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It's interesting to see the responses to this article and contrast with the responses to the article regarding Facebook's possible 5B fine. I don't know the mo

It's interesting to see the responses to this article and contrast with the responses to the article regarding Facebook's possible 5B fine. I don't know the motivation behind this decision but I can't help but see the two sides of the same coin. If we decide as a society that third-party apps misusing the platform in a way that hurts the users or otherwise looks bad to the outside world is the platform's fault, even if this was done with the user's consent (which the app that harvested data for Cambridge Analytica had) and furthermore decide that such conduct deserves a disproportionate fine (which 5B is, given that much larger breaches without any consent have generally gone unpunished) because the platform as a whole is owned by a large successful company, we cannot also expect large tech companies to keep supporting open platforms that allow third-parties to thrive. The economic benefits of giving control to the user are fairly marginal and theoretical, while the risks are extremely large and potentially existential. I'm not intimately familiar with this particular API, but it's almost certain that it can be abused by third party apps in a way that makes look Google bad. Platform openness has its advocates and detractors at every company. In light of what's going on, it would be hard for the advocates to win any argument.

CaptainZapp 7y ago
which the app that harvested data for Cambridge Analytica had This is just part of the picture and almost revisionist in its briefness. Sure, they had "permission" from the user, which took that "personality-test" to harvest their data. Who sure as shit did not agree to have their data harvested were the friends of those who took the test and whoms data was harvested and resold with applomb and abandon. Leaving this part out of your statement makes this statement a lie by omission.
- makomk 7y ago
  The thing is, that's clearly not what most people actually object to about Cambridge Analytica. I mean, the same is even more true of Obama's 2012 campaign, which went so far as to harvest their supporters' friends' posting activity to assess how best to get those friends to vote Obama, and yet nearly all of the people who loudly decried Cambridge Analytica used this same bogus consent argument to justify why the Obama campaign's actions were OK.
  - CaptainZapp 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- orcthwy012 7y ago
  Well if your friend has access to your information, your friend can give that information to a third-party. That's how anything normally works. I didn't explicitly grant my friends or anyone permission to give my information to some specific browser my friend may be using, yet if I explicitly share information with my friend on any social media website, and the friend uses that browser, the browser will get that information. Same with plugins - could I create a website and say, you know what I explicitly do not give permission to the ad blockers to access my information. I can't - that's not how information works - if I give you access, you can give that access to any software you want. Again, this is how anything at all works and certainly with Nest.
- orcthwy012 7y ago
  Also I fail to see any actual privacy-related consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal - there's some fear-mongering over some targeted ads seen by some people but that is not a privacy breach nor a scandal. They broke TOS for Facebook API, but outside of that, what they eventually did with the data wasn't out of the ordinary. In other words, there may be concerns with the source data, but the source data was merely used to compute what is ordinarily considered non-sensitive information: a list to target given some political ad campaigns. Every single campaign does the latter, whether through email or direct mail. Hypothetically, if Zynga did this with Facebook API - to better target future potential customers, how much outrage would there be? Privacy-wise, it's exactly the same. Marketers at nearly all large companies routinely do much worse with sensitive information. What personal information anyone cares about was used in a bad way here? Hypothetically, if there was an ad-platform that allowed you to specifically run targeted ad campaigns political opinions/leanings/etc as computed by the platform, this would not be an issue per se by the norms of the ad industry. It appears to me that what most people are upset about it has more to do: 1) how targeted advertising normally works and 2) that the political campaign of someone they don't want as president was helped by this. But targeted advertising is absolutely not illegal or anything and politicians you don't like still get to run campaigns. The actual amount of wrong-doing here is miniscule and the part that is attributable to Facebook is even smaller. And the point is that any of this could absolutely happen with Nest. Nest does involve sensitive information and for instance, Nest cams don't have consent from every single person they happen to record either. I don't know exactly what nest API allowed apps to do but it would be hard to imagine that there's no possibility of scandal.

CaptainZapp 7y ago

which the app that harvested data for Cambridge Analytica had This is just part of the picture and almost revisionist in its briefness. Sure, they had "permission" from the user, which took that "personality-test" to harvest their data. Who sure as shit did not agree to have their data harvested were the friends of those who took the test and whoms data was harvested and resold with applomb and abandon. Leaving this part out of your statement makes this statement a lie by omission.

makomk 7y ago
The thing is, that's clearly not what most people actually object to about Cambridge Analytica. I mean, the same is even more true of Obama's 2012 campaign, which went so far as to harvest their supporters' friends' posting activity to assess how best to get those friends to vote Obama, and yet nearly all of the people who loudly decried Cambridge Analytica used this same bogus consent argument to justify why the Obama campaign's actions were OK.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
orcthwy012 7y ago
Well if your friend has access to your information, your friend can give that information to a third-party. That's how anything normally works. I didn't explicitly grant my friends or anyone permission to give my information to some specific browser my friend may be using, yet if I explicitly share information with my friend on any social media website, and the friend uses that browser, the browser will get that information. Same with plugins - could I create a website and say, you know what I explicitly do not give permission to the ad blockers to access my information. I can't - that's not how information works - if I give you access, you can give that access to any software you want. Again, this is how anything at all works and certainly with Nest.
orcthwy012 7y ago
Also I fail to see any actual privacy-related consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal - there's some fear-mongering over some targeted ads seen by some people but that is not a privacy breach nor a scandal. They broke TOS for Facebook API, but outside of that, what they eventually did with the data wasn't out of the ordinary. In other words, there may be concerns with the source data, but the source data was merely used to compute what is ordinarily considered non-sensitive information: a list to target given some political ad campaigns. Every single campaign does the latter, whether through email or direct mail. Hypothetically, if Zynga did this with Facebook API - to better target future potential customers, how much outrage would there be? Privacy-wise, it's exactly the same. Marketers at nearly all large companies routinely do much worse with sensitive information. What personal information anyone cares about was used in a bad way here? Hypothetically, if there was an ad-platform that allowed you to specifically run targeted ad campaigns political opinions/leanings/etc as computed by the platform, this would not be an issue per se by the norms of the ad industry. It appears to me that what most people are upset about it has more to do: 1) how targeted advertising normally works and 2) that the political campaign of someone they don't want as president was helped by this. But targeted advertising is absolutely not illegal or anything and politicians you don't like still get to run campaigns. The actual amount of wrong-doing here is miniscule and the part that is attributable to Facebook is even smaller. And the point is that any of this could absolutely happen with Nest. Nest does involve sensitive information and for instance, Nest cams don't have consent from every single person they happen to record either. I don't know exactly what nest API allowed apps to do but it would be hard to imagine that there's no possibility of scandal.