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It's fascinating that widespread outrage over privacy finally materializes when data is used for hated political causes. Commerce, law enforcement not so much.

It's fascinating that widespread outrage over privacy finally materializes when data is used for hated political causes. Commerce, law enforcement not so much... but "Trump" or "Obama" and suddenly people care.

wavefunction 9y ago
More like "British pimping/extortion ring" combined with possible "Russian aynchronous warfare" but yeah you're right, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's just the subordination of my democracy and civil rights.
sverige 9y ago
The Facebook outrage is interesting since it is tied to Trump. When Obama did it, no one cared. For example, there's a video of Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager, talking about how they obtained the entire Facebook social graph and used it to target voters. [1] I don't remember any "delete Facebook" campaigns back then. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZmcyHpG31A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZmcyHpG31A
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptoz 9y ago
  > When Obama did it, no one cared When Obama did what? Nothing here even remotely resembles the methods used by Obama's campaign. "No, Obama Didn’t Employ the Same Strategies as Cambridge Analytica" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/#.WrJK9WsY5bs.twitter https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl... HN is so full of already-debunked right-wing talking points, it has to stop. This place is full of as much disinformation as anywhere else. Everything in your post is a straight lie, a specific intent to deceive readers and create a false narrative about balance. Edit: Dang, the flamebait here is the lie, disinformation and chaos created in the statement "When Obama did it, no one cared" which I was responding to. The cause of the flamebait frequently on HN is the frequently-upvoted lies and falsehoods, not my responses. My responses are entirely factual and do not contain lies or disinformation, unlike the flamebait I was responding to. I'm not allowed to reply to you directly because your software won't let me.
  - extradego 9y ago
    And at the end of the day, all that matters is avoiding an adult conversation over our absurd campaign finance policies.
  - jayess 9y ago
    Your response only talks about 2008. The 2012 campaign admitted that it sucked data out of facebook. 'The entire social network' in the united states. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaShw https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS... "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
    - cryptoz 9y ago
      So Obama's campaign violated the Facebook terms of service and illegally used the data they obtained, combined with funds illegally collected from a hostile foreign power, and used the user data to spread disinformation and lies about US politics? Is that what you're saying? Because otherwise, the two cases are completely different.
      - jayess 9y ago
        Nice goal post moving!
        cryptoz 9y ago
        > Nice goal post moving! I'm not moving any goal posts. User sverige and everyone else has declined to even mention which "it" is being referred to in this whataboutism of "Obama did it too" stuff. My point is and has always been that there is no comparison to be made here, the usage and methods taken by Obama's campaign are totally simple and small and legal compared to the methods taken by Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/Trump et al. recently.
      - 9y ago
- rhizome 9y ago
  Please stop spreading the "Obama did it too!" canard, they didn't exceed authorization.
  - sverige 9y ago
    Because Facebook gave them authorization to do whatever they wanted to do with the data.
  - macspoofing 9y ago
    Can you elaborate on the difference?
  - Aunche 9y ago
    That has nothing to do with Facebook though. Once Facebook gives its data to a third party, they have no control over it.
  - nickysielicki 9y ago
    See here for details of how CA's data was aggregated: 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... You can find that this survey was listed on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/comments/27nnaa/ussurvey_on_personality_wellbeing_demographics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/comments/27nnaa... Half the reddit commenters claim to have gave them fraudulent information, and they paid people $2 for completing the survey. How is that fundamentally different from this: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 > I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work. So a bunch of MT users voluntarily gave their information over, for $2, knowing that it would be used for research purposes, and clearly (at least on reddit) skeptical of giving over their information. But that's theft and that's wrong. A bunch of Obama for President enthusiasts voluntarily give their information to his campaign, knowing that it would be used for research purposes. That's categorically different, for some reason.
- pera 9y ago
  I have been campaigning since 2007 :) and of course I wasn't the only one: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html
- nemothekid 9y ago
  I'm struggling to understand why people keep bringing up the Obama comparison. At the start of the 2016 elections everyone, Sanders, Clinton, Jeb!, Trump were doing what Obama did in 2012. The outrage isn't soley in the fact that the CA campaign used FB data. 1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached. 2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news. Comparing the CA scandal to Obama is willfully ignoring these two facts that has led to the current backlash. Society, to the frustration of many of us on this forum, has implicitly decided to trust Facebook with the personal data of millions and has allowed the mass-resale of user data, provided that everyone else plays by the "rules" (for example, you can target me to sell ads, but only as long as you trying to sell me TVs). CA (and transitively, Trump) broke these rules.
