7 ms·

Facebook emails show internal concerns being raised about Cambridge Analytica

201 points by innovateee 7y ago

wpietri 7y ago
Naively I would think that at some point Facebook would say, "Hey, maybe we should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here." It really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.
- smt88 7y ago
  It's easy to tell yourself you're not evil when you're one small person in an organization comprising thousands (or millions) of people. It would be happening with or without you, right? You didn't decide to do these evil things, and not everything the organization does is evil. Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands of people telling themselves this same thing. I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to get into politics. I just want to work on cool code." He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning.
  - pimmen 7y ago
    Reminds me of the song about Wernher von Braun who built rockets for the Nazis and the US. ”Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical ’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department’ says Wernher von Braun” I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed before every task out of worry, or that we can be morally perfect, but I don’t think we should just throw our hands in the air and pretend that only the person pulling the trigger could’ve done differently.
    - abraae 7y ago
      > I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I don't think that's a universally sound position, unless you hold extremely pacifist views. It's too hard to predict the end game for military technology, given that the world is full of bad guys. Should techies work on rockets/guns/missiles? Yes - your country might need them to defend itself against an invading force, or even to menace/subdue a threatening force. Perhaps one day, far in the future, your country will need those weapons when it joins a coalition to invade an otherwise peaceful country that refuses to stop burning fossil fuels.
      - pimmen 7y ago
        I’m willing to concede that it can be hard to speculate what the technology will be used for, but sometimes it’s very easy. Wernher von Braun knew about the Holocaust and that the missiles he built was going to be used by the same regime. The person who works at Facebook in the comment I responded to, who doesn’t want to get all political and just write code, could still have heard about what the technology is used for. Once you have confirmation that what you build will be used for harm I think you should reflect on that. Sure, it might be that the technology is used for so much good that you can defend building it even if it’s also used for harming people, and that’s good. As long as you actually did some thinking and didn’t just say ”I don’t really care about all the bad stuff it’s used for, I just want to make cool code”.
        wpietri 7y ago
        Totally. If we are building a technology that could be used for good or bad, I think it's especially important that we find out which, rather than just throwing up our hands and cashing the paycheck.
      - ryandrake 7y ago
        The phrase “your country” complicates things even more. Suppose you have an engineer born in Country A, lived most of his life in Country B, currently works in Country C, for a company based in Country D, on technology being sold to Country E. How should that employee think about country loyalty and the potential applications of his code? I think a good rule of thumb could be: Ask yourself how you would feel if the software you are writing were deployed against you? In other words if the designed purpose of your software application results in winners and losers, put yourself in the shoes of the loser. I think we would have a lot fewer people willing to work on weapons if everyone thought about this a little.
  - hos234 7y ago
    Guilt tripping and shaming your friend isn't productive. He is just going to get defensive or feel bad. People when pushed into that state of mind don't exactly effect change or are open to change.
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. If you think it's bad to work at Facebook, you want people who work at Facebook to feel bad about working there. This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company. If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
      - BeetleB 7y ago
        >If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior. Feeling bad about it usually has the outcome of avoiding the person making them feel bad about it, not changing behavior. And while I don't have any hard scientific data, the consensus in the world of negotiation is that overt guilt tripping is often less effective than not discussing the topic at all (i.e. guilt tripping increases the chance the undesired behavior will occur). >If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there. Putting the particular case of Facebook aside, my recommendation is always to avoid people who force politics onto you because of where you work. They are usually the least objective.
        daveFNbuck 7y ago
        > At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior. That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences. My point was that feeling bad is the mechanism that guilt-trippers and shamers are trying to utilize. I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends. Personally, I don't do it because that's not how I want to treat my friends.
  - 481092 7y ago
