Can we stop calling this a data leak? This was business as usual. What Cambridge Analytica did is SOP for almost every organization that's large enough to do th

Can we stop calling this a data leak? This was business as usual. What Cambridge Analytica did is SOP for almost every organization that's large enough to do their own ad targeting. I know personally of several information brokers that are actively buying and selling these kind of data sets on exponentially larger scales, not to mention hundreds of middlemen in the advertising industry that each have their own databases. I'd be willing to bet at least half the users of HN work at companies with splunk databases that could be used to infer a lot of the same data CA used. I made a Facebook app in college that was used by under a thousand people and I remember being able to scrape email addresses from friends of friends. Am I crazy or does everyone just have their heads in the sand? Framing this as a "Facebook data leak" makes it seem like the problem was people we don't like got a hold of our precious data, not that our entire industry is funded by the mass harvesting and reselling of personal information.