Be Excellent To Each Other

Here are the facts as I understand them:

And all of this, at the moment, is "allegedly".

1) CA put a survey onto Facebook which asked lots of questions to find out what sort of X you were (you know - "You're Phoebe Buffay! You're in Gryffindor!").

2) Because the app was built to work on Facebook it also collected your name, and some basic details about you - the sort of stuff you see if you look at a profile of a person you're not "friends" with. It would give them a name, age, things you 'like', and a rough idea of where you live. It may or may not have given them quite an accurate idea of where you lived, no-one can decide about that. It also told them who your friends were - again, the sort of thing you can see when you hit up someone's page that you don't know.

3) They did some wicked-smart stuff with the masses of data they collected, and built a psych profile on folks to find out how they might vote in the upcoming USA election. Then they looked for patterns of people connected to friends that didn't do the survey, and took a guess at how those friends would vote, based on the answers of the connected people, and where they lived.

4) Team Trump used this data to target adverts at the people they thought were most likely to be swayed to vote Republican, in a way that was most likely to sway them. It was super-granular, street-level stuff. People canvassed in those areas, saying things they'd been told to say which would be most likely to sway that particular area's vote. They also did the neighbours, because people living in close proximity are more likely to think in the same way.

5) Trump won, and everyone immediatly started asking "how?".

Now, first off, I think this is genius. Genius. This stuff is fucking hard, and if it was as effective as people are saying it was then it was a fucking work of art.

Second off - everyone does this. I used to work in Market Research, and at least one person there is doing this sort of stuff full time, and that was just a little research shop. The behemoths like Nielsen and Kantar are going to have massive swathes of people doing the same thing (and they'll tie it to a load of other information sources, like websites you visit or things you buy). Fun fact - market research is exempt from the part of the Data Protection Act that says you can't keep data that's not timely or relevant, so over the years they're going to have accumulated buckets of data that they never have to remove.

Third off - I don't think it can have worked as well as people are saying. As I said before, this stuff is hard, not only collecting the psyc profiles but using NLP to sway people. I think it may have worked to an extent, but not to a large extent.

Bottom line - I can't see how anyone did anything illegal. Immoral perhaps (on the part of CA) because they didn't tell people answering the questions what the data was really for. But it's incredibly rare that a market research survey will tell you what it's actually for - for a start, it will skew the results. Sometimes they tell you at the end, but not often.

Now, everyone is losing their tits over this, but all I can see is business as normal. CA did an excellent job, and in their desperate hunt to believe anything except for the fact that people actually wanted Trump to be president, America is jumping up and down and pointing finders.

So... Am I wrong? Tell me!

Interesting side note - almost every US report you see or hear about this describes CA as being 'a British company', which is correct, but it was the New York office that actually did the work.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree.

Based on what?

I say it's an incredibly dubious practice. Legal yes, moral no. Plus Facebook have to take a lot of flak here for letting it happen.

You missed the bit about them offering to send Eastern European girls round to politicians so they can get footage of them being naughty for blackmail purposes (edit: which I think is probably very illegal).

Also yeah I don't blame them, I blame FB for not just allowing but encouraging this sort of thing.

That's nothing to do with what everyone is currently kicking off about, though.

Letting a survey happen?

I thought the issue was twofold:

1) The people who did the survey agreed to let their info be used for "marketing purposes" (or whatever the small print - that they didn't read - said), however what that survey did was take their info, and all of the info of the people they were connected to, too ("as well" is more grammatically correct, but when else do you get a chance to say tutu, got to take them when you see them.) The exact details of what they scraped isn't clear, but my assumption is that it is more than can be scraped from the public profile, otherwise what's the big deal

2) CA bods get filmed saying they can blackmail, bribe, entrap, put up fake news etc... to rig elections. Understandably people go "hang on a second".

Having such lax security so that all sorts of personal data is collected by the survey. Come on, Grim…. I can't tell if you're playing devil's advocate here or not. If you are, please stop.

One person's lax security is another person's 'your data is our business model'.

Well, it was part of the same investigation, but yes.

I thought they had got more of the info on friends than just a list of names of whatnot, and FB had allowed them to harvest further details that they shouldn’t have been allowed to take.

I think a lot of it is not just the privacy aspect but the specifics of what was then done (by all sorts of people) in terms of the targeted messages. Like, they weren’t of the ‘Trump will lower taxes and build a wall’ common GOP approach but were more of the ‘Proof that Killary eats babies and Obama is a Muslim’ type clickbait encouraging people to vote based on mad lies.

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

Not quite:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... s-election

I don't really think you understand what happened.

