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I appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more difficult than asking questions, but ... > “You don’t know? This was the largest data sca

I appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more difficult than asking questions, but ... > “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?” ... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is reported in the original article. This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. I understand that Zukerberg's legal team may have advised him to be vague during the interview and he probably answered what is best for his company. But as citizens of the world, we should never find such vague answers acceptable. The way Cambridge Analytica has upset the process of democracy and how Facebook data was used while doing so requires Facebook to be subject to such grilling. It should be made clear to Facebook in no uncertain terms that it needs to present answers and concrete answers.

Mirioron 7y ago
Sure, we should not find this dodging acceptable, but shouldn't we start by using this standard on the politicians themselves first? At least Zuckerberg is offering a service we can opt out of, that's not the same for what the politicians do.
- danaris 7y ago
  In a very real way, that's not true. Facebook's adoption is so high that even if you and I choose not to use it—choose to take every measure available to us to avoid personal interaction with anything Facebook does—we cannot avoid its effects, because of the millions of people around us who do not take that choice. Facebook can, without any exaggeration or doubt, influence elections in multiple countries. Treating Zuckerberg like he's the CEO of, say, Dropbox just doesn't fly anymore.
bertil 7y ago
> This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. It actually wasn’t but no one will listen to people familiar with what happened.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  Please elaborate.
  - bertil 7y ago
    In 2009-2013 Facebook was under a lot of pressure to share their data with academic researchers. They didn’t have the resources to process information, anonymise and make those tables available and manage the relationship, the research project, etc. More importantly, they were afraid of data leaks from careless handling. One researcher with an interesting research topic on personality traits and impeccable credentials (Cambridge, great PhD advisor) started collecting information on his own with a personality test, an app the newly updated API. It seemed like an easy to manage relation, someone who knew about information security and a good test-balloon for engaging more with the academic community. There were some warnings later when the app grew suddenly: he started paying Amazon Mechanical Turk to increase the subscribers; however, paying subject was common in psychology and AMT was becoming a standard in that area. More power to him. There were some documents signed to confirm he was focusing on academic-only interest. So far, that was hardly a scandal. But Kogan wanted to live from his research and he would end up selling the database to a company called SCL, doing psychological research. That wasn’t completely leftfield. Facebook anticipated and decided to pull the plug, giving the app weeks to close (in order to let end-customers download their data, a standard process at the time when data portability was the main topic of conversation). Kogan claimed he used a different app but kept the same credentials and user base, so that argument was, as expected, invisible to the API detection systems. The AMT budget grew massively to a million dollars. I don’t know how or when Facebook learned about the sale; I suspect the increase of activity triggered an audit. Once the lie was clear, Facebook asked the buyer to delete the data, obtained outside of the agreement in the API license. Without being the ICO, you can’t use the law to guarantee that, so they did the next best thing: they asked the buyer to sign legal documents promising that they had deleted it. If Facebook could have used the ICO then to enforce the deletion, they would have. I’ve had to deal with them since and I would find that confidence… generous. But either way: physical force wasn’t an option between two companies, neither had breached the letter of the law. All academic collaboration projects were put on ice and later cancelled because that test proved sour. Third-party apps misbehaving is alas common and there’s nothing special about this: people were scamming gullible users into clicking on fake buttons at an industrial scale. So false claims where banned. More dodgy stuff emerged, they were blocked; scammers tried again with renewed trick and were caught with an increasingly refined detection system. And, as far as Facebook was concerned, it was a massive cat-and-mouse game but that was it. CA was one of many game studios, spammers, etc. who had abused the API in ways that were unexpected in 2008 and patched since. One thing that has not been documented about this: banning and lawyer letters were possibly not enough; there is a system to detect suspicious targeting (like racist real-estate ads). Most likely, Kogan’s list, like other data stolen by spammers was added to that system. It would detect anyone using stolen information -- so if CA used it, they would get caught again. That particular feature is not talked about a lot for obvious reasons but fairly expected when you have so many scammers at scale. For Facebook, that story is a classic case of enforcing API rules: extensive observability, defence in depth, complying with the law at the time (who couldn’t care less about disclosure) and being flexible with rules that abusers are keen to circumvent. So, saying that Cambridge Analytica used that leaked data to target advertising was surprising to anyone in charge, and their expected reaction was likely to check, see that wasn’t the case and likely focus on something else, something that wasn’t a (for an insider obviously) made-up scandal, spewed by a disgruntled employee. For a good reason: Cambridge Analytica didn’t use Facebook data or anything like that. They tried briefly, it failed and they fired the data scientist who wouldn’t