  - xienze 9y ago
    https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... You have a former Obama campaign staffer saying that what they did raised alarms with Facebook. Hence, what they were doing was not OK by someone’s standard. Plus, the intent of the app is irrelevant. By using it you authorized it to get information on everyone in your friend list, something they’ve since disabled for, wait for it, privacy reasons because it’s not like the people on your friend list were ever asked for _their_ consent during the harvesting process.
    - astronautjones 9y ago
      IJR is an extremely biased source
      - drak0n1c 9y ago
        Article by the Washington Post on the same topic for those who may prefer a different flavor of 'biased source': https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...
- xienze 9y ago
  Even better is this Time article which is non-stop fawning over the brilliance of the Obama campaign using an app to suck down information in your friends list: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-campaign-connected-with-young-voters/ http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-... 2012: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? How cool is that? Haha bet you Republican dinosaurs had thought of that, huh? 2018: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? This is utterly terrifying! And save me the “it’s different because it was a campaign app.” Did the app get the consent from all the friends whose data was harvested? I’m thinking... no. From a former Obama campaign staffer... https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... > Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing. > They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. So a former Obama staffer is saying they harvested data in a manner that raised red flags with Facebook, news articles of the time detailed the manner in which friend data was harvested automatically (i.e., without consent) and yet, no one in 2012 or after stopped and said, “hey wait, that’s not OK.” Throw aside all the talk about false equivalences, what the 2012 Obama campaign did with data was obviously not OK by Facebook or anyone else’s standards and yet... crickets. It really is a case of “it’s OK when we do it” for Democrats. Anyone wanna wager that Facebook will really revisit this case like Zuckerberg promised to do?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ctrl-j 9y ago
  Maybe I missed the part in that video where he says they pulled private user data? If Trump generated his own social graph, I don't think there would be outrage.. instead they've got something worse than a breach on their hands. It's apples and oranges.
  - sverige 9y ago
    They got the whole thing. https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975
    - jayess 9y ago
      For some reason my prior comment with sources was deleted, so here goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS.... "We were able to ingest the entire social network of the US." https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing." "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."
- ravitation 9y ago
  "Using data" (said at least a hundred times in that video) or even using Facebook data is not what the outrage is about. I missed the part in the video about third-party developers trawling user (and non-user) data and then giving (selling) it to other third-parties. And the part where the Obama campaign was one of those third-parties...
- quadrangle 9y ago
  It's not that interesting. Obama is a typical politician. Trump is a bullshitting, dysfunctional, con-artist who would never have been elected under normal circumstances. Trump is not politics as usual.
  - throwaway7656 9y ago
    Well, there are some trends (such as dropping life expectancy for whites without college degree [0]), which are without precedent. It's literally unheard for developed country to have a dropping life expectancy in XX century. So, maybe US being functional democracy, with working feeback loop from voters to elites (no sarcasm here) did something extraordinary because of extraordinary circumstances. I hold no strong opinion here, but this is something worth evaluating, IMO. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-collapse-of-the-white-working-class/520815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-co...
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      Oh, there's a ton extraordinary going on. Our economic system has been a farce for years. We financialized everything and fake a working economy. The financial sector's portion of the GDP is so high, it's patently pathological. The internet is still young but has finally reached the vast majority of everyone. We're in the last years of any chance to avoid massive climate catastrophe as we already experience the early realities of climate change. And automation is truly in the beginnings of taking over the last unskilled jobs where (unlike all past cases) it won't merely be a shift from one industry to another. I could go on… I was not saying that everything today would be normal if not for Trump.
  - SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
