7 ms·

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower used same Facebook dataset for own startup

219 points by AJRF 9y ago

danso 9y ago
I haven't been following this stuff super closely, but hasn't there been ongoing counternarrative of how CA data analysis and its 50 million profiles may not have been very useful, period? Because there's a concurrent (and legitimate) narrative of Facebook's questionable data practices, I've been wondering whether CA has been an overhyped antagonist in our media's rush to find the true villains. Yesterday Drudge Report (still one of our biggest news drivers) had a headline [A] that almost made my eyes roll through the back of my head. It was "WHISTLEBLOWER: FACEBOOK CAN HEAR YOU!" But the linked story [B] contained nothing more than Wylie speculating how it was physically possible for Facebook (and other apps) to do this, but they probably weren't, but if they were, it could lead into some bad shit or something. Yeah, Wylie can't control what linkbaiters write about him. Or what politicians ask him in a public hearing. But because he was a whistleblower about CA's abuse of FB's data, he's been considered an expert/whistleblower in domains far beyond what he actually has experience in. Being a good data analyst and having a bunch of FB scraped data is still not enough to remotely guarantee success in the startup scene. In terms of the election, what's the most substantive discussion/proof that CA and its magic data was any more a game changer than, say, Brad Pascale [0]? And I also haven't read out CA's insights were a gamechanger in boosting the Russians' alleged propaganda and fake news bots schemes. I haven't yet read a better reporter on this angle than the New Yorker's Adrian Chen, and his relative reluctance to blame big data/bot schemes has perhaps made me too skeptical every time I read media stories about CA's magical mind-bending dataset [1]. [A] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large [B] http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.com/trending/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-facebook-may-listening-home-work/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.co... [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/trumps-facebook-advertising-advantage-explained/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/t... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-uneasy-dive-into-the-trump-russia-frenzy https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-...
- bromuro 9y ago
  Indeed I even think the overreactions we see about this “scandal” is because media in general love to follow such catastrophic plots and spread false or enhanced news. As always. Many articles i read don’t understand even what happened and, from here, the whole thing seems a big bluff that will shake the internet based economy and powers. Best we can do is ignore this case and go back to our life. It’s however an interesting phenomenon under many points of view.
  - tmuir 9y ago
    You know how Donald Trump says he doesn't telegraph his moves? You know how Donald Trumps supporters talk a lot about 4D chess? There are several people playing 4D chess with Donald. The Cambridge Analytica story is lining up a path to Donald's opponent's queen, to entice him into taking that queen. Once the queen is taken, Donald Trump is in check, possibly mate. And its all because Donald telegraphed his moves. You've been triggered so hard to believe the Fake News narrative, you don't have a snowballs chance in hell at detecting the difference in this story. Its the same for your boy. Facebook is the Red Herring, the delicious smoked creature served up on a platter to those most likely to bite into it. Donald Trump will be (already is) in check, because once he bites on the controversy that Facebook losing control of the data is the actual problem at the root of this story, he will gush to us all about his far superior data operation, that hardly relied on facebook at all. It is as Donald spits these flakes of herring meat he will confess. You know how I've told you alot of this story in the future tense. Well, it turns out some of the players confessed right away, but they still don't know it. Here's one now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM
    - tmuir 9y ago
      Oh, I almost forgot. A good way to think about downvotes is your subconcsious admission that the best recourse you have to any argument is to try and make sure as few other people read it as possible. That means part of you that you have no control over knows the truth, but for whatever reason, decides your better off not knowing that truth.
stevefeinstein 9y ago
What's the point of this article, to try to discredit him? He's already discredited. The whistleblowing doesn't require his trust, it's true or it's not. We already know he's not trustworthy, and surprise, he did it (at least) twice.
- tmuir 9y ago
  I posit that its a beautiful piece of artwork designed as a honeypot. The sweetness that will draw certain people in is all of the conflicting, and therefore inherently controversial information that can be used to paint Facebook and Christopher Wylie as the true problem here, and the incredible Donald is just the poor guy caught up in the middle. This is evidenced by the conservative media's discrediting of all of the people telling the story. I don't even contend that Buzzfeed is conservative or liberal, so I think Buzzfeed is either an unwitting accomplice in this honeypot, or perhaps it is their pot. Time will tell. My thesis is that, just like actual honeypots, the sweetness is coverfire for the trap lying inside. That trap is to frame this whole story as if the most heinous part of the story is just Facebook losing control of the data. Once the key players admit to the microtargetting, but claim everybody does it, the jaws of the trap will spring shut. Some of those players have already made their confessions, literally on Fox News, a week after the election, and they couldnt contain their joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM It is obvious that Donald Trump intuitively understands the general concepts at play in microtargetting, but also just as obvious that he doesn't understand its mechanics. Microtargetting is literally a deep learning algorithm, and Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer affiliated outfit. You may remember Robert Mercer from such travesties as high frequency trading. After all, he invented it, and used it to become a billionaire. Microtargeting is to humans as high frequency trading is to investment markets. The underlying principle is the same. If you can glean information about your target faster than your competitors, you can act upon that information to your own gain. Microtargeting is literally a computer evolving its algorithm to influence the targetted. It is A/B testing what will unite one half of an electorate with the reddest of red meat policies, which by definition induce panic in the other half of the electorate. Cambridge Analytica has cracked the code on how to divide or unite people with an algorithm. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one they are aiming for.