    >when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning In a fairly benign way, maybe. But if you want to take the moral high ground then you should be careful not to steer people, friends and family especially, into an us vs them trap which inherently forces them to militarize their position. Myself, I have no issue with people who aren't for me or against me and I have no idea how the 'for me or against me' phrase could maintain popularity in any civil society. Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies into fighting their personal battles for often petty reasons. I get militarizing against big threats, I served my time, but there's just so many petty battles out there that's not worth wasting energy over and better left to more productive energy.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      > Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies Sure. Everybody wants that. But not everybody gets it. And if some people are getting paid because other people are getting exploited, then their peace is coming at the expense of other people's pain. If the Facebook guy is comfortable with the fact that he is making a living working for a company that is morally dubious (even ignoring that they make their money selling their users up for manipulation), then he should own that. But we aren't all obligated to pretend that isn't happening just so he feels better about his fat paycheck. I used to make a lot of money working for financial traders. But I don't do that work any more because it was at best zero sum, but in practice I think it was mostly parasitic on society. Now I do work that I think is more valuable, even if it pays less. Nobody owes me the difference in pay, just like if I had stayed, nobody would have owed me participation in the fiction that I was doing something worthwhile.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    I used to know someone who worked on missile guidance systems. He rationalised it as "I only care about the code." Then there was a war in the middle east and there were TV images of dead and badly injured people being pulled out rubble on the news. They'd been put under the rubble by the missiles he had helped design. He changed jobs not long after. But it would be misleading to reduce this to a moral binary. He wasn't a bad person in most ways, and like most people who aren't bad people in most ways he ended up in that situation through a disinterest in anything outside of his domain, and also because he was allowing economics to do his moral thinking for him. He was doing work that interested him, paying his bills, and keeping on top of the mortgage. What more can you ask of someone?
    - smt88 7y ago
      I suppose the moral question here is, how much do you trust your employer (or country) to use your code only for good? If you're guiding missiles, I think you're naive to think you'll never guide missiles into innocent people. If you're working on Facebook, the question is whether you trust Zuckerberg's moral leadership. It was plausible to be unsure in the past, but at this point, you know he's going to do something unethical and post another "sorry-not-sorry" message online when he gets caught. You know your code will be misused, and that's on you now.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      > What more can you ask of someone? To take responsibility for the effects of their actions? That doesn't seem like too much.
- wsxcde 7y ago
  An alternative explanation is that they routinely bury similar negative stories so they have good reason to believe that obsfuscation and spin will work.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Maybe there are just hundreds of these horrendous things happening at facebook at any one time and almost all of them never get exposed but from the public's view it looks like they are always missing things that should be obvious.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  It makes sense when you look at the market’s reaction to these scandals. Investors don’t care enough about stories like Cambridge Analytica to jettison their holdings in Facebook, and the market reacted positively to their recent fine. Until the US government is willing to stand up and nail them to a wall with serious fines and criminal investigations, continue to be amazed because nothing is going to change.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > "Hey, maybe we should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here." Hardly anyone ever does this until they have to, on either a personal or business level, and those that do are seldom rewarded in this life. This is why external accountability is so important.
aazaa 7y ago
This is a very poorly-written story... From the first paragraph of back-slappy happy talk and inside innuendo to the lack of any coherent introduction or even narrative. If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at stake? This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that Facebook is responsible for the election of the president. For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.
- ec109685 7y ago
  The filter bubble that Facebook created where all sorts of misinformation was shared back and forth ad nauseam (I couldn't believe some of the stuff that was shared during the run up between my family members), was far worse than what Cambridge did to the election.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I don't really like the tone of this article. The linked document doesn't show anything evil; they're not saying "haha look at this terrible secret we're keeping" or "word came from above, let's not fix this problem" or anything like that. It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details. They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the company.
- Havoc 7y ago
  Not gonna lie - I read that post and thought "yep thats a FB employee".
  - richmarr 7y ago
    It may not be a lie, but it is argument ad hominem, so you can probably do better
  - dang 7y ago
    This breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ggggtez 7y ago
  Maybe you haven't worked in a big company: someone raises a thread that one of your users is crawling and stealing all of your data and you don't resolve it for 3 months? At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by someone more quickly than that. FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3 months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But multiple people knew, and there were multiple email threads about it. FB can't claim ignorance here.
dragonsh 7y ago