These scandals are always useful for people to think a bit harder on the problems of using social media too much. But there's nothing here that's surprising, and wasn't the Obama campaign lauded for being pioneers in using big data? I don't doubt for a minute that this is just regular stuff that many campaigns too.

The Trump election was a tragedy, but this news just makes me shrug my shoulders. Sometimes I really want to close my facebook account but i still need to be reminded about birthdays.

a) how much do you pay for beex
b) even when you're paying for the product, you are often still the product. cf any traditional media that sells adverts: newspapers, magazines, television, ...

Indeed, I was just about to write that but had to reply to yet another tiresome "this can't really be your opinion lul" post from the Ivory tower department.

I think the actual information collected from the friends was key. At the moment, I've seen nothing to suggest is isn't anything you could get from page-scraping.

That's fine (it's not but for the sake of argument let's say it is ), but CA abused Facebook's ToS as DocG stated above. FB harvesting data for their own nefarious means is one thing, but allowing a third-party to do it is another matter entirely.

Like I've not mined Beex for data.

Read it again. If CA is a third party how can they have been involved with Facebook's TOS?

Sorry if I offended you. I was just genuinely surprised that it was your sincere opinion.

Ok, there was something that was missing that makes everything worse. But aren't we used to tech giants basically ignoring laws? Uber has been operating against EU laws and national laws for years, so it's surprising that facebook pulls something like this?

I really hate conspiracy theories, but I make an exception when it comes to tech giants. I'm sure this is the least evil that they're capable to do.

Now send me Latvian hookers.

Seems pretty clear. The platform policy allowed them to collect data, but then they sold it on against Facebook's policy.

They didn't sell it, they bought it.

Although other places say that they built the whole thing, so


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... explained/

No, they bought data from someone who was violating the T&Cs.

Edit: wot Grim... said.

Stop editing stuff.

If that's true then Kogan is to blame.

-edit- wait, Kogan was specifically paid by CA to build the app?

I edited a comma into a post that was nine years old last week.

I can't get a definitive answer to this. It's an old API that FB closed in 2015 or so, just after Kogan's app did its thing. However, I think it's extensive -- apps could read a lot of Friends-only data that belonged to your friends. It wasn't just names. Consider this:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... -parakilas

Facebook wouldn't have been nervous if the harvested data was trivial.

Grim…, considering how our opinions on internet privacy, big corporations, capitalism and personal data are so diametrically opposed, we should probably just agree to disagree here to avoid a falling out.

@DoccyG True enough, but that's still just speculation. I guess we'll find out in time.

That seems to be different from what I understand from what I’ve read in The Guardian.

Facebook will give personal data to people for certain usages (improvement of service, for example). It seems they took this data and then used it for political means (well, they used it for cash money means, but by selling their wares in the political arena).

At a minimum there’s a very strong implication that they had a lot more data than was publicly available.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/faceb ... shut-down/



https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/02/f8/



Facebook's official API docs page doesn't go back far enough to show the old API
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/gr ... og/archive

Here's an archived image from 2013 showing what data of yours could be accessed by 3P apps installed by your friends:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/0 ... formation/


I'd say that's extensive.

You are allowed to have a discussion with differing opinions on both sides without falling out, you know

Ah, yes indeed. And there's no reason to assume they didn't grab everything they could.

The "things they like" would be the most important one for working out stuff about them, I suspect.

The entire history of their posts and all their photos would be more useful.

Depends how good the AI would have been at the time.

[edit]D'uh

You fucking plank.

Right?!

It's also worth reflecting on these points: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/1 ... _director/

First, Facebook's reaction when it discovered what had happened:


Also Facebook's PR line is that this is not a breach:

It doesn't join the dots that (to my mind) suggest that if this wasn't a breach, then everything must have been working just as it intended, which might be a worse PR place for it to be in.

The data that was collected was meant to be used for a different purpose than it ended up being used for, which is the issue I think.

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/975054469275799552

If I walk into a hospital and tell them I’m the butt inspector and they should give me pictures of all their patients’ butts and they do, that’s a data breach, regardless of whether the hospital obtained the butt pics with patient consent

— you heard it here first: tweting is bad (@alexhern) March 17, 2018

Why has the Twitter embed function turned to shit?

Seems okay. What's it done wrong?

If you share from twitter, you get some s=xx gunk on the URL that breaks the embed. Just delete it.

Nope, it's:

It's just pasted the tweet rather than doing the fancy embed you implemented a while back.

Are you using a phone?

Gosh, that's confusing.

Weird. No, I'm doing it from a PC. Copied the link from twitter.com using Firefox.

Fine in iOS too.