primeblue 9y ago
Great, the world is full of hypocrites.
jacquesm 9y ago
And that is why you never let such data off your premises in the first place. Who knows how many copies there have been made by now. Remember that AOL stuff that was online for a couple of hours? It will never go away. A pretty good source of very interesting information is the OpenRTB interface to your average advertising bidding platform or company. A couple of bucks and you too could be bidding for ads. If you bid low you will get all the data you could possibly imagine and you can keep it even if you lose the bid. All you need is a good story and a couple of bucks to keep the exchanges satisfied.
- 21 9y ago
  Even worse, while you can change your password, or even your email or telephone number, you won't significantly change your personality. I find it funny the kind of standards we have around passwords (PKDF, ...) and how it's anathema to not hash and salt them, while we casually store and trade much more valuable personal data.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    Analyses like 'stylography' are especially worrying: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-hackers-should-be-afraid-of-how-they-write-20130116-2csdo.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-hackers-should-be-afra...
    - jstarfish 9y ago
      Yeah short of running everything you write through a back-and-forth series of translations to non-native languages, stylometry is going to be the true end of anonymity.
      - stagbeetle 9y ago
        Not really. If you know the patterns threat actors are using to deanonymize you, you can spoof yours to mimic the mean. You can even spoof them to create "writing profiles" for each of your identities. I know I already do.
21 9y ago
In the original whistle-blowing interview the whistle-blower (Wylie) says that he was the one which initiated this whole project: > At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica > It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. > Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’” > But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  Yeah... There's a certain imprecision with the use of the term "whistleblower" here. It's far closer to the immunity a mobster informant might get (although it's obviously not (yet) playing out as a criminal matter)
- debt 9y ago
  Once all these regulations get pushed through, “information operations” will be relegated to "fax machine" status in about five years.
JohnTClark 9y ago
I don't know why I don't trust this Christopher Wylie. They way he is pictured, filmed etc. looks over produced, like he is trying to lie to me. I can't put it in words but something is fishy about him. In one of his interviews I found out that CA has sue him, so he did not care about anything, he did something wrong to CA, they sue, he blows the whistle to save his *. Is not about "oh, I care so much about the data of millions of people and I can't live any more with the guilt", its about his own skin. If its your own skin that you care about please don't picture in a victim/tormented soul, it makes me hate you just for that.
- iamleppert 9y ago
  Agreed. And did you see how he died his hair and changed his look to be more edgy when he got all this media attention? It's like he is playing some role and maximizing his media exposure. This is the behavior of a sociopath. It really is looking more and more like the real story here is about a guy that tried to usurp his puppet masters with a technique that was likely oversold and probably couldn't really deliver what he claimed it could do, based on his limited understanding of machine learning and statistics. The next best thing in his twisted mind is to become a "national hero", probably taking a card from Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers. I do think that most whistleblowers have positive intentions and what they do, they are doing for public good, not for notoriety or personal celebrity. However, I don't really feel that to be the case with Christopher Wylie. In his interviews he definitely gives me a strange gut feeling and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. I'm sure we will find out more facts about him as this whole thing continues to unfold, but I'm not holding my breath as to his intentions. The silver lining in all of this is that Facebook and others will be forced to treat privacy seriously for a change, and its always good to have this conversation front and center for a change.
  - jonny_eh 9y ago
    I think he sees himself more like a Snowden than an Assange. The former being a true whistleblower, the latter, well…
    - 9y ago
sngz 9y ago
any source thats more reliable than buzzfeed?
- the_watcher 9y ago
  While Buzzfeed may have made its name on listicles, it now does a substantial amount of real investigative journalism.
- tmuir 9y ago
  Do you have context to add to the story, or just more reasons to look somewhere else, preferably away from this story?
  - sngz 9y ago
    i don't like giving buzzfeed clicks and when i share stories with people i like to give sources that preferably isn't buzzfeed. kinda makes it less credible.
- donarb 9y ago
  The article itself contains multiple sources (links), not all of them reference previous Buzzfeed articles. Unfortunately people nowadays expect one article to give them all the facts they think they need. Sometimes what appears to be bias in a story can be brought down to mistakes, space constraints, even the timing of the release of certain facts that may alter the story within a few hours. Any news story should be scrutinized with skepticism, but looking at the story from multiple sources should give you all the information you need to assess the veracity.
ahuxley2013 9y ago
I have a sneaking suspicion this guy is a plant or something for the C.I.A. or NSA. The interviews I have heard, he starts to ramble on about Russia, and making bizarre connections. There is such lust for a ward with Russia it is nuts.
- wruwew8uu9 9y ago
  CA would have identified that you clearly have a combination of "openness" and "neurotisism" that predisposes you to conspiratorial thinking