When they approved for access to personal data feeds of information, they might not have imagined the use-case or might not have know about the usage in details. "Cambridge Analytica" came out due to political implications, there might be many others people don't now. Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become influencers. I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids. I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.
- bcherny 7y ago
  Small, but really important clarification: Facebook and Google do not “sell personal information”. They sell advertising. There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.
  - gibolt 7y ago
    Why is this at the bottom? It is amazing that people (even on this site) still don't get how targeting works. Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.
    - dragonsh 7y ago
remotecool 7y ago
I've always been curious why nobody cared when Obama misused Facebook data in 2012 to win the election. I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign. Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians. This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians. The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it. It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.
- remotecool 7y ago
  Weird that my comment was down voted in the split second that I posted it. I have suspected there were voting bots on HN for awhile now...And now it seems like it's actually happening.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - edoceo 7y ago
    Well, and more than enough human visitors to downvote political comment. I think that's one of the rules here
    - remotecool 7y ago
      So posting countless political articles is allowed? Please... It's because I questioned the Democrats.
      - techntoke 7y ago
        I actually find that comments supporting Democrats, and especially progressive ideas are more likely to be downvoted on Hacker News. Almost like corporate PR doesn't want them to become popular opinions.
      - 7y ago
buttholesurfer 7y ago
Still butthurt about 2016 elections I see...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tempsy 7y ago
My issue with the whole CA debacle is that I’ve seen no proof that the services they offered were actually effective in persuading anyone. They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.
- RandomTisk 7y ago
  And Obama or PAC's used the exact same tactics in 2012 it has been shown, but nobody cared then because the home team was doing the doping and nobody knew about them yet.
  - dunstad 7y ago
    Obama isn't a foreign power.
  - acgh213 7y ago
    This is an interesting claim and any information about this you could provide would be helpful
    - colordrops 7y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
    - alexeldeib 7y ago
      FWIW, I don't think this is particularly revelatory. The Obama campaign was known for its effective and widespread use of digital voter information. e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campaign-won-the-race-for-voter-data/2013/07/28/ad32c7b4-ee4e-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
    - alexeldeib 7y ago
ianhawes 7y ago
Some context around the FB staff trying to identify app IDs: Cambridge Analytica themselves never had an app on the FB platform. Instead, they bought the data from Kogan, who had built the app "thisisyourdigitallife" which was a personality quiz.
earenndil 7y ago
Suggestion to change the URL to the original facebook report at https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-potential-for-confusion/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-pote..., or the email chain (linked from there) at https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-document.pdf https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-d....
thinkcomp 7y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act. Learning about Cambridge Analytica ten years later would have been at least the second time he heard about a friend-of-friend data breach. https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-timeline/ https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-t...
- BoiledCabbage 7y ago
  > I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act. That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it communicated?
  - karlding 7y ago
    Quote from the linked website: > Thursday, April 7, 2005 > 4:12:44 PM EDT > Mark Zuckerberg starts a conversation with Aaron Greenspan on AIM > > [...] > ThinkComp: i don't care who wrote it > ThinkComp: or where they are > ThinkComp: it's your responsibility to get it done > zberg02: yea but it's also my responsibility to get other stuff done as well > zberg02: you know how it is to run a business > ThinkComp: believe me, i totally understand that :-) > ThinkComp: i'm drowning in taxes > ThinkComp: and have 20 other projects going on > zberg02: yea > ThinkComp: but those projects affect maybe 30 people collectively > ThinkComp: and there's no danger element > zberg02: and i really do get that you care about people's security > ThinkComp: you could have opened yourself up to another lawsuit had you left it open longer > zberg02: not quite > ThinkComp: oh yes > ThinkComp: very much so > ThinkComp: FTC code section 5 > [...]
mkorfmann 7y ago
BIIIIIG KARMA TANK ROLLING IN SHOOOOOOOT
readme3 7y ago
With all due respect to FB's engineering , how can a company be so vile in blatantly not monitoring data that was used for obviously not so ethical means. I deleted my FB account and that to me has been the most amazing decision personally i have made. But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-of-user-profile-with-aadhaar-sc-agrees-to-hear-facebooks-plea-for-transfer-of-cases/articleshow/70750965.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...). This is even more scary!. FB is a shady organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other free biggies as well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.
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201 points by innovateee 7y ago

