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Another chapter on Facebook’s privacy woes is being written in Latin America
- bitumen 9y agoIf we add that up with the lack of control from governments and Facebook attempts to solve the issue, we have a ticking time bomb. The only positive, Galup says, is that services like the ones on offer from Cambridge Analytica are prohibitively expensive for most political parties in Latin America. In this case, the only thing saving elections in the region from outside corrupting influences may be the greed of those same corrupting influences. Jesus, that’s rough. We’ve been screwing with elections South of our border for generations, and now we’ve de facto privatized it! We have a talent for cultivating blowback, and I really hope that FB doesn’t become the new face of that story. I guess Bosworth would just shrug and point out that this is all good, and if Americans are subject to potentially lethal backlash it’s just growing pains for FB.
- forapurpose 9y ago> We’ve been screwing with elections South of our border for generations now we’ve de facto privatized it! I think it's very interesting to think of Facebook in that context. However, it was privatized long ago. Companies have been buying political influence for a long time, and when that hasn't worked, U.S. security forces sometimes have been deployed. I don't know about private security forces, but I'd be surprised if that didn't play some part. Facebook effectively plays the role of the private security agency; they provide an election manipulation service that others can utilize. It's different because those private armies exist solely for that purpose, but let's not pretend that Facebook learned about all these things in the last month - they knew what was going on better than anyone.
- jumelles 9y agoI'm surprised the chatter about/against FB hasn't died down yet - how long before FB really starts to worry? Are they already there I wonder?
- ReverseCold 9y agoI think this could have been the end of Facebook if we had an actual alternative ready.
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- AlexandrB 9y agoI'd like to think that, but a service with 2 billion users doesn't end overnight. Even if this was the beginning of the end it would take many years for everyone to move on to something else. In the meantime, Facebook would still have a lot of influence in the industry.
- portofcall 9y agoI wouldn’t trust FB to accurately report the time of day, never mind their user count. They have every reason to inflate a number that already peobsbly includes a vast number of duplicates, bots, and other “Not quite real,” accounts.
- barry-cotter 9y agoGoogle Plus still exists. It’s not Reader or Wave, they didn’t shut it down.
- jacquesm 9y agoGoogle is not an alternative to Facebook. I think it is going to be very hard to create an alternative to Facebook that will not in the long term morph into something just as bad as Facebook is today.
- AlexandrB 9y agoThe thing is, none of this stuff is new. It's almost like a dam broke and every privacy doomsayer is finally being taken seriously by the media. About time, IMHO. I think it was really easy for Facebook to brush off accusations of data collection overreach before because the media was not doing a good job of reporting on its consequences.
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- cowpig 9y agoI'm just really happy people are starting to care about this
- jnmandal 9y agoThere's nothing really substantive here but I am happy to see that journalists are investigating privacy issues in other countries also.
- woliveirajr 9y ago> ... and has an election coming in seven months. An election that began and is being discussed exactly from the day the last election was over, 4 years ago.