219 points by AJRF 9y ago

I haven't been following this stuff super closely, but hasn't there been ongoing counternarrative of how CA data analysis and its 50 million profiles may not have been very useful, period? Because there's a concurrent (and legitimate) narrative of Facebook's questionable data practices, I've been wondering whether CA has been an overhyped antagonist in our media's rush to find the true villains. Yesterday Drudge Report (still one of our biggest news drivers) had a headline [A] that almost made my eyes roll through the back of my head. It was "WHISTLEBLOWER: FACEBOOK CAN HEAR YOU!" But the linked story [B] contained nothing more than Wylie speculating how it was physically possible for Facebook (and other apps) to do this, but they probably weren't, but if they were, it could lead into some bad shit or something. Yeah, Wylie can't control what linkbaiters write about him. Or what politicians ask him in a public hearing. But because he was a whistleblower about CA's abuse of FB's data, he's been considered an expert/whistleblower in domains far beyond what he actually has experience in. Being a good data analyst and having a bunch of FB scraped data is still not enough to remotely guarantee success in the startup scene. In terms of the election, what's the most substantive discussion/proof that CA and its magic data was any more a game changer than, say, Brad Pascale [0]? And I also haven't read out CA's insights were a gamechanger in boosting the Russians' alleged propaganda and fake news bots schemes. I haven't yet read a better reporter on this angle than the New Yorker's Adrian Chen, and his relative reluctance to blame big data/bot schemes has perhaps made me too skeptical every time I read media stories about CA's magical mind-bending dataset [1]. [A] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large [B] http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.com/trending/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-facebook-may-listening-home-work/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.co... [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/trumps-facebook-advertising-advantage-explained/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/t... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-uneasy-dive-into-the-trump-russia-frenzy https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-...