Naively I would think that at some point Facebook would say, "Hey, maybe we should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here." It really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.

smt88 7y ago
It's easy to tell yourself you're not evil when you're one small person in an organization comprising thousands (or millions) of people. It would be happening with or without you, right? You didn't decide to do these evil things, and not everything the organization does is evil. Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands of people telling themselves this same thing. I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to get into politics. I just want to work on cool code." He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning.
- pimmen 7y ago
  Reminds me of the song about Wernher von Braun who built rockets for the Nazis and the US. ”Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical ’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department’ says Wernher von Braun” I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed before every task out of worry, or that we can be morally perfect, but I don’t think we should just throw our hands in the air and pretend that only the person pulling the trigger could’ve done differently.
  - abraae 7y ago
    > I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I don't think that's a universally sound position, unless you hold extremely pacifist views. It's too hard to predict the end game for military technology, given that the world is full of bad guys. Should techies work on rockets/guns/missiles? Yes - your country might need them to defend itself against an invading force, or even to menace/subdue a threatening force. Perhaps one day, far in the future, your country will need those weapons when it joins a coalition to invade an otherwise peaceful country that refuses to stop burning fossil fuels.
    - pimmen 7y ago
      I’m willing to concede that it can be hard to speculate what the technology will be used for, but sometimes it’s very easy. Wernher von Braun knew about the Holocaust and that the missiles he built was going to be used by the same regime. The person who works at Facebook in the comment I responded to, who doesn’t want to get all political and just write code, could still have heard about what the technology is used for. Once you have confirmation that what you build will be used for harm I think you should reflect on that. Sure, it might be that the technology is used for so much good that you can defend building it even if it’s also used for harming people, and that’s good. As long as you actually did some thinking and didn’t just say ”I don’t really care about all the bad stuff it’s used for, I just want to make cool code”.
      - wpietri 7y ago
        Totally. If we are building a technology that could be used for good or bad, I think it's especially important that we find out which, rather than just throwing up our hands and cashing the paycheck.
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      The phrase “your country” complicates things even more. Suppose you have an engineer born in Country A, lived most of his life in Country B, currently works in Country C, for a company based in Country D, on technology being sold to Country E. How should that employee think about country loyalty and the potential applications of his code? I think a good rule of thumb could be: Ask yourself how you would feel if the software you are writing were deployed against you? In other words if the designed purpose of your software application results in winners and losers, put yourself in the shoes of the loser. I think we would have a lot fewer people willing to work on weapons if everyone thought about this a little.
- hos234 7y ago
  Guilt tripping and shaming your friend isn't productive. He is just going to get defensive or feel bad. People when pushed into that state of mind don't exactly effect change or are open to change.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. If you think it's bad to work at Facebook, you want people who work at Facebook to feel bad about working there. This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company. If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
    - BeetleB 7y ago
      >If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior. Feeling bad about it usually has the outcome of avoiding the person making them feel bad about it, not changing behavior. And while I don't have any hard scientific data, the consensus in the world of negotiation is that overt guilt tripping is often less effective than not discussing the topic at all (i.e. guilt tripping increases the chance the undesired behavior will occur). >If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there. Putting the particular case of Facebook aside, my recommendation is always to avoid people who force politics onto you because of where you work. They are usually the least objective.
      - daveFNbuck 7y ago
        > At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior. That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences. My point was that feeling bad is the mechanism that guilt-trippers and shamers are trying to utilize. I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends. Personally, I don't do it because that's not how I want to treat my friends.
- 481092 7y ago
  >when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning In a fairly benign way, maybe. But if you want to take the moral high ground then you should be careful not to steer people, friends and family especially, into an us vs them trap which inherently forces them to militarize their position. Myself, I have no issue with people who aren't for me or against me and I have no idea how the 'for me or against me' phrase could maintain popularity in any civil society. Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies into fighting their personal battles for often petty reasons. I get militarizing against big threats, I served my time, but there's just so many petty battles out there that's not worth wasting energy over and better left to more productive energy.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies Sure. Everybody wants that. But not everybody gets it. And if some people are getting paid because other people are getting exploited, then their peace is coming at the expense of other people's pain. If the Facebook guy is comfortable with the fact that he is making a living working for a company that is morally dubious (even ignoring that they make their money selling their users up for manipulation), then he should own that. But we aren't all obligated to pretend that isn't happening just so he feels better about his fat paycheck. I used to make a lot of money working for financial traders. But I don't do that work any more because it was at best zero sum, but in practice I think it was mostly parasitic on society. Now I do work that I think is more valuable, even if it pays less. Nobody owes me the difference in pay, just like if I had stayed, nobody would have owed me participation in the fiction that I was doing something worthwhile.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I used to know someone who worked on missile guidance systems. He rationalised it as "I only care about the code." Then there was a war in the middle east and there were TV images of dead and badly injured people being pulled out rubble on the news. They'd been put under the rubble by the missiles he had helped design. He changed jobs not long after. But it would be misleading to reduce this to a moral binary. He wasn't a bad person in most ways, and like most people who aren't bad people in most ways he ended up in that situation through a disinterest in anything outside of his domain, and also because he was allowing economics to do his moral thinking for him. He was doing work that interested him, paying his bills, and keeping on top of the mortgage. What more can you ask of someone?
  - smt88 7y ago
    I suppose the moral question here is, how much do you trust your employer (or country) to use your code only for good? If you're guiding missiles, I think you're naive to think you'll never guide missiles into innocent people. If you're working on Facebook, the question is whether you trust Zuckerberg's moral leadership. It was plausible to be unsure in the past, but at this point, you know he's going to do something unethical and post another "sorry-not-sorry" message online when he gets caught. You know your code will be misused, and that's on you now.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > What more can you ask of someone? To take responsibility for the effects of their actions? That doesn't seem like too much.
wsxcde 7y ago
An alternative explanation is that they routinely bury similar negative stories so they have good reason to believe that obsfuscation and spin will work.
baroffoos 7y ago
Maybe there are just hundreds of these horrendous things happening at facebook at any one time and almost all of them never get exposed but from the public's view it looks like they are always missing things that should be obvious.
save_ferris 7y ago
It makes sense when you look at the market’s reaction to these scandals. Investors don’t care enough about stories like Cambridge Analytica to jettison their holdings in Facebook, and the market reacted positively to their recent fine. Until the US government is willing to stand up and nail them to a wall with serious fines and criminal investigations, continue to be amazed because nothing is going to change.
pjc50 7y ago
> "Hey, maybe we should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here." Hardly anyone ever does this until they have to, on either a personal or business level, and those that do are seldom rewarded in this life. This is why external accountability is so important.

