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I think most Americans comments in this thread is displaying bias. To put in perspective, if Alibaba's partners was caught collecting massive amounts of custom

I think most Americans comments in this thread is displaying bias. To put in perspective, if Alibaba's partners was caught collecting massive amounts of customer data through Alibaba and using it to spy (in part for Chinese govt) and perform experiments/tactics on the American people, would they first summon the highest American branch leader of Alibaba in hush-hush manner or the most notable founder himself/herself with the most voting power on changing and directing the organization? UK isn't USA, if they feel that the liberties of their own people is being tampered with, they would want to talk directly to the big man, the UK-based CEO would rather be just a horn through which Zuckerberg and his team talks through so it would be more direct to talk to him. Moreover whole situation is like a Catch-22, if Zuckerberg doesn't go, it would betray him more.

equalunique 9y ago
This analogy seems out-of-proportion, IMO. With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. To me, this really is the legitimate status quo of advertising. As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests? Now, I'm not saying that the ideal utopia wouldn't be a Facebook-less interlocking combination of privacy respecting, free open source software, decentralized networking, and federated identity. I just feel weird how it seems like "fears of election interference" and "muh democratic system" are being used to effect arbitrary changes in how Facebook does business.
- bkor 9y ago
  > As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." Hacker News had various articles explaining that the EU soon will have something called the GDPR (https://www.eugdpr.org/ https://www.eugdpr.org/). UK is going to exit the EU, but it's not about that in particular. If EU citizens didn't give explicit permission for this data to be shared Facebook is not following this law. As UK is questioning this behaviour it seems they'll probably have something similar to GDPR after they leave the EU. Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given. That's what is not ok. All the other questions seem like strawmans.
  - Kpourdeilami 9y ago
    Didn’t the third party collect data after users gave explicit permission to the third party app to use their data? From my understanding, users didn’t read the short text explaining the information the third party would receive before pressing the “okay” button.
    - literallycancer 9y ago
      Fortunately, having sane data protection laws gives you things like being able to rescind an agreement like that at any time. Then the party that collects the data has to inform any third parties of the change and all of them have to delete your data.
    - Angostura 9y ago
      Users gave the app permission. The app also harvested the data of their Facebook Friends, who hadn't given permission.
      - thomasfortes 9y ago
        They should take a lesson from the spotify API, friend listening feeds are out of reach for third party apps. Since facebook apps request these fields so much, they could implement it as an opt-in/out checkbox "Do you want your data to be accessible by 3rd party apps without your consent through your friends?" This way, if an app request friends access, they would get data only from the ones that allowed it. It probably would remove a lot of value that can be extracted from their users, but facebook itself would still have all this data to use internally to target ads and they would limit the amount of data that can be exfiltrated to malicious 3rd parties without the consent of users.
        azernik 9y ago
        Facebook already made this change; however, they changed these things after the data was fetched and stored.
- ekanes 9y ago
  > the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. ... to become the government.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Ignoring scale of emotional reaction here for a moment, do you believe that the actual on-the-ground outcomes of this will be greater or lesser in scope than the Snowden files? I feel like there was a lot of bluster about the government tracking private citizens illegally but nothing really happened. Conversely, this time the wrong political candidate won using social media data, and now we might get some valuable privacy regulation. The best outcome would be privacy from both private and government, but if I had to choose I'd pick privacy from government. It appears I'm either in the significant minority or it's just easier to kick private corporations than it is to kick the government.
    - squiggleblaz 9y ago
      I don't like the choice. It's a matter of being ~abused. With analytics, many large companies are so powerful they can manipulate my emotions and decisions. Effectively they can choose what I will do. It's true that people and small companies have always done that, but I'm on a relatively level playing field with them. With these massive corporations, I can do pretty close to nothing about it. And in many cases we're talking about companies so big they're as powerful or more powerful that whole countries. The government could arrest someone I love and hold them under administrative detention because they'd decided "type of person X" is bad for the Party. But Facebook manipulate people's emotions - someone with that kind of power could encourage those who they don't like to commit suicide or acts of terror. It's not obvious to me that 1984 would have be different if we realised that the Party was democratically elected every four years and had merely manipulated everyone using a private service into voluntarily acting that way.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        There's an important difference between corporations and governments. Corporations rarely get a monopoly and in the event that they do they don't last forever. Once a government gets power it almost always keeps it forever.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. It was used by a political campaign; that it was not used by a government is...less clear. The Trump-Mercer-CA-Lukhoil-Putin connections are intriguing, and part of the reason this is getting so much media attention with the ongoing Mueller investigation.