bromuro 9y ago
Indeed I even think the overreactions we see about this “scandal” is because media in general love to follow such catastrophic plots and spread false or enhanced news. As always. Many articles i read don’t understand even what happened and, from here, the whole thing seems a big bluff that will shake the internet based economy and powers. Best we can do is ignore this case and go back to our life. It’s however an interesting phenomenon under many points of view.
- tmuir 9y ago
  You know how Donald Trump says he doesn't telegraph his moves? You know how Donald Trumps supporters talk a lot about 4D chess? There are several people playing 4D chess with Donald. The Cambridge Analytica story is lining up a path to Donald's opponent's queen, to entice him into taking that queen. Once the queen is taken, Donald Trump is in check, possibly mate. And its all because Donald telegraphed his moves. You've been triggered so hard to believe the Fake News narrative, you don't have a snowballs chance in hell at detecting the difference in this story. Its the same for your boy. Facebook is the Red Herring, the delicious smoked creature served up on a platter to those most likely to bite into it. Donald Trump will be (already is) in check, because once he bites on the controversy that Facebook losing control of the data is the actual problem at the root of this story, he will gush to us all about his far superior data operation, that hardly relied on facebook at all. It is as Donald spits these flakes of herring meat he will confess. You know how I've told you alot of this story in the future tense. Well, it turns out some of the players confessed right away, but they still don't know it. Here's one now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM
  - tmuir 9y ago
    Oh, I almost forgot. A good way to think about downvotes is your subconcsious admission that the best recourse you have to any argument is to try and make sure as few other people read it as possible. That means part of you that you have no control over knows the truth, but for whatever reason, decides your better off not knowing that truth.

stevefeinstein 9y ago

What's the point of this article, to try to discredit him? He's already discredited. The whistleblowing doesn't require his trust, it's true or it's not. We already know he's not trustworthy, and surprise, he did it (at least) twice.

tmuir 9y ago
I posit that its a beautiful piece of artwork designed as a honeypot. The sweetness that will draw certain people in is all of the conflicting, and therefore inherently controversial information that can be used to paint Facebook and Christopher Wylie as the true problem here, and the incredible Donald is just the poor guy caught up in the middle. This is evidenced by the conservative media's discrediting of all of the people telling the story. I don't even contend that Buzzfeed is conservative or liberal, so I think Buzzfeed is either an unwitting accomplice in this honeypot, or perhaps it is their pot. Time will tell. My thesis is that, just like actual honeypots, the sweetness is coverfire for the trap lying inside. That trap is to frame this whole story as if the most heinous part of the story is just Facebook losing control of the data. Once the key players admit to the microtargetting, but claim everybody does it, the jaws of the trap will spring shut. Some of those players have already made their confessions, literally on Fox News, a week after the election, and they couldnt contain their joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM It is obvious that Donald Trump intuitively understands the general concepts at play in microtargetting, but also just as obvious that he doesn't understand its mechanics. Microtargetting is literally a deep learning algorithm, and Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer affiliated outfit. You may remember Robert Mercer from such travesties as high frequency trading. After all, he invented it, and used it to become a billionaire. Microtargeting is to humans as high frequency trading is to investment markets. The underlying principle is the same. If you can glean information about your target faster than your competitors, you can act upon that information to your own gain. Microtargeting is literally a computer evolving its algorithm to influence the targetted. It is A/B testing what will unite one half of an electorate with the reddest of red meat policies, which by definition induce panic in the other half of the electorate. Cambridge Analytica has cracked the code on how to divide or unite people with an algorithm. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one they are aiming for.

primeblue 9y ago

Great, the world is full of hypocrites.

jacquesm 9y ago

And that is why you never let such data off your premises in the first place. Who knows how many copies there have been made by now. Remember that AOL stuff that was online for a couple of hours? It will never go away. A pretty good source of very interesting information is the OpenRTB interface to your average advertising bidding platform or company. A couple of bucks and you too could be bidding for ads. If you bid low you will get all the data you could possibly imagine and you can keep it even if you lose the bid. All you need is a good story and a couple of bucks to keep the exchanges satisfied.

