Politics Cambridge Analytica: Data, spies, sex workers, blackmail

[tandino]

But I have an agreement with Facebook.

I have no agreement with the maker of an app my friend clicks on.

The agreement that we all have with Facebook seems to allow them to flog our information to all and sundry.

Even today the apps friends use can still see some of your information and use it for....who really knows?

Obama's 2012 Campaign made use of this access in a very smart way, they used supporters as middlemen to push targeted messages to specific friends in their friend list based on their interests etc. The end recipient gave no agreement for their information to be used in this way but Facebook seemed to have no problem back then. And it's a smart way to run a campaign. Find out what is important to people and tell them why your guy is better than the other guy. No great revelation there. And the more targeted that campaign, the better.

Facebook can wag it's finger about this scandal all day long. But they allowed it to happen. And continue to allow it to happen.


​

 

[Procrastinator35]

The agreement that we all have with Facebook seems to allow them to flog our information to all and sundry.

Even today the apps friends use can still see some of your information and use it for....who really knows?

Obama's 2012 Campaign made use of this access in a very smart way, they used supporters as middlemen to push targeted messages to specific friends in their friend list based on their interests etc. The end recipient gave no agreement for their information to be used in this way but Facebook seemed to have no problem back then. And it's a smart way to run a campaign. Find out what is important to people and tell them why your guy is better than the other guy. No great revelation there. And the more targeted that campaign, the better.

Facebook can wag it's finger about this scandal all day long. But they allowed it to happen. And continue to allow it to happen.
​

Facebook is a well-known western intel complicit app.....Anyone surprised by these revelations must be living under a rock.

 

[Chief]

The agreement that we all have with Facebook seems to allow them to flog our information to all and sundry.

Even today the apps friends use can still see some of your information and use it for....who really knows?

Obama's 2012 Campaign made use of this access in a very smart way, they used supporters as middlemen to push targeted messages to specific friends in their friend list based on their interests etc. The end recipient gave no agreement for their information to be used in this way but Facebook seemed to have no problem back then. And it's a smart way to run a campaign. Find out what is important to people and tell them why your guy is better than the other guy. No great revelation there. And the more targeted that campaign, the better.

Facebook can wag it's finger about this scandal all day long. But they allowed it to happen. And continue to allow it to happen.


​

But the Obama campaign stayed within their own app, asking people to share.

CA went between apps and entities and Trump’s people posted all manner of fake, and racist rubbish.




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[tandino]

But the Obama campaign stayed within their own app, asking people to share.

No they didn't, they went outside the app and asked their users to share specific messages to specific friends based on their demographics.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/

 

[Chief]

No they didn't, they went outside the app and asked their users to share specific messages to specific friends based on their demographics.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/

What I meant was their messaging, requests to share etc were within the app. They stayed within the app for communicating and within the purpose of the app.

From the article:

The real divergence is in the way each campaign accessed the data.

The Obama campaign created a Facebook app for supporters to donate, learn of voting requirements, and find nearby houses to canvass. The app asked users’ permission to scan their photos, friends lists, and news feeds. Most users complied.

The people signing up knew the data they were handing over would be used to support a political campaign. Their friends, however, did not.

The people who downloaded the app used by Cambridge Analytica did not know their data would be used to aid any political campaigns. The app was billed as a personality quiz that would be used by Cambridge University researchers.



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[Taylor]

Do CA know they are Russian yet and will there be live footage when they find out?

 

[Procrastinator35]

Do CA know they are Russian yet and will there be live footage when they find out?

I'd of thought Oxford to be more the Russians cuppa myself....Oh well, live n learn.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

The agreement that we all have with Facebook seems to allow them to flog our information to all and sundry.

Even today the apps friends use can still see some of your information and use it for....who really knows?

Obama's 2012 Campaign made use of this access in a very smart way, they used supporters as middlemen to push targeted messages to specific friends in their friend list based on their interests etc. The end recipient gave no agreement for their information to be used in this way but Facebook seemed to have no problem back then. And it's a smart way to run a campaign. Find out what is important to people and tell them why your guy is better than the other guy. No great revelation there. And the more targeted that campaign, the better.

Facebook can wag it's finger about this scandal all day long. But they allowed it to happen. And continue to allow it to happen.


​

Facebook acted on it in 2014, right? That was when they decided that their mode of revenue would be (by a long way) advertising, rather the 'platform' idea they were previously trying to aim for. Selling ad space is far easier to control than having to deal with the complexity and potential dodginess of apps.

