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This fact has me more confused than anything. What did most people think Facebook was doing... Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make us

• jnbiche 9y ago
  > Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. No, there's new Cambridge Analytica information, as of today: https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
• munk-a 9y ago
  Because I still have Al Gore's voice in my head. I assumed they took this data and put it in a "Lock-box". You see, we need to take it all in and put it in a "Lock-box".
  • mhneu 9y ago
    I'd be happy if we made it easier for gov't to buy stuff like ashtrays.
• TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way. People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.
  • RpFLCL 9y ago
    Interesting point. I think you're probably right. There's a different emotional impact between being manipulated to consume versus being manipulated in what you think. Of course at the end of the day it's exploiting a similar vulnerability in our wetware.
    • jacobolus 9y ago
      Also, when that propaganda is full of invented racist conspiracy theories and defamatory lies about the opposition, it starts getting pretty ethically gross. If the propaganda was fundamentally truthful and respectful (e.g. sharing additional accurate factual analysis that people just didn’t know about), it wouldn’t have quite the same odious smell. There’s not that much distance between some of the ads and fake news stories flashed in front of people before the election and e.g. ISIS recruiting materials or Nazi propaganda from the 1930s.
  • Zarath 9y ago
    I personally call it "brainwash", as "propaganda" tends to have political connotations (which I think may be a reason you don't see it associated with typical advertising).
  • opportune 9y ago
    There's also the fact that political propaganda comes in a lot more veiled forms than corporate propaganda. Because it's in a sense natural for us to discuss politics face to face, or at least we recognize that some level of discussion about politics is necessary and good, we're mostly ok with things like celebrities endorsing a candidate. A candidate traveling around the country and speaking to potential voters is pretty much fine. A single person expressing their views honestly isn't really guilty of "propaganda". The problem is when huge amounts of money get mixed up in it. In the US money doesn't buy you political power directly, but it does buy you a voice (in the form of advertisements using mass media). It's still up to the listeners to listen to your voice one way or the other, but the disproportionate loudness of people's voices ensures that arguments backed by money are supported much louder than those without money (this is the thesis of Manufactured Consent). Ok, this is less than ideal, but things probably aren't skewed that much regarding things like social issues. Political advertisement, in my opinion, doesn't veer into the realm of propaganda until one of two things happen: either the source is dishonest about their intentions (e.g. a person fully aware of climate change publicly denying it for financial reasons) and true beliefs, or their arguments are veiled in a way such that they do not appear to be advertisement at all. For example, suppose out of 100 homicides in the US, 10 were committed by Green people against Purple people, but a news organization decides to cover 5 homicides this week, and focuses solely on the ones between green and purple people. That doesn't look like an ad, even though it is one. The problem is that there's big money in this type of propaganda; these days political power is all about controlling narratives. It allows for a type of "inception" of beliefs and values - for example, making Green people think they're on the bring of a race war with Purple people - by letting people come to conclusions themselves after being presented by a highly slanted distribution of input. This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in. By knowing demographic information, they could target individuals based on issues they knew they would be sensitive to, and slowly indoctrinate them with desired views. I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Ra.... You start by painting a narrative picture, highlighting race-related conflicts and painting a picture of deteriorating race relations. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this stokes racial tensions, creating more incidents for you to curate. By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people. You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"
• 8ytecoder 9y ago
  There are always different levels of privacy. Everybody knew Google was "reading" their emails. The understand of that was never that Google will expose your individual email to a company. Similarly people understood that Facebook used the data about them to monetize and advertise to them. I don't think anyone assumed they'd let someone else literally take that data.
  • colordrops 9y ago
    > I don't think anyone assumed Everyone who worked at Facebook or on 3rd party integrations knew this for years.
    • mhneu 9y ago
      So about 0.1% of the American populace knew that. (Ball park: call Facebook 30k employees. If you want to add a whole lot of digital marketers take that to even as high as 3M. That's still only 1% of the US population.)
  • creato 9y ago
    I've always been incredibly suspicious of the way Facebook handled it's user data. Remember back when every website on the internet had a box that showed "random" people that liked their website, and if you had any friends that liked it, they were in there? How about all of the services using Facebook OAuth that subtly leak social graph information? For exactly this reason, Facebook OAuth is always my absolute last resort, and I'll almost always skip a service entirely if it's the only option. Still, I always gave Facebook the benefit of the doubt and I figured that these things were handled by Facebook directly as a "plugin" to the app/website (I'm not a web developer, I don't know the details of how this would work), and the various services didn't actually see the data. It's pretty mind blowing to me that this is not actually the case. I always felt I was being absurdly paranoid about Facebook compared to most people I knenw, now it turns out I was not being even remotely paranoid enough. Does anyone know if Google is similarly aggressive with user data sharing? I've never noticed information leakages similar to the above coming from Google (so I don't hesitate much to use Google OAuth) but me not noticing something during casual browsing is not a very high bar to clear.
• laythea 9y ago
  "What did most people think Facebook was doing" People don't think.
• jacobolus 9y ago
  The story about the conspiracy aspect has been hiding in plain sight since the election https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/11/24/a-trumprussia-confession-in-plain-sight/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/11/24/a-trumprussia-confe...
• EastLondonCoder 9y ago
  I think that kind psychological profiling you can do with a Facebook profile is not obvious to most people. It’s not even clear to to most people that they are under 24/7 surveillance by using the Facebook app. There has been some raised eyebrows of creepy targeted advertisements, but it’s a different ball game of knowing that there is a company that has profiled you as an individual and then manipulated you with targeted political advertising using your most deepest fears.
