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All the terms and templates we are using legally and in the media... they are painting a totally (imo) misleading picture. FB's "crime" is painted as data secu
by dalbasal 9y ago
All the terms and templates we are using legally and in the media... they are painting a totally (imo) misleading picture.
FB's "crime" is painted as data security. The "criminals" are trump, Bannon, Putin or whoever is alleged to have used this data to "manipulate public opinion." This misses the entire point.
FB's business model is based on using large datasets of mundane (in isolation) information in order to "profile" people. More specifically, score people for likelihood to do X, where X is refinance a loan, go to a diet seminar or whatever an advertiser wants.
The key point is large quantities of mundane data, not necessarily stuff that is protected.
Someone got a hold of a small subset of FBs dataset and presumably used it to target political messages or whatnot.
This is exactly what all FB advertiser's do every day.
If we're calling this incident "manipulating public opinion" or "foreign meddling"... Then the problem is 10,000X times bigger than this case. This stuff is all around us.
- Chardok 9y agoThis article practically comes off as apologetic for Facebook and absolutely ignores the point of outrage for a lot of people. Great example of language designed to lead. "Facebook, of course, lets you target exactly those boring, old demographic qualities" - just boring old mundane everyday Facebook. No worries here "To be clear, what Cambridge Analytica did was somewhat worse" - Just a bit worse, but not too far from the norm "Facebook no longer allows anyone to do this, thankfully, and hasn’t for years" - this has been a non-issue for years, what are you worried about?
- dalbasal 9y agoExactly what I meant. This is made possible by the way the issue is framed, as a data security issue. Well, it isn't hard to imagine an identical scenario playing out where no data was "leaked," with everything being legal and normative data collection. If FB had done with their own data whatever these 3rd parties are alleged to have done... would any laws have been broken?
- maxerickson 9y agoAs I understand it, the Trump campaign mostly used Facebook's in house ad targeting services. In contrast to the Clinton campaign that relied on their own data team for targeting. It's hard to get a read on it, but there are plenty of people slagging Cambridge Analytica as being pretty worthless.
- neuronexmachina 9y agoMaybe he's just overtooting his own horn, but CA's CEO claimed differently: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-firm-ran-digital-campaign-for-trump-report-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-... > In the video posted by Channel 4, Nix is heard saying that the company did much of the work behind Trump's campaign, which resulted in a shocking upset victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016. > "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting," Nix says on the video. "We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy."
- maxerickson 9y agoYeah, that's why I say it's hard to get a read on it. There's also plenty of people claiming that they were crucial to the effort. This article seems pretty clear headed and makes the Nix quote sound like a sales pitch: https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-really-do-for-trumps-campaign/ https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-rea...
- jessaustin 9y agoVictory has a thousand fathers...
- terscofalen 9y agoAll politics using it, some use targeting sevices and some of them use trolls