21 9y ago
Even worse, while you can change your password, or even your email or telephone number, you won't significantly change your personality. I find it funny the kind of standards we have around passwords (PKDF, ...) and how it's anathema to not hash and salt them, while we casually store and trade much more valuable personal data.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Analyses like 'stylography' are especially worrying: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-hackers-should-be-afraid-of-how-they-write-20130116-2csdo.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-hackers-should-be-afra...
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    Yeah short of running everything you write through a back-and-forth series of translations to non-native languages, stylometry is going to be the true end of anonymity.
    - stagbeetle 9y ago
      Not really. If you know the patterns threat actors are using to deanonymize you, you can spoof yours to mimic the mean. You can even spoof them to create "writing profiles" for each of your identities. I know I already do.

21 9y ago

In the original whistle-blowing interview the whistle-blower (Wylie) says that he was the one which initiated this whole project: > At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica > It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. > Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’” > But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”

IAmEveryone 9y ago
Yeah... There's a certain imprecision with the use of the term "whistleblower" here. It's far closer to the immunity a mobster informant might get (although it's obviously not (yet) playing out as a criminal matter)
debt 9y ago
Once all these regulations get pushed through, “information operations” will be relegated to "fax machine" status in about five years.

JohnTClark 9y ago

I don't know why I don't trust this Christopher Wylie. They way he is pictured, filmed etc. looks over produced, like he is trying to lie to me. I can't put it in words but something is fishy about him. In one of his interviews I found out that CA has sue him, so he did not care about anything, he did something wrong to CA, they sue, he blows the whistle to save his *. Is not about "oh, I care so much about the data of millions of people and I can't live any more with the guilt", its about his own skin. If its your own skin that you care about please don't picture in a victim/tormented soul, it makes me hate you just for that.

iamleppert 9y ago
Agreed. And did you see how he died his hair and changed his look to be more edgy when he got all this media attention? It's like he is playing some role and maximizing his media exposure. This is the behavior of a sociopath. It really is looking more and more like the real story here is about a guy that tried to usurp his puppet masters with a technique that was likely oversold and probably couldn't really deliver what he claimed it could do, based on his limited understanding of machine learning and statistics. The next best thing in his twisted mind is to become a "national hero", probably taking a card from Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers. I do think that most whistleblowers have positive intentions and what they do, they are doing for public good, not for notoriety or personal celebrity. However, I don't really feel that to be the case with Christopher Wylie. In his interviews he definitely gives me a strange gut feeling and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. I'm sure we will find out more facts about him as this whole thing continues to unfold, but I'm not holding my breath as to his intentions. The silver lining in all of this is that Facebook and others will be forced to treat privacy seriously for a change, and its always good to have this conversation front and center for a change.
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  I think he sees himself more like a Snowden than an Assange. The former being a true whistleblower, the latter, well…
  - 9y ago

sngz 9y ago

any source thats more reliable than buzzfeed?

the_watcher 9y ago
While Buzzfeed may have made its name on listicles, it now does a substantial amount of real investigative journalism.
tmuir 9y ago
Do you have context to add to the story, or just more reasons to look somewhere else, preferably away from this story?
- sngz 9y ago
  i don't like giving buzzfeed clicks and when i share stories with people i like to give sources that preferably isn't buzzfeed. kinda makes it less credible.
donarb 9y ago
The article itself contains multiple sources (links), not all of them reference previous Buzzfeed articles. Unfortunately people nowadays expect one article to give them all the facts they think they need. Sometimes what appears to be bias in a story can be brought down to mistakes, space constraints, even the timing of the release of certain facts that may alter the story within a few hours. Any news story should be scrutinized with skepticism, but looking at the story from multiple sources should give you all the information you need to assess the veracity.

ahuxley2013 9y ago

I have a sneaking suspicion this guy is a plant or something for the C.I.A. or NSA. The interviews I have heard, he starts to ramble on about Russia, and making bizarre connections. There is such lust for a ward with Russia it is nuts.

wruwew8uu9 9y ago
CA would have identified that you clearly have a combination of "openness" and "neurotisism" that predisposes you to conspiratorial thinking