  • zjaffee 9y ago
    Sure, but companies do this sort of thing too, and in ways that are almost certainly illegal. Using Race/Sexual orientation to better target individuals, the biggest difference between now and before, is that when running pre internet ad campaigns, you couldn't AB test well and measure direct impressions. The fact that computers are placing digital picture ads (that are cheap to produce), allows such extreme cases as we've seen to happen.
• daodedickinson 9y ago
  Most people couldn't understand ToS agreements if they had the energy to read them, which they don't. They assume protections in place that aren't there because things like the bill of rights do not apply.
  • ekianjo 9y ago
    > Most people couldn't understand ToS agreements if they had the energy to read them, which they don't. It's easy to understand, however, the business model of companies like Facebook if you don't pay for the service. That's what Facebook users should realize by themselves.
    • chc 9y ago
      The "easy-to-understand" business model of a service like Facebook is that they show ads on it. That's pretty different from what we're talking about here.
• CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
  > Additionally, this information about Cambridge Analytica came out months ago. Minor nit: Years ago. The name Cambridge Analytica was being circulated in hacker circles since at least mid-2016. Thus far, the only new revelation was the Channel 4 reporting [1]. Security nerds have been complaining about Facebook's business model for years and it fell upon deaf ears. Suddenly, the public gives a shit and I don't understand what changed. [1]: https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
  • letslightafire 9y ago
    My guess: Selling psychological data to advertisers is boring but if you get Bannon involved and rope it into the Trump news cycle, it suddenly gets a lot of people talking. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl... This article is probably the biggest one right now.
    • mhneu 9y ago
      Selling psychological data to advertisers is boring, but when you get billionaires and foreign powers involved to elect a would-be autocrat who is degrading American democracy, it suddenly gets a lot of people talking. Yup. It's not a surprise why people are interested in the role of data in modern public debate and democracy.
      • mistermann 9y ago
        Wait until people find out American democracy is smoke and mirrors, then you'll see people talking. They better this situation under control soon or that might just happen.
      • rtx 9y ago
        That's why we need safeguards in place. Everyone was happy when Obama used it and never thought it can be used by someone else too. Edit: Someone linked this below - http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-marketer-year/131810/ http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...
• manigandham 9y ago
  Psychographic data (personalities and traits beyond simple demographics) has long been known and used before Facebook ever existed, it's just much easier now that so many people are feeding data to a centralized system with easy access. CA's CEO is seen presenting this clearly in 2016, specifically how well it helped the Cruz campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc Worldview Standard has a podcast called RawData where ep 1 of season 1 in 2015 talked about how a few likes on Facebook would let you know someone better than their own family, based on research from 2013: http://worldview.stanford.edu/raw-data/episode-1-uploaded http://worldview.stanford.edu/raw-data/episode-1-uploaded Obama's campaign used heavy data analytics for both runs, explained as early as 2012: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us... None of this is new. It was only either ignored or accepted before and has finally reached critical mass due to the amount of controversy and conspiracy today, along with the generally expected fatigue of social media and the now evident effects it makes on most people's lives.
  • mhneu 9y ago
    This is in some sense an extension of the Myers-Briggs-type personality typing, which in its early days also grew out of data analysis. People use the Myers-Briggs typing at work because it helps you work with (read persuade) people. So you can make an argument this is at least 100 years old. As for why we've reached critical mass - it seems likely the ability to influence democratic elections, and the efforts by enemies of the Western world to use it to undermine democracy, are getting people to notice.
    • mistermann 9y ago
      > As for why we've reached critical mass - it seems likely the ability to influence democratic elections, and the efforts by enemies of the Western world to use it to undermine democracy, are getting people to notice. American politicians of both stripes have realized the private sector now wields comparable propaganda power to that of the government, hence the post election "Russia" propaganda activity burst and full court press on the story by friendly newspapers to rein everyone in, before they are neutered.
• dstroot 9y ago
  This was covered over a year ago: https://danstroot.com/2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-succeed-in-politics/ https://danstroot.com/2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-suc...
• closeparen 9y ago
  >Keeping all the data locked away an never letting anyone make use of it? Using the data internally to target ads. Once you let it out the door, you no longer have an exclusive asset on which to charge rent.
• mirimir 9y ago
  There's a clear distinction between selling widgets based on however-detailed behavioral profiling, and influencing the results of elections.
  • SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
    >influencing the results of elections. I’d like some explaination of $1.2 billion is spent on Clinton some of which came from Saudi, Canada, UK, Australia, Norway and that’s all well and good! But $500,000 spent against her is “influencing elections”. Is Facebook advertising that effective!? I’d really appreciate if people stopped using the term “influencing elections” that’s the whole point of campaigning. In related news, you don’t have to like him, but Trump won fairly.
    • mirimir 9y ago
      I don't like any of those. I do my best to avoid being manipulated by ads. And I especially avoid political ads. I want unbiased information for choosing. Restricting political advertising is not such an unprecedented concept. The risks are just too fundamental.
  • rtx 9y ago
    Its sad that you think that. Election campaigning and selling products shouldn't be different. What we need to be fighting is false claims.
• imron 9y ago
  > What did most people think Facebook was doing. Most people think Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch with family and friends, and most of my friends and family are bemused that I don't have a FB account, and think that any concerns I have about privacy are overblown.