Yes, Obama used Facebook (and many apps could access info on friends, and some still can). But I find it is one of the most insidious aspects of current debates is that even people whose politics are theoretically based on the idea that 'idealistic' thinking is naive and impractical, are also prepared to use idealistic standards in a debate. i.e. Because the DNC takes money from lobbysists, they are therefore as bad as NRA shills. Or because Obama used Facebook's offerings then, there is less of an issue with Alexandr Kogan selling info it gained dodgily. Shouldn't the argument from these people be that no-one can live up to an idealistic motherhood statement of what a politician should be, so therefore individual contexts should be taken into account?

Darwin's theories monetized to do practical eugenics on the weakest of the species of which you are central casting's typecast actor, HRC #HormoneReplacementClinton luvs the shills and useful idjits

So you took my advice and returned to writing gibberish only you can understand so that your obvious analytical weakness isn't so obvious. Good stuff. Now you just have to disconnect the bitterness that has you tagging me in random threads and you'll be back to as you were. Comfortable.

 

[tandino]

Facebook acted on it in 2014, right? That was when they decided that their mode of revenue would be (by a long way) advertising, rather the 'platform' idea they were previously trying to aim for. Selling ad space is far easier to control than having to deal with the complexity and potential dodginess of apps.

Yes, Obama used Facebook (and many apps could access info on friends, and some still can). But I find it is one of the most insidious aspects of current debates is that even people whose politics are theoretically based on the idea that 'idealistic' thinking is naive and impractical, are also prepared to use idealistic standards in a debate. i.e. Because the DNC takes money from lobbysists, they are therefore as bad as NRA shills. Or because Obama used Facebook's offerings then, there is less of an issue with Alexandr Kogan selling info it gained dodgily. Shouldn't the argument from these people be that no-one can live up to an idealistic motherhood statement of what a politician should be, so therefore individual contexts should be taken into account?

Facebook whole raison d'etre is Advertising, it has been the main source of revenue since day 1 and to suggest that they only came to that realization, or they made it their focus, as late as 2014 is confusing. If you have a look at the chain of comments, it was never about "Obama did it, so it must be OK", it's to make the point that apps sharing the data of friends is just how Facebook conducts it's business.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

Facebook whole raison d'etre is Advertising, it has been the main source of revenue since day 1 and to suggest that they only came to that realization, or they made it their focus, as late as 2014 is confusing. If you have a look at the chain of comments, it was never about "Obama did it, so it must be OK", it's to make the point that apps sharing the data of friends is just how Facebook conducts it's business.

Good thing I didn't claim they only came to that realisation in 2014, then, isn't it? They did try to get Facebook working as a platform - like how Apple and Google generate lots of revenue from their platforms (and how Microsoft is trying to), but decided it wasn't worth it and advertising would be the main revenue mode "by far".

The point of what I said was to correct your inference that Facebook still shared data like they did with Cambridge Analytica (they don't). Not to mention you made it sound like they didn't make changes in the interim period. I wanted to point out changes were made and they were not based on anything political.

Kogan sneaking people's info and selling it on was against the terms of his agreement with Facebook when he did it. It was used to target people without their knowledge that they were being targeted. Obama's campaign explicitly asked permission from a person to send promotional info to a friend. They gave people the information and option to choose to send a specific message to someone. It's obviously different in direct context, and in the context of the way Facebook was claiming to work at the time.

Facebook are clearly dodgy, given they are still talking like they are just a little company who has made an error. But the distribution of fake news designed to divide people, and exploitation of stolen data, are FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR dodgier. Facebook makes money by data, and as a business they therefore want to keep lots of options open for gaining and using data. Standard business conflict of interest with ethics, and that is why we know business requires regulation. Willfully attacking and ruining Democracy is a whole other kettle of fish and concern.

 

[PP34]

Facebook has been doing a dodgy with data since it began. I remember seeing a story at least a decade ago talking about how a guy had his proposal plans with his girlfriend ruined because Facebook started spamming her with ads for rings after he had searched the net to buy one.

Nobody cared enough then and nobody will care now. Facebook and Google are scary companies which should be harshly regulated but I don't think they ever will be unless something truly disastrous happens. Both have become so ingrained in the lives of anyone living in Western society that people cannot afford to boycott them. I'd love to close off Facebook but doing so would leave me seeing very little interaction with friends, I'd miss out on a lot of news that pops up in my feed and I'd instead have to waste time trawling the web and with my generation Facebook has become the norm when it comes to organising events.

Google's even worse. Supposedly they keep track of a ridiculous amount of things you do on the internet and with your phones (particularly Android).

