3 ms·

Is the Cambridge Analytica scandal a valid problem?

by starbugs 8y ago

ridgewell 8y ago
Unfortunately, a good majority of Facebook Users still barely know what that is, or have never heard of it.
- starbugs 8y ago
  Guess then we'll have to wait for the next (bigger) "breach" of "trust" :)
  - gremlinsinc 8y ago
    Younger generations have grown up on fb and youtube...everything they do--they share...sadly. They don't care about 'trust' of their data, they don't seem to care about privacy at all, because they've never known privacy, it's a foreign concept to them...
    - starbugs 8y ago
      I anticipate this will be a self-correcting problem eventually. If it's not for large-scale political effects that evolve as a consequence of reckless evasion of privacy, then it might be events on a small scale. Maybe your current girlfriend happens to be the ex of some other guy that uses the information you provided to stalk you. This kind of event happens on a different time scale than the instant gratification scheme that made certain social media platforms so successful. Nonetheless their negative impact is orders of magnitude higher than all of those small positive impacts combined so that they eventually outweigh them. It's a matter of time.
      - gremlinsinc 8y ago
        I'd hope it gets corrected... But it could be a slippery slope with more and more privacy protections and freedoms taken away... I mean you give up freedom it becomes easier to give up more especially when groups are involved... Hopefully those who with in tech and code the crap can enforce some ethics though.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ummonk 8y ago
      Well, the youngest generation moved off FB and Snapchat, and [the appearance of] privacy seems to have been a factor there. Of course, I don't see how decentralization helps with privacy though - instead of trusting just one vendor, you end up trusting several vendors (either the service providers in the case of federation, or the app writers in the case of full decentralization) assuming people you communicate with are using a varied set of vendors (i.e. you don't end up with a dominant vendor like gmail).
api 8y ago
What would stop a group like CA from setting up Mastodon nodes and passively sucking down all that data? What would stop them from sock puppeting?
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Two things on the CA part: 1. Mastodon is closer to Twitter than FB. Things are public by default. Users even have an RSS feed. 2. Get off targeted-ad-driven platforms and the Cambridge Analytica business model goes away and this stops being an issue. I don't know if sock puppets can be eliminated on any large platform.
  - WJW 8y ago
    It would seem that point 1 makes it even easier for companies to slurp everything about a person. Point 2 is only true if the data has no other use. Political parties might find a lot of value in discovering Mastodon users whose posting habits indicate that they are currently voting one way but are disatisfied with that party. Insurance companies might also be interested about users being part of groups for people with certain mental or genetic diseases. I can imagine a sort of "reverse glassdoor" site where employers can pay to get a complete profile of everything an applicant has ever done or said online. The CA business model works very seamlessly with ad targeting, but that is by far not the only use for such data.

Is the Cambridge Analytica scandal a valid problem?

ridgewell 8y ago

Unfortunately, a good majority of Facebook Users still barely know what that is, or have never heard of it.

starbugs 8y ago
Guess then we'll have to wait for the next (bigger) "breach" of "trust" :)
- gremlinsinc 8y ago
  Younger generations have grown up on fb and youtube...everything they do--they share...sadly. They don't care about 'trust' of their data, they don't seem to care about privacy at all, because they've never known privacy, it's a foreign concept to them...
  - starbugs 8y ago
    I anticipate this will be a self-correcting problem eventually. If it's not for large-scale political effects that evolve as a consequence of reckless evasion of privacy, then it might be events on a small scale. Maybe your current girlfriend happens to be the ex of some other guy that uses the information you provided to stalk you. This kind of event happens on a different time scale than the instant gratification scheme that made certain social media platforms so successful. Nonetheless their negative impact is orders of magnitude higher than all of those small positive impacts combined so that they eventually outweigh them. It's a matter of time.
    - gremlinsinc 8y ago
      I'd hope it gets corrected... But it could be a slippery slope with more and more privacy protections and freedoms taken away... I mean you give up freedom it becomes easier to give up more especially when groups are involved... Hopefully those who with in tech and code the crap can enforce some ethics though.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Well, the youngest generation moved off FB and Snapchat, and [the appearance of] privacy seems to have been a factor there. Of course, I don't see how decentralization helps with privacy though - instead of trusting just one vendor, you end up trusting several vendors (either the service providers in the case of federation, or the app writers in the case of full decentralization) assuming people you communicate with are using a varied set of vendors (i.e. you don't end up with a dominant vendor like gmail).

api 8y ago

What would stop a group like CA from setting up Mastodon nodes and passively sucking down all that data? What would stop them from sock puppeting?

fenwick67 8y ago
Two things on the CA part: 1. Mastodon is closer to Twitter than FB. Things are public by default. Users even have an RSS feed. 2. Get off targeted-ad-driven platforms and the Cambridge Analytica business model goes away and this stops being an issue. I don't know if sock puppets can be eliminated on any large platform.
- WJW 8y ago
  It would seem that point 1 makes it even easier for companies to slurp everything about a person. Point 2 is only true if the data has no other use. Political parties might find a lot of value in discovering Mastodon users whose posting habits indicate that they are currently voting one way but are disatisfied with that party. Insurance companies might also be interested about users being part of groups for people with certain mental or genetic diseases. I can imagine a sort of "reverse glassdoor" site where employers can pay to get a complete profile of everything an applicant has ever done or said online. The CA business model works very seamlessly with ad targeting, but that is by far not the only use for such data.