aazaa 7y ago

This is a very poorly-written story... From the first paragraph of back-slappy happy talk and inside innuendo to the lack of any coherent introduction or even narrative. If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at stake? This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that Facebook is responsible for the election of the president. For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.

ec109685 7y ago
The filter bubble that Facebook created where all sorts of misinformation was shared back and forth ad nauseam (I couldn't believe some of the stuff that was shared during the run up between my family members), was far worse than what Cambridge did to the election.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I don't really like the tone of this article. The linked document doesn't show anything evil; they're not saying "haha look at this terrible secret we're keeping" or "word came from above, let's not fix this problem" or anything like that. It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details. They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the company.

Havoc 7y ago
Not gonna lie - I read that post and thought "yep thats a FB employee".
- richmarr 7y ago
  It may not be a lie, but it is argument ad hominem, so you can probably do better
- dang 7y ago
  This breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ggggtez 7y ago
Maybe you haven't worked in a big company: someone raises a thread that one of your users is crawling and stealing all of your data and you don't resolve it for 3 months? At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by someone more quickly than that. FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3 months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But multiple people knew, and there were multiple email threads about it. FB can't claim ignorance here.

dragonsh 7y ago

When they approved for access to personal data feeds of information, they might not have imagined the use-case or might not have know about the usage in details. "Cambridge Analytica" came out due to political implications, there might be many others people don't now. Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become influencers. I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids. I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.