    > Obama is a typical politician. > Trump is a bullshitting, dysfunctional, con-artist Therefore, Trump is a typical politician.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      Haha, no. Typical politicians are dishonest but they accept the premise of honesty. In other words, they care that they can plausibly claim to be honest. They form lies in ways to attempt to get away with it and be accepted as true. Trump has no premise of honesty. He doesn't care what's true or not. He doesn't bother lying and hoping to get away with it. He just wants people to play along and he can know who's loyal by who plays along or not. That's just one of a massive list of distinctions. The short of it is: typical politicians accept the social norms of their corrupt political world. Obama was one of those. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't give a shit about social norms, and that may be one reason some people find him refreshing — too bad that some of the social norms are positive, and throwing it all away is reckless. Anyway, my pithy initial reply wasn't clear enough, so it works for the joke. But really, Trump is not a typical politician. He's not even anything like a typical real-estate developer.
- zz32asdf 9y ago
  My guess is you're in a bit of an echo chamber if you're hearing a lot of "Delete Facebook" rhetoric. There's been no change in Google trends for "delete Facebook" and similar. I suspect people will stop caring about Facebook in this context. It's handy, but not held in the same regard socially as a bank or government. Those things impact multiple generations. Facebook will, at best, impact a couple generations.
- api 9y ago
  What the Trump campaign did was more aggressive and dishonest. They took it too far, finally inspiring a backlash. It happens with lots of things: crime, financial bubbles, etc. Eventually you hit a critical mass and a reaction starts. Once started the reaction spreads virally and feeds on itself. It also doesn't help that Trump is allied with and most ardently supported by neo-Nazis. Not claiming all his supporters are such, but that's obviously his most vocal and enthusiastic base.
- gord288 9y ago
  Link: 'No, Obama Didn’t Employ the Same Strategies as Cambridge Analytica' https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...
- mc32 9y ago
  Sometimes people who scrutinize things fail to see it from the working class's perspective (the "poorly educated" be they white or black, or something else.) I think there are quite a few people on HN who never hung out with poor people or never paid attention to how they may think, in some situations. If their "horse" wins, whatever the means, they're glad it wins. Case in point is O.J. Everyone knew he got away with a crime, but despite that, people were happy to see him stick it to the man. If Obama won on FB data, people who voted for him, on balance, would not care. People who voted for Trump, on balance, would not care, if he won on the back of FB data --we don't know the actual degree of the usage, but for argument's sake, let's pretend it was material. Even "highly educated" people are susceptible to this bias.
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    Your assertion that the poorly-educated/working-class don't care about integrity is incredibly condescending and ignorant.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Explain Deflategate and the OJ trial reactions. I also grew up with them. It's not condescending, it's been observational. I didn't claim it's universal or it's like that for everything in their lives, but if one of their horses cheats a bit, gets away with something, it's not the end of the world.
      - ikeyany 9y ago
        > Explain Deflategate and the OJ trial reactions. The loudest and most attention-grabbing voices are generally the least thoughtful. The reasonable voices tend to go unnoticed.
        mc32 9y ago
        I'll grant you that's true in the media --but when I was in those circles, i.e. poor, it wasn't just the loudest. Normal people would have similar reactions. I think there is a bit of, "hey, we're owed one, it's not dignified, but if that's what it took, so be it."
- jorblumesea 9y ago
  Obama seemed to do it in a less negative way. The Obama campaign used it to encourage people to get out and vote. The ads run in the Trump campaign seem far more nefarious and suppressive of voting, targeting minority populations and other would be democratic voters. Seems far, far darker than anything Obama did, and in many ways, fairly anti American. So not surprising that people take notice of that kind of stuff. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...
hangonhn 9y ago
But that is very human: we are really, really bad at grasping abstract ideas but make something concrete and we will react. I can talk about privacy with someone until their ear falls off but to most people I sound like a lunatic. Show them how we can be manipulated into sometimes literally tearing each other apart and suddenly people care.
aidenn0 9y ago
One of my friends mentioned that Trump denying climate change galvanized a lot of support for reducing greenhouse emissions. Apparently people hate Trump more than they like our planet...
- api 9y ago
  American politics has a certain "wicker man" aspect to it. We elect a representative of that which is to be destroyed. We do the same with celebrities, raising them up only to symbolically sacrifice them with scandal. Note the explosion of vocal atheism and decline of the political power of the evangelical movement during Bush II, the rise of the alt-right during Obama, and now an explosion of social justice and #metoo type stuff during Trump. Maybe the best strategy is to vote for your least favorite candidate?
cmurf 9y ago