let it go but that’s it: overall, the dataset wasn’t helpful. I know that because I had left Facebook soon before and I was surprised when I heard that story too. I had the opportunity to meet CA data scientists, at conferences, etc. both before and after the scandal, and ask them directly: they confirmed and told a far more credible story. All of Kogan’s work, the Ocean model, the Facebook dataset, three- or four-year-old at this point? All bullshit. Well, the research was interesting and there are some correlations but it’s not usable at scale, not with three-year-old partial data. They didn’t delete the database (putting them in a breach with Facebook, again, and in a difficult position once the ICO started enforcing new laws) anyway but never used it—which is why you have ambiguity between former employees on whether that table existed at all. As you can see at the exact 1:00:00 mark in _The Big Hack_ documentary, they used party membership, magazine subscription and credit report data (for the car make & model) to predict affiliation -- not a bad take, actually: all three have verified full name and address. More importantly, all are more representative of your opinion (in the US) than whether you liked the “Curly Fries” page. Quick take: if Joe is a 65-yo registered Republican, read _Guns & Ammos_ and drive a Ford 350, who might you vote for? Should you send Joe a paper flyer asking for a campaign contribution? No need to figure out what Facebook account might be Joe’s and whether he is a fan of the page “I like to flip my pillow at night to get the cooler side”. Why would SCL/CA lie about their work? Because their actual job was more to write slimy, racist and sexists dog-whistle campaign ads (see the “Do So” campaign in Trinidad & Tobago, in the same _Big Hack_ documentary, pitting Blacks against Indians). It’s not really great to sell yourself based on that so they mentioned magical statistics and impressive “results”. De facto, their effectiveness doesn’t come from targeting (the Do So racist campaign, as the Trump racist campaign, was for all to see) but from drafting counter-campaigns with fake militants; leveraging “secret” meaning about “the cultural differences with immigrants” ::cough, cough:: skin colour, “real Americans” i.e. not _that_ “Mexican” judge; getting different reaction from different demographic groups. Overall, Classic 70’s StateOps, that the CIA and FSB have perfected against each other. I remember an Asterix where this is explained: Asterix and the Roman Agent. Tactics that Trump has exploited shamelessly: provoke your most principled opponent with abusive, often coded language, and exploit their outrage as being anti-pragmatic. Use that attention to deny principles. Deny the truth, repeatedly, shamelessly. Of all the things that the Trump twitter account is, targetted isn’t one of them.
iagovar 7y ago
I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us, I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot more companies doing this in the US. Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries, arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.
- DrScientist 7y ago
  Exactly. Facebook et all grew on the fact that they could automate the process - but in reality they have only automated part of it - the easy part of taking the money and placing the ad - not checking the content. If they can't check the content in an automated way ( very hard because people will be actively working against you ) and the remedy is to have an army of people checking content then their competitive edge over the traditional business model largely disappears. The other way to fix this - which I'd imagine Facebook and Google might want to push - is to put the responsibility onto the generator of the content. Google and Facebook could easily help automate the the shifting of responsibility if everyone is identifiable. Imagine the CASE act - but automated for everyone who breaches copyright on youtube... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disastrous-copyright-bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disa... That would be like a newspaper not taking responsibility for a story being wrong - simply passing the legal blame onto a source - while there is some justice here as the source has a responsibility also, it is ignoring the fact that the platforms play a role in placing and promoting the content.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an improvement on the status quo. I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Have you seen or heard of the Night Trap hearings? They refused to hear answers to accusations of lurid content that "wasn't even remotely in the goddamn game". The have proven that they will refuse to listen to any answer that they can't grandstand about. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook is shady as hell and even I feel sympathy for him here and suspect he may be drugging himself to not snap at the hours of stupid and dishonest questions. Since it wouldn't be good for the company long term to make enemies by shaming them during their grandstand hours with many choice lines.
ThomPete 7y ago
I think there is something else going on here. Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing. If you get into a debate with her on whether her completely unproven claim is true or false you are guilty, if you try to avoid it you are basically saying she is right and are guilty. This kind of questioning only works because it's not a courtroom. This would never be allowed as an actual question.
- Udik 7y ago
  > Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing. "Congresswoman, half of this country thinks that your statement about the impact of Cambridge Analytica in the last election is factually false. In case you wanted to publish an ad that mentioned it, should Facebook reject it?"
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    That would expose him for not taking responsibility.
    - Udik 7y ago
      You cannot be asked to take the responsibility of an impossible task such as telling truths from lies. It's a responsibility that even the government doesn't want. What about "congresswoman, you pass a bill to institute the Ministry of Truth, and I'll scrupulously follow their indications".

