid ourselves, hardly anyone in the media and government would make a stink about what he does with FB to get elected. This is all hypothetical of course, he has to be one of the most unlikeable people in ages, and the reception to his “I identify with you, middle Americans” tour really solidified that feeling.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoIt's too easy for this information to get out. There's basically no penalty, you just use as you want and year's late facebook cuts you off? So you start a new company, owned by a new llc, get the lawyers to sign the 'i am not evil' doc and repeat. There's no way this will have any impact until there are criminal citations on the people involved. In this case, because it's the us, there's not going to be anything criminal. Facebook, you need to sue companies that do this into oblivion. You are rich and can stand up. In europe, there's gdpr, the us has no defense. Remember, the chinese and russian govts (probably) were the ones that hacked the company that had all the security clearance applications. Basically, everyone but average americans have access to us govt employee's private information. There must be some blackmailing going on.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoI'm getting downvoted why? Isn't it true that's it is too easy to do this? The us govt wasn't hacked? see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/07/09/hack-of-security-clearance-system-affected-21-5-million-people-federal-authorities-say/?utm_term=.ba70af3c02ac https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/07/0....
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoNow my downvote question is getting downvoted. It's very meta. Let's see if my downvote downvote question get's downvoted.
- roywiggins 9y agoPosts on "why is this down voted" always get downvoted, mostly because they're unanswerable and not germane to the actual topic under discussion. It's also against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- noobermin 9y agoI don't know if it really is in fb's best interest to sue them. It might in fact be in their interest to allow the players to come back because that would benefit their bottom line.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoWe are utterly shocked to discover that people have been invading our customer's privacy to manipulate them politically, without our consent. Sorry, their consent, I meant to say without their consent. Furthermore, we had no idea that this was going on, as we were reading a really good book at the time and the radio was on really loud. That said, we are paying attention now and you can trust us with everything from here on in, as we are really nice and competent, honest.
- astronautjones 9y agoread: how dare you not pay for this data
- supergirl 9y agoI wonder how many apps do this and continue to do it. FB just looked for any reason to do something about these problematic companies to appease their favorite politicians.
- ericls 9y agoThe only things that can be trusted is the things does not require trust.
- dng88 9y agoI saw some comment and stangely have at the same time agree and not agree. Like the quantum cat unobseved. Is fb guy go for president ... those ent I agree but if you look into those payment record from trump election to trump org (ignore whether it is paid for cover up or not) you found out there is a lot of ways you can find conflict of interest and bad press. But no one care. You think human are wiser but in a sense human mistake repeat and repeat. No. Couldn’t be Then it comes again and again and again. You just not sure any more. That is American which can have kids not allow to drive but can get a gun, crazy American but how about chinese ... You thought cultural revolution and Mao taught a lesson. Then here goes again. And who will silly enough to hang on power as a sole guy. Power in the past get you a lot and may be. But what is to gain for a naked power without succession can give you. Like Mao. Who just kill his successor as long as he can. Why? Then here goes again. For this event as a stream of events yes I know like water they is not the same water and history do not exactly repeat. But it feels like water and you feel it has been seen before. Game theory with unsteady hand and not totally repeat but same game. Why we have to play these again and again, my dear Buddha.
- aslkdjaslkdj 9y agoStory from March 2017 about this: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/30/facebook-failed-to-protect-30-million-users-from-having-their-data-harvested-by-trump-campaign-affiliate/ https://theintercept.com/2017/03/30/facebook-failed-to-prote... >In late 2015, the turkers began reporting that the Global Science Research survey had abruptly shut down. The Guardian had published a report that exposed exactly who the turkers were working for. Their data was being collected by Aleksandr Kogan, a young lecturer at Cambridge University. Kogan founded Global Science Research in 2014, after the university’s psychology department refused to allow him to use its own pool of data for commercial purposes. The data collection that Kogan undertook independent of the university was done on behalf of a military contractor called Strategic Communication Laboratories, or SCL. The company’s election division claims to use “data-driven messaging” as part of “delivering electoral success.” >Shortly after The Guardian published its 2015 article, Facebook contacted Global Science Research and requested that it delete the data it had taken from Facebook users. Facebook’s policies give Facebook the right to delete data gathered by any app deemed to be “negatively impacting the Platform.” The company believes that Kogan and SCL complied with the request, which was made during the Republican primary, before Cambridge Analytica switched over from Ted Cruz’s campaign to Donald Trump’s. It remains unclear what was ultimately done with the Facebook data, or whether any models or algorithms derived from it wound up being used by the Trump campaign. >In public, Facebook continues to maintain that whatever happened during the run-up to the election was business as usual. “Our investigation to date has not uncovered anything that suggests wrongdoing,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept. >Facebook appears not to have considered Global Science Research’s data collection to have been a serious ethical lapse. Joseph Chancellor, Kogan’s main collaborator on the SCL project and a former co-owner of Global Science Research, is now employed by Facebook Research. “The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.