It's not just that. There's also mainstream media having an incentive to attack competitors. There is a legitimate case to be made if the NYTimes did exactly what Facebook did there would be even more outrage. Also, it's Facebook losing control of data to a company that has admitted on video that they setup politicians in fake situations with hookers and use that to pressure the politician as well as create fake new stories to impugn that politician. This is a variation on blackmail and Facebook data and infrastructure is the vehicle for actualizing a part of that blackmail, even though it's libel. There's also the pile on effect. There's also the loss of trust in Facebook because we've been here before. Zuckerberg has variably told people to "calm down" in 2006, to claiming that privacy is no longer a social norm in 2010. And also this ideological statement “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.” The idea that privacy is itself a detriment to the world. I found it an obscenity in 2010 when he said it, and the recent events of the past year prove that this is an embedded part of what Facebook is and it cannot be removed without destroying Facebook. Today's statement is likewise telling. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. And is it now understood, and you know what went wrong? No. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. The most important actions have already been taken, are unspecified, yet this mess still happened meaning those actions were insufficient. Whether this is an assessment problem, a failure to implement safeguards problem, or bad ideology, the net result is loss of trust. I've never trusted Facebook and everything that's happened over 10 years with this company just reinforces how right I was to not trust them. That history is 95% not Trump or Obama related.
throwaway7656 9y ago
You gotta understand the ruling elites though. It was fun to watch different "Springs" happening in some distant lands. Not so much fun when "American Spring" happens in your own country, even if it's a "mild" edition.
- extradego 9y ago
  You're aware of Occupy Wall Street, right? Corporate corruption is the issue at the root of all of the above, very much including this Facebook mess.
colordrops 9y ago
Commerce and law enforcement don't have opposing forces with huge political propaganda/PR machines behind them. Trump is opposed by the Democrats, and Obama is opposed by the Republicans. Both parties are public sentiment manipulation machines.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  What a vapid post. It's X vs Y, and everything is relative to that? Here's an exercise for you. Identify federal law enforcement agencies, and see what public statements and actions they've taken on this. There is not partisan symmetry, but I won't give the answer away.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Apparently you have a reading comprehension problem. My point is precisely what you said, which is that there is not partisan symmetry with law enforcement agencies.
    - dang 9y ago
      Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how someone read or didn't read your comment. It breaks the HN guidelines badly and makes this place worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
eftychis 9y ago
People care about their "football team" [party] and their small economic and social bubble. They are not good in general to see how things affect them. Fun fact: most fiscal policies have as a goal to get people to invest their money and get growth back in. Their effect is psychological. If the effects sound like they will have a positive effect in my little bubble I will start spending and investing, as I feel the Big Brother is ensuring a positive future for me. In fact, I as an individual impact the economy and not the Big Brother directly, as i) I spread the positive feeling and ii) invest. Hence, the consensus of the market is positive. See Keyene's "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (http://cas2.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/courses/econ645/winter2011/generaltheory.pdf http://cas2.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/co...) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment%2C_Interest_and_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...) chapter 12. The average per person confidence for the short term affects the long term progress. People usually find no precedence to connect their privacy to the economic or political success. Now events start rolling stating otherwise. This article for instance states claims that their lack of privacy might have impacted the election, a matter most people feel affects their bubble. And rightly so. Thus why the mild reactions. Example 2: People in security world/academia have been paranoid about what NSA was doing. The average Joe did not care about their data till the E. Snowden fiasco. The "mob reaction" told them to care. Then it subsided a bit again. Fortunately, it left the average person maybe a bit more aware on average. The impact was more money flowing towards security research and the rest of the world took note. As a last (desperate) solution, I hope events like this hit the public where it hurts. Equifax was not enough, but it was a wake up call for some. This Facebook scandal probably will not do the job for the average Jane/Joe, but maybe the next one will. At that point people will either have to take a step or we will wake up in an Orwellian world. We may need an event so drastic that relates people's privacy with their bubble and fast. Remember the "sudden" economic/social disasters of today are usually decades in the making (1920s, 2007, Russian revolution, most likely "x (social) revolution", where x is your country).
IAmEveryone 9y ago
At least half the country feel like they were actually harmed, and even the rest sees the danger coming closer. I actually don’t care, or may even prefer, if commercial ads are perfectly targeted at me.
mch82 9y ago
Am I wrong that there is a clear difference between big data marketing methods and military information operations methods? > [SCL Group's] expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news. 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...
SN76477 9y ago
that is the nature of things. big changes require a lot of accumulation of small things.