Mirioron 7y ago

Sure, we should not find this dodging acceptable, but shouldn't we start by using this standard on the politicians themselves first? At least Zuckerberg is offering a service we can opt out of, that's not the same for what the politicians do.

danaris 7y ago
In a very real way, that's not true. Facebook's adoption is so high that even if you and I choose not to use it—choose to take every measure available to us to avoid personal interaction with anything Facebook does—we cannot avoid its effects, because of the millions of people around us who do not take that choice. Facebook can, without any exaggeration or doubt, influence elections in multiple countries. Treating Zuckerberg like he's the CEO of, say, Dropbox just doesn't fly anymore.

bertil 7y ago

> This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. It actually wasn’t but no one will listen to people familiar with what happened.

codetrotter 7y ago
Please elaborate.
- bertil 7y ago
  In 2009-2013 Facebook was under a lot of pressure to share their data with academic researchers. They didn’t have the resources to process information, anonymise and make those tables available and manage the relationship, the research project, etc. More importantly, they were afraid of data leaks from careless handling. One researcher with an interesting research topic on personality traits and impeccable credentials (Cambridge, great PhD advisor) started collecting information on his own with a personality test, an app the newly updated API. It seemed like an easy to manage relation, someone who knew about information security and a good test-balloon for engaging more with the academic community. There were some warnings later when the app grew suddenly: he started paying Amazon Mechanical Turk to increase the subscribers; however, paying subject was common in psychology and AMT was becoming a standard in that area. More power to him. There were some documents signed to confirm he was focusing on academic-only interest. So far, that was hardly a scandal. But Kogan wanted to live from his research and he would end up selling the database to a company called SCL, doing psychological research. That wasn’t completely leftfield. Facebook anticipated and decided to pull the plug, giving the app weeks to close (in order to let end-customers download their data, a standard process at the time when data portability was the main topic of conversation). Kogan claimed he used a different app but kept the same credentials and user base, so that argument was, as expected, invisible to the API detection systems. The AMT budget grew massively to a million dollars. I don’t know how or when Facebook learned about the sale; I suspect the increase of activity triggered an audit. Once the lie was clear, Facebook asked the buyer to delete the data, obtained outside of the agreement in the API license. Without being the ICO, you can’t use the law to guarantee that, so they did the next best thing: they asked the buyer to sign legal documents promising that they had deleted it. If Facebook could have used the ICO then to enforce the deletion, they would have. I’ve had to deal with them since and I would find that confidence… generous. But either way: physical force wasn’t an option between two companies, neither had breached the letter of the law. All academic collaboration projects were put on ice and later cancelled because that test proved sour. Third-party apps misbehaving is alas common and there’s nothing special about this: people were scamming gullible users into clicking on fake buttons at an industrial scale. So false claims where banned. More dodgy stuff emerged, they were blocked; scammers tried again with renewed trick and were caught with an increasingly refined detection system. And, as far as Facebook was concerned, it was a massive cat-and-mouse game but that was it. CA was one of many game studios, spammers, etc. who had abused the API in ways that were unexpected in 2008 and patched since. One thing that has not been documented about this: banning and lawyer letters were possibly not enough; there is a system to detect suspicious targeting (like racist real-estate ads). Most likely, Kogan’s list, like other data stolen by spammers was added to that system. It would detect anyone using stolen information -- so if CA used it, they would get caught again. That particular feature is not talked about a lot for obvious reasons but fairly expected when you have so many scammers at scale. For Facebook, that story is a classic case of enforcing API rules: extensive observability, defence in depth, complying with the law at the time (who couldn’t care less about disclosure) and being flexible with rules that abusers are keen to circumvent. So, saying that Cambridge Analytica used that leaked data to target advertising was surprising to anyone in charge, and their expected reaction was likely to check, see that wasn’t the case and likely focus on something else, something that wasn’t a (for an insider obviously) made-up scandal, spewed by a disgruntled employee. For a good reason: Cambridge Analytica didn’t use Facebook data or anything like that. They tried briefly, it failed and they fired the data scientist who wouldn’t let it go but that’s it: overall, the dataset wasn’t helpful. I know that because I had left Facebook soon before and I was surprised when I heard that story too. I had the opportunity to meet CA data scientists, at conferences, etc. both before and after the scandal, and ask them directly: they confirmed and told a far more credible story. All of Kogan’s work, the Ocean model, the Facebook dataset, three- or four-year-old at this point? All bullshit. Well, the research was interesting and there are some correlations but it’s not usable at scale, not with three-year-old partial data. They didn’t delete the database (putting them in a breach with Facebook, again, and in a difficult position once the ICO started enforcing new laws) anyway but never used it—which is why you have ambiguity between former employees on whether that table existed at all. As you can see at the exact 1:00:00 mark in _The Big Hack_ documentary, they used party membership, magazine subscription and credit report data (for the car make & model) to predict affiliation -- not a bad take, actually: all three have verified full name and address. More importantly, all are more representative of your opinion (in the US) than whether you liked the “Curly Fries” page. Quick take: if Joe is a 65-yo registered Republican, read _Guns & Ammos_ and drive a Ford 350, who might you vote for? Should you send Joe a paper flyer asking for a campaign contribution? No need to figure out what Facebook account might be Joe’s and whether he is a fan of the page “I like to flip my pillow at night to get the cooler side”. Why would SCL/CA lie about their work? Because their actual job was more to write slimy, racist and sexists dog-whistle campaign ads (see the “Do So” campaign in Trinidad & Tobago, in the same _Big Hack_ documentary, pitting Blacks against Indians). It’s not really great to sell yourself based on that so they mentioned magical statistics and impressive “results”. De facto, their effectiveness doesn’t come from targeting (the Do So racist campaign, as the Trump racist campaign, was for all to see) but from drafting counter-campaigns with fake militants; leveraging “secret” meaning about “the cultural differences with immigrants” ::cough, cough:: skin colour, “real Americans” i.e. not _that_ “Mexican” judge; getting different reaction from different demographic groups. Overall, Classic 70’s StateOps, that the CIA and FSB have perfected against each other. I remember an Asterix where this is explained: Asterix and the Roman Agent. Tactics that Trump has exploited shamelessly: provoke your most principled opponent with abusive, often coded language, and exploit their outrage as being anti-pragmatic. Use that attention to deny principles. Deny the truth, repeatedly, shamelessly. Of all the things that the Trump twitter account is, targetted isn’t one of them.