bcherny 7y ago
Small, but really important clarification: Facebook and Google do not “sell personal information”. They sell advertising. There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.
- gibolt 7y ago
  Why is this at the bottom? It is amazing that people (even on this site) still don't get how targeting works. Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.
  - dragonsh 7y ago

remotecool 7y ago

I've always been curious why nobody cared when Obama misused Facebook data in 2012 to win the election. I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign. Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians. This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians. The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it. It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.

remotecool 7y ago
Weird that my comment was down voted in the split second that I posted it. I have suspected there were voting bots on HN for awhile now...And now it seems like it's actually happening.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- edoceo 7y ago
  Well, and more than enough human visitors to downvote political comment. I think that's one of the rules here
  - remotecool 7y ago
    So posting countless political articles is allowed? Please... It's because I questioned the Democrats.
    - techntoke 7y ago
      I actually find that comments supporting Democrats, and especially progressive ideas are more likely to be downvoted on Hacker News. Almost like corporate PR doesn't want them to become popular opinions.
    - 7y ago

buttholesurfer 7y ago

Still butthurt about 2016 elections I see...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tempsy 7y ago

My issue with the whole CA debacle is that I’ve seen no proof that the services they offered were actually effective in persuading anyone. They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.

RandomTisk 7y ago
And Obama or PAC's used the exact same tactics in 2012 it has been shown, but nobody cared then because the home team was doing the doping and nobody knew about them yet.
- dunstad 7y ago
  Obama isn't a foreign power.
- acgh213 7y ago
  This is an interesting claim and any information about this you could provide would be helpful
  - colordrops 7y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
  - alexeldeib 7y ago
    FWIW, I don't think this is particularly revelatory. The Obama campaign was known for its effective and widespread use of digital voter information. e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campaign-won-the-race-for-voter-data/2013/07/28/ad32c7b4-ee4e-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
  - alexeldeib 7y ago

ianhawes 7y ago

Some context around the FB staff trying to identify app IDs: Cambridge Analytica themselves never had an app on the FB platform. Instead, they bought the data from Kogan, who had built the app "thisisyourdigitallife" which was a personality quiz.

earenndil 7y ago

Suggestion to change the URL to the original facebook report at https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-potential-for-confusion/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-pote..., or the email chain (linked from there) at https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-document.pdf https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-d....

thinkcomp 7y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act. Learning about Cambridge Analytica ten years later would have been at least the second time he heard about a friend-of-friend data breach. https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-timeline/ https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-t...

BoiledCabbage 7y ago
> I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act. That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it communicated?
- karlding 7y ago
  Quote from the linked website: > Thursday, April 7, 2005 > 4:12:44 PM EDT > Mark Zuckerberg starts a conversation with Aaron Greenspan on AIM > > [...] > ThinkComp: i don't care who wrote it > ThinkComp: or where they are > ThinkComp: it's your responsibility to get it done > zberg02: yea but it's also my responsibility to get other stuff done as well > zberg02: you know how it is to run a business > ThinkComp: believe me, i totally understand that :-) > ThinkComp: i'm drowning in taxes > ThinkComp: and have 20 other projects going on > zberg02: yea > ThinkComp: but those projects affect maybe 30 people collectively > ThinkComp: and there's no danger element > zberg02: and i really do get that you care about people's security > ThinkComp: you could have opened yourself up to another lawsuit had you left it open longer > zberg02: not quite > ThinkComp: oh yes > ThinkComp: very much so > ThinkComp: FTC code section 5 > [...]

mkorfmann 7y ago

BIIIIIG KARMA TANK ROLLING IN SHOOOOOOOT

readme3 7y ago

With all due respect to FB's engineering , how can a company be so vile in blatantly not monitoring data that was used for obviously not so ethical means. I deleted my FB account and that to me has been the most amazing decision personally i have made. But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-of-user-profile-with-aadhaar-sc-agrees-to-hear-facebooks-plea-for-transfer-of-cases/articleshow/70750965.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...). This is even more scary!. FB is a shady organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other free biggies as well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.

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