I'm just surprised it has taken so long for companies like this and politicians to use data in such a dirty manner.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

To be clear, what Aleksandr Kogan did was against Facebook's rules. Sending ads to you based on what you search for is the business model for Google. Always has been. That isn't something that needs to be "harshly regulated", but privacy is something which should be regulated. People need to become digitally literate so they understand how cookies and interconnectedness work. There are many easy ways to stop your privacy being overly compromised.

New info on the info Kogan stole (his company name was 'Global Science Research', which sounds quite plain... like Russia's 'Internet Research Agency'):

Facebook today revealed that as many as 87 million users, most of them in the US but at least 1 million in the UK, may have had their information improperly obtained and used by the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

The post outlines plans to restrict the use of its many application programming interfaces...Effectively, Facebook has put a nail in the coffin of its app platform with unilateral restrictions across the board. As part of the changes, Facebook says it will notify people if their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, as well as allow users to see what info they’ve shared with any and all third-party apps from a link at the top of the News Feed starting on April 9th.

In addition to the API changes, Facebook will no longer let anyone input a user’s phone number or email address to find them on the social network, which is a big change in how the product is used by millions of people in response to what the company says is “abuse” from “malicious actors.” In fact, Schroepfer says, “given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way.” So Facebook is disabling the feature and “also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well.”

It wasn't that long ago that Facebook were pretending there was nothing wrong with how their website was being misused. The main reason they are acting is due to the good work of journalists and whisteblowers, and the subsequent reaction of consumers (and therefore the stock market). That first aspect we should be particularly grateful for, and is key to Democracy. The second aspect is Capitalism at work, but I am wary of celebrating that too much, as I don't think it's that hard to imagine a situation where, like PP34 above, people decide they are too dependent on a service to remove themselves. Capitalism requires regulation, and Governments, particularly in the USA, have a lot of work to do to get the balance right for society to work efficiently and effectively.

 

[Seeds]

why are you guys focusing on the data mining aspect which is not news? surely the problem here is this company peddled propoganda to swing elections using the data.

 

[tandino]

why are you guys focusing on the data mining aspect which is not news? surely the problem here is this company peddled propoganda to swing elections using the data.

Take away the data mining and it's just political parties/groups using targeted advertising to sway public opinion. Where's the scandal in that?

 

[Procrastinator35]

Take away the data mining and it's just political parties/groups using targeted advertising to sway public opinion. Where's the scandal in that?

Oh I dunno....12 Russian face-book memes & a 2 & a half year anti-Russian propaganda war.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you....But how people can swallow & get sucked in by this Russian nonsense is pure theatre on the part of the MSM.

 

[Seeds]

Take away the data mining and it's just political parties/groups using targeted advertising to sway public opinion. Where's the scandal in that?

They spread fake news from anonymous sources making it dangerous propoganda. political parties ads are regulated. Political parties cant make facts up.

 

[Seeds]

Oh I dunno....12 Russian face-book memes & a 2 & a half year anti-Russian propaganda war.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you....But how people can swallow & get sucked in by this Russian nonsense is pure theatre on the part of the MSM.

you are living testament that people can be sucked in by fake news and conspiracies found on the internet.

 

[Procrastinator35]

you are living testament that people can be sucked in by fake news and conspiracies found on the internet.

Is that the sum of your argument?......It's predicate, subject & conclusion all rolled into one?.....What chance do I have against one so schooled in logical argumentation?

 

[tandino]

They spread fake news from anonymous sources making it dangerous propoganda. political parties ads are regulated. Political parties cant make facts up.

But we are not talking about the Ruskies, they're two different issues.

 

[Seeds]

But we are not talking about the Ruskies, they're two different issues.

yeah but CA didnt just feed them the data, they have admitted they came up with the slogans to use as propoganda. They are the source of it. Apprently we found out today that Dutertes whole tough man pro security image was made up, by these guys. CA are changing the geopolitical world and we are only discussing Facebooks privacy settings. really?

 

[tandino]

yeah but CA didnt just feed them the data, they have admitted they came up with the slogans to use as propoganda. They are the source of it. Apprently we found out today that Dutertes whole tough man pro security image was made up, by these guys. CA are changing the geopolitical world and we are only discussing Facebooks privacy settings. really?

How's that different to political parties engaging the services of Hawker Britton or Crosby Textor? External political strategists and ad agencies have been on the scene for decades.

Is it just a matter of scale, or are they doing something different?

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

Within a few weeks of moving in, My neighbour started getting me popping up on his Facebook suggested friends.

We had texted once or twice - he wasn’t even in my contacts.