iagovar 7y ago

I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us, I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot more companies doing this in the US. Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries, arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.

DrScientist 7y ago
Exactly. Facebook et all grew on the fact that they could automate the process - but in reality they have only automated part of it - the easy part of taking the money and placing the ad - not checking the content. If they can't check the content in an automated way ( very hard because people will be actively working against you ) and the remedy is to have an army of people checking content then their competitive edge over the traditional business model largely disappears. The other way to fix this - which I'd imagine Facebook and Google might want to push - is to put the responsibility onto the generator of the content. Google and Facebook could easily help automate the the shifting of responsibility if everyone is identifiable. Imagine the CASE act - but automated for everyone who breaches copyright on youtube... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disastrous-copyright-bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disa... That would be like a newspaper not taking responsibility for a story being wrong - simply passing the legal blame onto a source - while there is some justice here as the source has a responsibility also, it is ignoring the fact that the platforms play a role in placing and promoting the content.
jacques_chester 7y ago
If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an improvement on the status quo. I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Have you seen or heard of the Night Trap hearings? They refused to hear answers to accusations of lurid content that "wasn't even remotely in the goddamn game". The have proven that they will refuse to listen to any answer that they can't grandstand about. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook is shady as hell and even I feel sympathy for him here and suspect he may be drugging himself to not snap at the hours of stupid and dishonest questions. Since it wouldn't be good for the company long term to make enemies by shaming them during their grandstand hours with many choice lines.

ThomPete 7y ago

I think there is something else going on here. Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing. If you get into a debate with her on whether her completely unproven claim is true or false you are guilty, if you try to avoid it you are basically saying she is right and are guilty. This kind of questioning only works because it's not a courtroom. This would never be allowed as an actual question.

Udik 7y ago
> Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing. "Congresswoman, half of this country thinks that your statement about the impact of Cambridge Analytica in the last election is factually false. In case you wanted to publish an ad that mentioned it, should Facebook reject it?"
- ThomPete 7y ago
  That would expose him for not taking responsibility.
  - Udik 7y ago
    You cannot be asked to take the responsibility of an impossible task such as telling truths from lies. It's a responsibility that even the government doesn't want. What about "congresswoman, you pass a bill to institute the Ministry of Truth, and I'll scrupulously follow their indications".