wavefunction 9y ago

More like "British pimping/extortion ring" combined with possible "Russian aynchronous warfare" but yeah you're right, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's just the subordination of my democracy and civil rights.

sverige 9y ago

The Facebook outrage is interesting since it is tied to Trump. When Obama did it, no one cared. For example, there's a video of Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager, talking about how they obtained the entire Facebook social graph and used it to target voters. [1] I don't remember any "delete Facebook" campaigns back then. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZmcyHpG31A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZmcyHpG31A

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cryptoz 9y ago
> When Obama did it, no one cared When Obama did what? Nothing here even remotely resembles the methods used by Obama's campaign. "No, Obama Didn’t Employ the Same Strategies as Cambridge Analytica" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/#.WrJK9WsY5bs.twitter https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl... HN is so full of already-debunked right-wing talking points, it has to stop. This place is full of as much disinformation as anywhere else. Everything in your post is a straight lie, a specific intent to deceive readers and create a false narrative about balance. Edit: Dang, the flamebait here is the lie, disinformation and chaos created in the statement "When Obama did it, no one cared" which I was responding to. The cause of the flamebait frequently on HN is the frequently-upvoted lies and falsehoods, not my responses. My responses are entirely factual and do not contain lies or disinformation, unlike the flamebait I was responding to. I'm not allowed to reply to you directly because your software won't let me.
- extradego 9y ago
  And at the end of the day, all that matters is avoiding an adult conversation over our absurd campaign finance policies.
- jayess 9y ago
  Your response only talks about 2008. The 2012 campaign admitted that it sucked data out of facebook. 'The entire social network' in the united states. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaShw https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS... "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
  - cryptoz 9y ago
    So Obama's campaign violated the Facebook terms of service and illegally used the data they obtained, combined with funds illegally collected from a hostile foreign power, and used the user data to spread disinformation and lies about US politics? Is that what you're saying? Because otherwise, the two cases are completely different.
    - jayess 9y ago
      Nice goal post moving!
      - cryptoz 9y ago
        > Nice goal post moving! I'm not moving any goal posts. User sverige and everyone else has declined to even mention which "it" is being referred to in this whataboutism of "Obama did it too" stuff. My point is and has always been that there is no comparison to be made here, the usage and methods taken by Obama's campaign are totally simple and small and legal compared to the methods taken by Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/Trump et al. recently.
    - 9y ago
rhizome 9y ago
Please stop spreading the "Obama did it too!" canard, they didn't exceed authorization.
- sverige 9y ago
  Because Facebook gave them authorization to do whatever they wanted to do with the data.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on the difference?
- Aunche 9y ago
  That has nothing to do with Facebook though. Once Facebook gives its data to a third party, they have no control over it.
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  See here for details of how CA's data was aggregated: 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... You can find that this survey was listed on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/comments/27nnaa/ussurvey_on_personality_wellbeing_demographics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/comments/27nnaa... Half the reddit commenters claim to have gave them fraudulent information, and they paid people $2 for completing the survey. How is that fundamentally different from this: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 > I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work. So a bunch of MT users voluntarily gave their information over, for $2, knowing that it would be used for research purposes, and clearly (at least on reddit) skeptical of giving over their information. But that's theft and that's wrong. A bunch of Obama for President enthusiasts voluntarily give their information to his campaign, knowing that it would be used for research purposes. That's categorically different, for some reason.
pera 9y ago
I have been campaigning since 2007 :) and of course I wasn't the only one: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html
nemothekid 9y ago