- ljm 9y ago
  > I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. There is a very subtle distinction here, no? What you're talking about is relevancy but the criticism levied against Facebook, CA, et al, is that it's not necessarily relevant per se, but manipulating fears and emotions of people based on easily identified characteristics. If this was purely relevant then you'd expect Facebook and Google to serve you content that challenged your opinion, rather than vying for your approval. As it stands, the technology understands you like certain things and does whatever it can to hide things it assumes you won't like.
  - ameister14 9y ago
    Why would relevant content challenge someone's opinion and not simply reinforce it?
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      Ideally, relevant content (at least by the definition of "relevant") shouldn't solely do either of those.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ranit 9y ago
  > I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. ... Is the objective to be less informed ... Do you feel more informed when targeted with relevant adds?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Good question. Saying "I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant ads" is like saying I'm grateful for only seeing what I want to see, and not what I need to see.
- nicoburns 9y ago
  You may be missing the context that political adverts are strictly regulated in the UK (and most of europe). For example, there are no politicians in TV commercials, no politicians on billboards, etc.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    There are TV spots and billboards, I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. TV spots: https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+uk+party+political+broadcast https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+uk+party+political+b... Billboards: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=david+cameron+billboard https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=david+cameron+billb...
    - sweeneyrod 9y ago
      But party political broadcasts are time political advertising on TV and radio is allowed, by the Communications Act 2003.
- zeofig 9y ago
  >it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." Ah yes, the poor plebs just don't know what's good for them!
- beojan 9y ago
  > I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests? What does "relevant ads" mean? They're more than just ads for something you would want to buy, the message is specifically tailored to you, and they use what they know about you to decide what to tell you and what not to tell you. This is bad enough when it's used to advertise products, it's much worse when used to influence how you vote, given candidates and political parties will have views / policy ideas on many different subjects. Targeting means you only hear about the ones you would agree with, not the ones you wouldn't.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Firstly, UK political advertising is highly regulated. There are spending limits, spending reporting requirements, and a general ban on TV advertising outside of the regulated slots: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22238582 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22238582 Most people are comfortable with this especially if the alternative is lie-filled attack ads as in the American system. Secondly, the context of this is the "fake news" enquiry. It seems that the Facebook advertising and targeting has been used to identify people who are already susceptible to lies (conspiracy theorists, woo believers, anti-vaxers etc) or racism and then feed links to "fake news" stories that were guaranteed to make them angry while encouraging them to share. It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it.
  - alehul 9y ago
    Assuming Zuck being summoned is related to Cambridge Analytica, do you have any data on this that you can share? I assumed the data was closer to, for example: seeing that a person worked in a low-wage position (or that their likes would suggest that), and serving them an ad about how Trump would bring more jobs to the US.
  - phonebucket 9y ago
    >It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it. The logical conclusion of what you write should be that what can be advertised on Facebook should be regulated. I don't believe it's Facebooks responsibility to judge what should and shouldn't be advertised; that's Parliament's remit.
  - foobarandgrill 9y ago
    >It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it. An echo chamber is less acceptable
- jkFeiwi 9y ago
  > I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? That's what you're giving up your privacy for. So you see more ads that relate to your interests. And you're grateful. Are you from Mars?
- SmellTheGlove 9y ago
  A couple of things. First, the USA and UK are regulated differently - while you might be right that it's fine in the US, it may not be in the UK. I'm from the US, so I don't actually know, but there's a good chance here given Europe's data privacy laws. The other is that this might not be legitimate advertising at all. Depending on what eventually shakes out regarding Cambridge Analytica's intent, there might be fraud in play, and conspiracy to fraud to various actors that may have assisted in some fashion. I'm not saying for certain, just raising the possibility as this unfolds.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Or, for a more concrete American example: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-toyota-president-agrees-to-testify-before-congress-2010feb18-story.html http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-toyota-president-ag...