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Further to this, a piece on The Verge says:

The most concrete example of a shadow profile comes from Facebook’s People You May Know service, studied in detail by Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo. Even if you’ve never signed up for Facebook, you’ve appeared in the contacts lists of people who did. When users connect their email account or texting data with Facebook, countless non-users are swept up. Instead of discarding their information, Facebook keeps non-user data attached to something Hill calls a shadow profile — a reliable bank of information held in reserve so that, if you ever do sign up for Facebook, the company will know exactly who to recommend as friends.

So we're both right. Interconnectibility, as well as them getting more info than people thought they were grabbing.

But we are not talking about the Ruskies, they're two different issues.

Personally, I think there's a very good chance that they are not two different issues. Russia not getting their hands on Kogan's data is a bit hard to believe. The facts seem to remain murky (due to competing narrative, see below), but they admit there were meetings with Russians and claim they simply weren't interested. Kogan worked at St. Petersburg. Some have tried to play that down, while The Guardian suggests Kogan admits he "received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”". This is from CNN about when he started working with them:

Aleksandr Kogan, started working with Cambridge Analytica in 2014. That same year, he teamed up with students and researchers from St. Petersburg State University, one of the top schools in Russia, to pursue a data-harvesting project similar to the one that produced the data he sold to Cambridge Analytica.

"It's messaging... this is private information, which no one sees," Kogan said. "You can also load all of that. We usually load 3,000 (messages) per person. And there they talk about everything."

CA are widely considered to be self-promoters exaggerating what they can do. The Russians, however, I could believe could pull off the Trump win. Their internet knowledge and skills; the decades of practice they've had using Propaganda within Russia; the many millions of dollars spent; the motivation; etc.

People like CA repeatedly claimed to derive specific information about people from 'likes'. Beyond the obvious ones (e.g. Fox News fan = Republican), this has always been spruiked as involving a wealth of hidden knowledge that only they have, so you should give them money. That sort of salesman sauce is harder to believe, for me, compared to the Russians having many dedicated employees at a place like the 'Internet Research Agency' digging through mountains of data, launching phishing exercises, scraping data, hacking, etc. in order to target people and help propagate propaganda. 'Brute force' vs 'secret sauce'.

Kogan himself in that same article above claims that you can't work out people's personalities from 'likes', saying that his thinking had evolved from that time in 2014 when he was quoted saying that you could (he says he was quoting other people's research).

I still can't get over the fact Kogan "established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research". Such a broad, dull, innocuous name that easily fits with the idea he was always looking to sell the data. The Cambridge University press release that I just quoted from in this paragraph also revealed:

Dr Kogan correctly sought permission from his Head of Department at the time to work with St Petersburg University; it was understood that this work and any associated grants would be in a private capacity

That again fits with selling data being an ongoing money-making objective of his. That means he needs to keep getting new data. Cambridge Uni also say Facebook would've been aware of the research. Rolling Stone also says Kogan's app was always designed to give data to CA, because they weren't able to buy the data from a previous personality analysis test.

 

[Proud SJW]

Darwin's theories monetized to do practical eugenics on the weakest of the species of which you are central casting's typecast actor, HRC #HormoneReplacementClinton luvs the shills and useful idjits

A common misconception about evolutionary theory is that the "survival of the fittest" equates to strength. It does not.
"Fitness" implies suitability, survivability, not strength... or even appropriateness.

Or, in the words of Shakespeare -
"And many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest timbered oak".
- Henry V, act II

Individual strength means very little in the greater scheme of things. Evolution requires only survival, it doesn't give a damn about human concepts like right or wrong.

 

[blackcat]

A common misconception about evolutionary theory is that the "survival of the fittest" equates to strength. It does not.
"Fitness" implies suitability, survivability, not strength... or even appropriateness.

Or, in the words of Shakespeare -
"And many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest timbered oak".
- Henry V, act II

Individual strength means very little in the greater scheme of things. Evolution requires only survival, it doesn't give a damn about human concepts like right or wrong.

Mercer tried to wrestle back the overreach by Clinton. simple dialectic.

Cambridge Analytica is not used in a way Obama did not use the data. Thats a double negative, which implies (the fallacy), Obama did the same thing.

HRC lost a JohnHewsonFightback election v PJK. Clinton should not have lost that election. Even if gerrymandering/ElectoralCollege/Popular vote.

 

[Procrastinator35]

But we are not talking about the Ruskies, they're two different issues.

But it has to be about the Ruskies cause they're the bad guys.....Just ask Seeds & Ratts.....The 2 spokespeople on U.S MSM manufactured consent (AKA dialectical spin for simpletons).