- username223 9y agoWow. From the laughable shell companies, to the use of underpaid contractors for questionable deeds, to the "we can do whatever we want" terms and conditions, to hiring one of the chief perps, these people never cease to amaze.
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- mind-blight 9y agoI'm curious to see what FB does to mitigate this sort of data grab in the future. Is there anything stopping them from creating a walled garden around user data? For instance, they could enforce that any code with access to user PII has to be run on their servers, and all results can only display aggregate data? It still can be manipulated, but it seems like it would be harder
- xienze 9y agoThere’s nothing they can do. Once you have access to the data it’s as good as copied.
- mind-blight 9y agoFB would have to not give personally identifying info (PII) to the app in the first place. The main reason apps (from a user's perspective) need PII are 1) Display it to you or someone else in the app, or 2) perform a calculation or action on it (e.g. send a text to a phone number, or display an add to women age 20-28). If all I have is a user ID, FB can make it possible to do both without ever access PII. For #1: PII could be embedded using an iframe and a url. You could even pass data (such as templates) in with url params For #2: FB would expose endpoints that allow actions (such as send this email to the user). They could make it as generic as they needed, up to running arbitrary code on a VM, minus networking calls.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoFacebook without PII is worthless. All that security is irrelevant when you can just bypass it all through the analogue hole. Chrome Headless just makes it easier.
- harry8 9y agoDump facebook. Just do it. Make your final posts informing your friends how to contact you by email. Follow up with a reminder or two over the coming weeks and delete it. It will be the best feeling you ever had from doing something with your facebook account.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoAnd after you dump facebook, invest in creating a strong social network in real life.
- jf 9y ago> It will be the best feeling you ever had from doing something with your facebook account. I second this, deleting my Facebook account was the best decision I made in 2017
- fuzzyoneuk 9y agoI've not been on fb for the past 3-4 years, the absolute best decision I have ever made, no more trying to decrypt cryptic statuses from people you have no interest in and 100% less pictures you could care less about.
- rybosome 9y agoSince early 2017, I’ve stopped posting, scrolling mindlessly through the news feed, giving a shit how many likes things I say or appear in garner, and subjecting myself to the collective fear and anger of my bubble. It’s been great! On the rare occasion that I need to go on (a friend has invited me to something and the details are on Facebook), I can get in and out without getting sucked in. Given this, I have no motivation to actually delete my profile, but I also don’t want to be a regular user ever again.
- abakker 9y agoHonest question: is this just masked preparation for GDPR? It looks to me that CA may have gathered and shared FB data, and FB has suddenly realized that they have a GDPR violation on their hands. IANAL, but I have seen articles suggesting that people will need to re-consent to the use of their data, and I could see this being a problem in this case, where the consent was never given in the first place, but FB would have to be able to report on how that data was being used. Specifically, it looks likely that CA's data violates GDPR Article 9 section 1 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/ - completely. GDPR violations for a company of Facebook's size would be substantial. In Facebook's case, if the fines were deemed to be "aggravated", the absolute maximum fine would be 4% of FB's annual revenue, or $318Million USD.
- tener 9y agoIs GDPR retroactive? I doubt so.
- jjp 9y agoYes in that it has no consideration on when the data was captured or acquired. And there is a trickle down to anyone you have or passed the data onto.