equalunique 9y ago

This analogy seems out-of-proportion, IMO. With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. To me, this really is the legitimate status quo of advertising. As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests? Now, I'm not saying that the ideal utopia wouldn't be a Facebook-less interlocking combination of privacy respecting, free open source software, decentralized networking, and federated identity. I just feel weird how it seems like "fears of election interference" and "muh democratic system" are being used to effect arbitrary changes in how Facebook does business.

bkor 9y ago
> As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." Hacker News had various articles explaining that the EU soon will have something called the GDPR (https://www.eugdpr.org/ https://www.eugdpr.org/). UK is going to exit the EU, but it's not about that in particular. If EU citizens didn't give explicit permission for this data to be shared Facebook is not following this law. As UK is questioning this behaviour it seems they'll probably have something similar to GDPR after they leave the EU. Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given. That's what is not ok. All the other questions seem like strawmans.
- Kpourdeilami 9y ago
  Didn’t the third party collect data after users gave explicit permission to the third party app to use their data? From my understanding, users didn’t read the short text explaining the information the third party would receive before pressing the “okay” button.
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    Fortunately, having sane data protection laws gives you things like being able to rescind an agreement like that at any time. Then the party that collects the data has to inform any third parties of the change and all of them have to delete your data.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    Users gave the app permission. The app also harvested the data of their Facebook Friends, who hadn't given permission.
    - thomasfortes 9y ago
      They should take a lesson from the spotify API, friend listening feeds are out of reach for third party apps. Since facebook apps request these fields so much, they could implement it as an opt-in/out checkbox "Do you want your data to be accessible by 3rd party apps without your consent through your friends?" This way, if an app request friends access, they would get data only from the ones that allowed it. It probably would remove a lot of value that can be extracted from their users, but facebook itself would still have all this data to use internally to target ads and they would limit the amount of data that can be exfiltrated to malicious 3rd parties without the consent of users.
      - azernik 9y ago
        Facebook already made this change; however, they changed these things after the data was fetched and stored.
ekanes 9y ago
> the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. ... to become the government.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Ignoring scale of emotional reaction here for a moment, do you believe that the actual on-the-ground outcomes of this will be greater or lesser in scope than the Snowden files? I feel like there was a lot of bluster about the government tracking private citizens illegally but nothing really happened. Conversely, this time the wrong political candidate won using social media data, and now we might get some valuable privacy regulation. The best outcome would be privacy from both private and government, but if I had to choose I'd pick privacy from government. It appears I'm either in the significant minority or it's just easier to kick private corporations than it is to kick the government.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    I don't like the choice. It's a matter of being ~abused. With analytics, many large companies are so powerful they can manipulate my emotions and decisions. Effectively they can choose what I will do. It's true that people and small companies have always done that, but I'm on a relatively level playing field with them. With these massive corporations, I can do pretty close to nothing about it. And in many cases we're talking about companies so big they're as powerful or more powerful that whole countries. The government could arrest someone I love and hold them under administrative detention because they'd decided "type of person X" is bad for the Party. But Facebook manipulate people's emotions - someone with that kind of power could encourage those who they don't like to commit suicide or acts of terror. It's not obvious to me that 1984 would have be different if we realised that the Party was democratically elected every four years and had merely manipulated everyone using a private service into voluntarily acting that way.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      There's an important difference between corporations and governments. Corporations rarely get a monopoly and in the event that they do they don't last forever. Once a government gets power it almost always keeps it forever.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> With Cambridge Analytica, the customer data wasn't used by any government, but by a political party. It was used by a political campaign; that it was not used by a government is...less clear. The Trump-Mercer-CA-Lukhoil-Putin connections are intriguing, and part of the reason this is getting so much media attention with the ongoing Mueller investigation.
ljm 9y ago
> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. There is a very subtle distinction here, no? What you're talking about is relevancy but the criticism levied against Facebook, CA, et al, is that it's not necessarily relevant per se, but manipulating fears and emotions of people based on easily identified characteristics. If this was purely relevant then you'd expect Facebook and Google to serve you content that challenged your opinion, rather than vying for your approval. As it stands, the technology understands you like certain things and does whatever it can to hide things it assumes you won't like.