I'm struggling to understand why people keep bringing up the Obama comparison. At the start of the 2016 elections everyone, Sanders, Clinton, Jeb!, Trump were doing what Obama did in 2012. The outrage isn't soley in the fact that the CA campaign used FB data. 1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached. 2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news. Comparing the CA scandal to Obama is willfully ignoring these two facts that has led to the current backlash. Society, to the frustration of many of us on this forum, has implicitly decided to trust Facebook with the personal data of millions and has allowed the mass-resale of user data, provided that everyone else plays by the "rules" (for example, you can target me to sell ads, but only as long as you trying to sell me TVs). CA (and transitively, Trump) broke these rules.
- xienze 9y ago
  https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... You have a former Obama campaign staffer saying that what they did raised alarms with Facebook. Hence, what they were doing was not OK by someone’s standard. Plus, the intent of the app is irrelevant. By using it you authorized it to get information on everyone in your friend list, something they’ve since disabled for, wait for it, privacy reasons because it’s not like the people on your friend list were ever asked for _their_ consent during the harvesting process.
  - astronautjones 9y ago
    IJR is an extremely biased source
    - drak0n1c 9y ago
      Article by the Washington Post on the same topic for those who may prefer a different flavor of 'biased source': https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...
xienze 9y ago
Even better is this Time article which is non-stop fawning over the brilliance of the Obama campaign using an app to suck down information in your friends list: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-campaign-connected-with-young-voters/ http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-... 2012: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? How cool is that? Haha bet you Republican dinosaurs had thought of that, huh? 2018: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? This is utterly terrifying! And save me the “it’s different because it was a campaign app.” Did the app get the consent from all the friends whose data was harvested? I’m thinking... no. From a former Obama campaign staffer... https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... > Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing. > They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. So a former Obama staffer is saying they harvested data in a manner that raised red flags with Facebook, news articles of the time detailed the manner in which friend data was harvested automatically (i.e., without consent) and yet, no one in 2012 or after stopped and said, “hey wait, that’s not OK.” Throw aside all the talk about false equivalences, what the 2012 Obama campaign did with data was obviously not OK by Facebook or anyone else’s standards and yet... crickets. It really is a case of “it’s OK when we do it” for Democrats. Anyone wanna wager that Facebook will really revisit this case like Zuckerberg promised to do?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ctrl-j 9y ago
Maybe I missed the part in that video where he says they pulled private user data? If Trump generated his own social graph, I don't think there would be outrage.. instead they've got something worse than a breach on their hands. It's apples and oranges.
- sverige 9y ago
  They got the whole thing. https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975
  - jayess 9y ago
    For some reason my prior comment with sources was deleted, so here goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1129&v=LGiiQUMaS.... "We were able to ingest the entire social network of the US." https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing." "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."
ravitation 9y ago
"Using data" (said at least a hundred times in that video) or even using Facebook data is not what the outrage is about. I missed the part in the video about third-party developers trawling user (and non-user) data and then giving (selling) it to other third-parties. And the part where the Obama campaign was one of those third-parties...
quadrangle 9y ago
It's not that interesting. Obama is a typical politician. Trump is a bullshitting, dysfunctional, con-artist who would never have been elected under normal circumstances. Trump is not politics as usual.
- throwaway7656 9y ago
  Well, there are some trends (such as dropping life expectancy for whites without college degree [0]), which are without precedent. It's literally unheard for developed country to have a dropping life expectancy in XX century. So, maybe US being functional democracy, with working feeback loop from voters to elites (no sarcasm here) did something extraordinary because of extraordinary circumstances. I hold no strong opinion here, but this is something worth evaluating, IMO. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-collapse-of-the-white-working-class/520815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-co...
