hckrnws
Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
(cbsnews.com)
168
32
by pseudolus
by pseudolus
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Aren't they supposed to be replaced by AI by then?
There won't even be human bodyguards; just Zuck, Musk, Bezos and Rasputin in their Thunderdomes sheltered by swarms of T-800s going StarCraft 3 on our ass
> Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
Meta already pays billions to gain access to people's personal data. This is just another business expense, a line item on a balance sheet.
When faced with an adverse ruling, an individual raises his hands, is handcuffed and led away. A corporation raises its prices.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
[dead]
[dead]
This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.
> .. the information likely included one's "public profile, page likes, birthday and current city" ..
This information was limited to what was publicly accessible on the site rather than some private data as many outlets tend to claim.
Putting aside the fact that a huge amount of regulation is designed by the most powerful companies to promote and defend their interests, the issue is that regulation, when not enforced, provides a way for corporations to inflict massive harm on individuals and discharge it for pennies on the dollar.
$18 billion was a paltry sum and represents about a month's worth of Meta's revenue. Let that sink in: a month's worth of revenue to discharge liabilities associated with years of massive harm to young people that some legal experts concluded could have reasonably resulted in damages in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, and possibly exceeding $1 trillion.
And as part of the settlement, Meta didn't even have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
> Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
You're acting as if there's no precedent for what I stated when the evidence is overwhelming.
A handful of examples for you:
1. Eric Holder, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for D.C. and Deputy AG. He was a partner at Covington & Burling, where he represented Chiquita Brands in the case over its payments to a Colombian paramilitary group and also represented Uber and Airbnb.
2. Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ's Criminal Division from 2009 to 2013. He didn't prosecute senior bank executives after the financial crisis and then went on to do white collar defense work as vice chair at Covington & Burling.
3. James Comey, U.S. Attorney for SDNY and Deputy AG. He became general counsel for Lockheed Martin and then Bridgewater Associates before he became FBI Director.
4. Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney for SDNY. She defended financial institutions at Debevoise & Plimpton afterwards, then chaired the SEC between 2013 and 2017, and then went back to Debevoise.
5. Louis Freeh, federal prosecutor for SDNY, federal judge and FBI Director from 1993 to 2001. He went on to become general counsel credit card company MBNA and later represented Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was alleged to have received over £1 billion in bribes from BAE Systems for arms deals. In his defense, Freeh argued that the money was actually going into official Saudi government accounts so they weren't bribes. BAE later pleaded guilty to US charges related to false statements and export violations.
Revolving doors in the US have gold handles.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
What do you mean?
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.
[deleted]
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?
Aren't they defunct [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#:~:text=De...
[dead]
This is false.
> all of his Meta advertising
You don't appear to have any understanding of how Cambridge Analytica affected the election.
[deleted]
[deleted]
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
The app had access to data about the friends of its participants.
AFAIR that included attributes that were set “friends-only”.
[dead]
[deleted]
[dead]