- tener 9y agoOk so you should take care of the data you posses now, but if you have shared the data with third party then I guess this is now their business to obey the law? I just don't see how you could possibly be forced to go and police everyone you have ever shared the data with.
- jimnotgym 9y agoI think the way GDPR could be consider retroactive is that the data you hold now is subject to the same test for explicit consent etc. as the data you collect now. So if you hold data now that was not collected in a way that is in line with GDPR you are in breach. However if hypothetically FB sold CA some data in 2015 without their users consent then it is CA that has the problem now as it has no consent to the data, not FB
- bitL 9y agoRead: only Facebook has the right to pass data to "firm that does political, government and military work around the globe."
- ucaetano 9y ago> In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. I guess Facebook is mad that Aleksandr Kogan profited from selling Facebook user info without Facebook taking a cut.
- itronitron 9y agoi wouldn't be surprised to hear that FB was at the same time also selling data directly to CA, such are the times in which we live
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago>> In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc. So basically FB's problem is that Kogan passed the data to third parties, without FB's knowledge and -I guess- without FB being in on the deal. Because FB's whole business model is to hoover up its user's data and sell it to "third parties". Third parties who may then do with it whatever they like, without users having any control over it. You know- like Kogan just did. FB is trying to pretend they're the responsible party in this - "Protecting peoples' information" is what they do, they say. Well, no it isn't. Trading peoples' information is at the heart of everything they do. And this is just one more example of why it is so harmful.
- rogerb 9y agoSomeone please correct me - but I don't think that FB sells data. They use it for their own uses, and customers of their advertising platform can use that data to target groups, but I don't think they sell their data to 3rd parties. Am I wrong ?
- jimsmart 9y agoFacebook themselves say they don't. https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583?helpref=uf_permalink https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583?helpref=uf_per...
- jimsmart 9y agoMy understanding is that Facebook act as the 'ad broker' themselves, as opposed to selling the data on to third-party ad brokers.
- SheinhardtWigCo 9y agoNobody outside of Facebook has any way of knowing. That’s the problem.
- jimsmart 9y agoCuriously, just weeks ago, Alexander Nix (CEO of Cambridge Analytica) stated, in a letter to UK Parliament, that they gather no such information: "On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica "gathers data from users on Facebook." Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data." Quoted from 'Letter from Alexander Nix, CEO, Cambridge Analytica, to the Chair of the Committee, 23 February 2018' (PDF), linked from this page: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/cambridge-analytica-ev/ https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z... — So it would seem that they've been caught with their pants on fire then?
- jimnotgym 9y agoIt is interesting to see Arron Banks (Arch Brexiteer and the money(under investigation by the Electoral Commission) behind Leave.EU) calling Nix a liar on Twitter recently. It is alleged that Banks colluded with other pro-Brexit campaigns to spend a lot of money with a CA subsidiary. By spreading it around the groups they would have been able to breach the election spending limits. It is also alleged that the money itself came from outside the UK (which is also illegal) It's a twisted web but here is an entry point with Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
- Cactus2018 9y agoCambridge Analytica Lead Data Scientist Job Description "Python for machine learning with SciPy stack and scikit-learn. Applied knowledge of SQL" https://pastebin.com/LMKN64Da https://pastebin.com/LMKN64Da
- inetknght 9y agoOne single person (Dr. Aleksandr Kogan) did all that damage, Facebook? And you think that the current method of enforcement is okay?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoAre they actually pretending that they give any credence to the personal information that a Facebook app could access? Back years before Facebooks IPO a professor I worked with had an idea to study social networks using Facebook as a dataset. They would make an App that would collect personal data and create conclusions. She looked into what Facebook collected and promptly stopped the data collection system. From my understanding any App that integrates with the Facebook platform has a large amount of data that can be mined. I think they started restricting this but still if you let an app attach to your profile all sorts of wondrous things can be found out
- gaius 9y agoGiven that both are in the sleazy data business and FB is the dominant incumbent CA has a good anti-monopoly case and it will be pleasurable to watch them fight it out. Whoever loses, we all win.
- gorbypark 9y agoI wonder what percentage of Facebook's revenue comes from political advertising? In an ideal world, I'd like to see all political advertising banned from their (and similar) platform.