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    Oh, there's a ton extraordinary going on. Our economic system has been a farce for years. We financialized everything and fake a working economy. The financial sector's portion of the GDP is so high, it's patently pathological. The internet is still young but has finally reached the vast majority of everyone. We're in the last years of any chance to avoid massive climate catastrophe as we already experience the early realities of climate change. And automation is truly in the beginnings of taking over the last unskilled jobs where (unlike all past cases) it won't merely be a shift from one industry to another. I could go on… I was not saying that everything today would be normal if not for Trump.
- SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
  > Obama is a typical politician. > Trump is a bullshitting, dysfunctional, con-artist Therefore, Trump is a typical politician.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    Haha, no. Typical politicians are dishonest but they accept the premise of honesty. In other words, they care that they can plausibly claim to be honest. They form lies in ways to attempt to get away with it and be accepted as true. Trump has no premise of honesty. He doesn't care what's true or not. He doesn't bother lying and hoping to get away with it. He just wants people to play along and he can know who's loyal by who plays along or not. That's just one of a massive list of distinctions. The short of it is: typical politicians accept the social norms of their corrupt political world. Obama was one of those. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't give a shit about social norms, and that may be one reason some people find him refreshing — too bad that some of the social norms are positive, and throwing it all away is reckless. Anyway, my pithy initial reply wasn't clear enough, so it works for the joke. But really, Trump is not a typical politician. He's not even anything like a typical real-estate developer.
zz32asdf 9y ago
My guess is you're in a bit of an echo chamber if you're hearing a lot of "Delete Facebook" rhetoric. There's been no change in Google trends for "delete Facebook" and similar. I suspect people will stop caring about Facebook in this context. It's handy, but not held in the same regard socially as a bank or government. Those things impact multiple generations. Facebook will, at best, impact a couple generations.
api 9y ago
What the Trump campaign did was more aggressive and dishonest. They took it too far, finally inspiring a backlash. It happens with lots of things: crime, financial bubbles, etc. Eventually you hit a critical mass and a reaction starts. Once started the reaction spreads virally and feeds on itself. It also doesn't help that Trump is allied with and most ardently supported by neo-Nazis. Not claiming all his supporters are such, but that's obviously his most vocal and enthusiastic base.
gord288 9y ago
Link: 'No, Obama Didn’t Employ the Same Strategies as Cambridge Analytica' https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...
mc32 9y ago
Sometimes people who scrutinize things fail to see it from the working class's perspective (the "poorly educated" be they white or black, or something else.) I think there are quite a few people on HN who never hung out with poor people or never paid attention to how they may think, in some situations. If their "horse" wins, whatever the means, they're glad it wins. Case in point is O.J. Everyone knew he got away with a crime, but despite that, people were happy to see him stick it to the man. If Obama won on FB data, people who voted for him, on balance, would not care. People who voted for Trump, on balance, would not care, if he won on the back of FB data --we don't know the actual degree of the usage, but for argument's sake, let's pretend it was material. Even "highly educated" people are susceptible to this bias.
- ikeyany 9y ago
  Your assertion that the poorly-educated/working-class don't care about integrity is incredibly condescending and ignorant.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Explain Deflategate and the OJ trial reactions. I also grew up with them. It's not condescending, it's been observational. I didn't claim it's universal or it's like that for everything in their lives, but if one of their horses cheats a bit, gets away with something, it's not the end of the world.
    - ikeyany 9y ago
      > Explain Deflategate and the OJ trial reactions. The loudest and most attention-grabbing voices are generally the least thoughtful. The reasonable voices tend to go unnoticed.
      - mc32 9y ago
        I'll grant you that's true in the media --but when I was in those circles, i.e. poor, it wasn't just the loudest. Normal people would have similar reactions. I think there is a bit of, "hey, we're owed one, it's not dignified, but if that's what it took, so be it."
jorblumesea 9y ago
Obama seemed to do it in a less negative way. The Obama campaign used it to encourage people to get out and vote. The ads run in the Trump campaign seem far more nefarious and suppressive of voting, targeting minority populations and other would be democratic voters. Seems far, far darker than anything Obama did, and in many ways, fairly anti American. So not surprising that people take notice of that kind of stuff. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...