- ameister14 9y ago
  Why would relevant content challenge someone's opinion and not simply reinforce it?
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Ideally, relevant content (at least by the definition of "relevant") shouldn't solely do either of those.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ranit 9y ago
> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. ... Is the objective to be less informed ... Do you feel more informed when targeted with relevant adds?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Good question. Saying "I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant ads" is like saying I'm grateful for only seeing what I want to see, and not what I need to see.
nicoburns 9y ago
You may be missing the context that political adverts are strictly regulated in the UK (and most of europe). For example, there are no politicians in TV commercials, no politicians on billboards, etc.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  There are TV spots and billboards, I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. TV spots: https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+uk+party+political+broadcast https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+uk+party+political+b... Billboards: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=david+cameron+billboard https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=david+cameron+billb...
  - sweeneyrod 9y ago
    But party political broadcasts are time political advertising on TV and radio is allowed, by the Communications Act 2003.
zeofig 9y ago
>it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." Ah yes, the poor plebs just don't know what's good for them!
beojan 9y ago
> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? What is the strategy here? Is the objective to be less informed and be directed to information that is non-relevant to our interests? What does "relevant ads" mean? They're more than just ads for something you would want to buy, the message is specifically tailored to you, and they use what they know about you to decide what to tell you and what not to tell you. This is bad enough when it's used to advertise products, it's much worse when used to influence how you vote, given candidates and political parties will have views / policy ideas on many different subjects. Targeting means you only hear about the ones you would agree with, not the ones you wouldn't.
pjc50 9y ago
Firstly, UK political advertising is highly regulated. There are spending limits, spending reporting requirements, and a general ban on TV advertising outside of the regulated slots: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22238582 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22238582 Most people are comfortable with this especially if the alternative is lie-filled attack ads as in the American system. Secondly, the context of this is the "fake news" enquiry. It seems that the Facebook advertising and targeting has been used to identify people who are already susceptible to lies (conspiracy theorists, woo believers, anti-vaxers etc) or racism and then feed links to "fake news" stories that were guaranteed to make them angry while encouraging them to share. It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it.
- alehul 9y ago
  Assuming Zuck being summoned is related to Cambridge Analytica, do you have any data on this that you can share? I assumed the data was closer to, for example: seeing that a person worked in a low-wage position (or that their likes would suggest that), and serving them an ad about how Trump would bring more jobs to the US.
- phonebucket 9y ago
  >It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it. The logical conclusion of what you write should be that what can be advertised on Facebook should be regulated. I don't believe it's Facebooks responsibility to judge what should and shouldn't be advertised; that's Parliament's remit.
- foobarandgrill 9y ago
  >It doesn't matter if an algorithm deems that my neighbour finds "relevant" an article on "here's why we should deport all the Poles", it's not an acceptable thing for Facebook to be showing people and they need to take responsibility for it. An echo chamber is less acceptable
jkFeiwi 9y ago
> I for one am grateful that these services target me with relevant adds. Is that something we want undo? That's what you're giving up your privacy for. So you see more ads that relate to your interests. And you're grateful. Are you from Mars?
SmellTheGlove 9y ago
A couple of things. First, the USA and UK are regulated differently - while you might be right that it's fine in the US, it may not be in the UK. I'm from the US, so I don't actually know, but there's a good chance here given Europe's data privacy laws. The other is that this might not be legitimate advertising at all. Depending on what eventually shakes out regarding Cambridge Analytica's intent, there might be fraud in play, and conspiracy to fraud to various actors that may have assisted in some fashion. I'm not saying for certain, just raising the possibility as this unfolds.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Or, for a more concrete American example: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-toyota-president-agrees-to-testify-before-congress-2010feb18-story.html http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-toyota-president-ag...