hangonhn 9y ago

But that is very human: we are really, really bad at grasping abstract ideas but make something concrete and we will react. I can talk about privacy with someone until their ear falls off but to most people I sound like a lunatic. Show them how we can be manipulated into sometimes literally tearing each other apart and suddenly people care.

aidenn0 9y ago

One of my friends mentioned that Trump denying climate change galvanized a lot of support for reducing greenhouse emissions. Apparently people hate Trump more than they like our planet...

api 9y ago
American politics has a certain "wicker man" aspect to it. We elect a representative of that which is to be destroyed. We do the same with celebrities, raising them up only to symbolically sacrifice them with scandal. Note the explosion of vocal atheism and decline of the political power of the evangelical movement during Bush II, the rise of the alt-right during Obama, and now an explosion of social justice and #metoo type stuff during Trump. Maybe the best strategy is to vote for your least favorite candidate?

cmurf 9y ago

It's not just that. There's also mainstream media having an incentive to attack competitors. There is a legitimate case to be made if the NYTimes did exactly what Facebook did there would be even more outrage. Also, it's Facebook losing control of data to a company that has admitted on video that they setup politicians in fake situations with hookers and use that to pressure the politician as well as create fake new stories to impugn that politician. This is a variation on blackmail and Facebook data and infrastructure is the vehicle for actualizing a part of that blackmail, even though it's libel. There's also the pile on effect. There's also the loss of trust in Facebook because we've been here before. Zuckerberg has variably told people to "calm down" in 2006, to claiming that privacy is no longer a social norm in 2010. And also this ideological statement “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.” The idea that privacy is itself a detriment to the world. I found it an obscenity in 2010 when he said it, and the recent events of the past year prove that this is an embedded part of what Facebook is and it cannot be removed without destroying Facebook. Today's statement is likewise telling. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. And is it now understood, and you know what went wrong? No. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. The most important actions have already been taken, are unspecified, yet this mess still happened meaning those actions were insufficient. Whether this is an assessment problem, a failure to implement safeguards problem, or bad ideology, the net result is loss of trust. I've never trusted Facebook and everything that's happened over 10 years with this company just reinforces how right I was to not trust them. That history is 95% not Trump or Obama related.

throwaway7656 9y ago

You gotta understand the ruling elites though. It was fun to watch different "Springs" happening in some distant lands. Not so much fun when "American Spring" happens in your own country, even if it's a "mild" edition.

extradego 9y ago
You're aware of Occupy Wall Street, right? Corporate corruption is the issue at the root of all of the above, very much including this Facebook mess.

colordrops 9y ago

Commerce and law enforcement don't have opposing forces with huge political propaganda/PR machines behind them. Trump is opposed by the Democrats, and Obama is opposed by the Republicans. Both parties are public sentiment manipulation machines.

throwaway5752 9y ago
What a vapid post. It's X vs Y, and everything is relative to that? Here's an exercise for you. Identify federal law enforcement agencies, and see what public statements and actions they've taken on this. There is not partisan symmetry, but I won't give the answer away.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Apparently you have a reading comprehension problem. My point is precisely what you said, which is that there is not partisan symmetry with law enforcement agencies.
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how someone read or didn't read your comment. It breaks the HN guidelines badly and makes this place worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

eftychis 9y ago

People care about their "football team" [party] and their small economic and social bubble. They are not good in general to see how things affect them. Fun fact: most fiscal policies have as a goal to get people to invest their money and get growth back in. Their effect is psychological. If the effects sound like they will have a positive effect in my little bubble I will start spending and investing, as I feel the Big Brother is ensuring a positive future for me. In fact, I as an individual impact the economy and not the Big Brother directly, as i) I spread the positive feeling and ii) invest. Hence, the consensus of the market is positive. See Keyene's "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (http://cas2.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/courses/econ645/winter2011/generaltheory.pdf http://cas2.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/co...) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment%2C_Interest_and_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...) chapter 12. The average per person confidence for the short term affects the long term progress. People usually find no precedence to connect their privacy to the economic or political success. Now events start rolling stating otherwise. This article for instance states claims that their lack of privacy might have impacted the election, a matter most people feel affects their bubble. And rightly so. Thus why the mild reactions. Example 2: People in security world/academia have been paranoid about what NSA was doing. The average Joe did not care about their data till the E. Snowden fiasco. The "mob reaction" told them to care. Then it subsided a bit again. Fortunately, it left the average person maybe a bit more aware on average. The impact was more money flowing towards security research and the rest of the world took note. As a last (desperate) solution, I hope events like this hit the public where it hurts. Equifax was not enough, but it was a wake up call for some. This Facebook scandal probably will not do the job for the average Jane/Joe, but maybe the next one will. At that point people will either have to take a step or we will wake up in an Orwellian world. We may need an event so drastic that relates people's privacy with their bubble and fast. Remember the "sudden" economic/social disasters of today are usually decades in the making (1920s, 2007, Russian revolution, most likely "x (social) revolution", where x is your country).

IAmEveryone 9y ago

At least half the country feel like they were actually harmed, and even the rest sees the danger coming closer. I actually don’t care, or may even prefer, if commercial ads are perfectly targeted at me.

mch82 9y ago

Am I wrong that there is a clear difference between big data marketing methods and military information operations methods? > [SCL Group's] expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news. 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...

SN76477 9y ago

that is the nature of things. big changes require a lot of accumulation of small things.