Paid ads are a small part of the problem. Fake news liked by bots is how the key messages are disseminated.
It may affect fewer voters, but those voters are critical to the outcome. That’s the whole point of selecting them. It’s kind of like gerrymandering, but on the individual level.
Possibly more shenanigans?
I’m reminded of the HBGary Federal/Palantir/Anonymous/Wikileaks stories of a few years back. Here’s an overview of what happend back then, this just seems like the latest extension, minus the Anonymous connection (we sure could use some Anons just now… haven’t heard much from them since then…
Interestingly, some of the leaked documents contained Palantir’s and HBGary’s PowerPoint decks and e-mails which detailed various Machiavellian schemes. A notable example was the strategy for destroying the credibility of Glenn Greenwald.
Even more troubling were plans to use malicious software to hack into computers owned by the opponents and their families. The e-mails show a proposal to develop and use “custom malware” and “zero day” exploits to gain control of a target’s computer network in order to snoop their files, delete content, monitor keystrokes, and manipulate websites.
Permanently deleted my Facebook account. Fuck those money grubbing traitors.
At this point deactivation/deletion is the only thing that can send a message. We’re the product- they can’t sell anything without anything to sell.
Beyond the bond villain bribery, prostitutes, and fake scandals pushed by fake identities on the internet, the original data scheme is interesting:
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that would later provide services for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reached out with a request on Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” platform, an online marketplace where people around the world contract with others to perform various tasks. Cambridge Analytica was looking for people who were American Facebook users. It offered to pay them to download and use a personality quiz app on Facebook called thisisyourdigitallife.
About 270,000 people installed the app in return for $1 to $2 per download. The app “scraped” information from their Facebook profiles as well as detailed information from their friends’ profiles. Facebook then provided all this data to the makers of the app, who in turn turned it over to Cambridge Analytica.
A few hundred thousand people may not seem like a lot, but because Facebook users have a few hundred friends each on average, the number of people whose data was harvested reached about 50 million.
I’m pretty sure that malware authors get about $1 dollar an install on in the internet, but that’s acting as a third party. I wonder if it’s profitable to just pay people 5 bucks to install full on malware on their computers and steal all their banking information before Amazon shuts you down.
Yes - I work with people who focus on AdSpam and there’s a lot of bad actors out there who either misuse non-PII (Personally Identifiable Info) or do things like incentivised downloads to arbitrage off of ad money.
Re: the Obama thing - it wasn’t just the Obama campaign, it was everyone. Prior to 2015 Facebook gave pretty much anyone the ability to scrape data from users who hadn’t agreed to it (but were friends of users who had.)
Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign’s data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences.
Cambridge Analytica — unlike other firms that access Facebook’s user data — broke Facebook’s rules by obtaining the data under the pretense of academic use. But experts familiar with Facebook’s systems and policies say that the greater problem was that the rules for accessing the social network’s information trove were so loose in the first place. … Practically any engineer who could persuade a Facebook user to download an app or to sign into a website using Facebook’s popular “log-in through Facebook” feature would have been able to access not only the profile, behavior and location of that Facebook user but also that of all the user’s Facebook friends, developers said.
I do need to keep my fb account for certain announcements and such that, unfortunately, only come out over fb.
But I have only ever had the most minimal fb footprint. I never ‘like’, never click on any of the ‘trending’ topics, never use fb for news at all, and never, ever “sign in with facebook” or “with google” for that matter and never, ever download any facebook app. Not sure if it is from running uBlock or from my lack of trackable fb activity, but I never see ads on facebook, so I’m not too worried about being targeted.
I never signed up for Facebook over all these years. I got lots of pressure from friends and family and I miss out on lots of family communication but even in the early days I was suspicious of Facebook and the premise really clashed with my personality and values.
For a while I seemed like an antisocial hermit, but I am glad I stayed the course and never made an account. It looks like my concerns a decade+ ago were on target.
Are you me? That describes my situation exactly. I got harassed endlessly by friends to join Facebook. Then most family communication (what little there is, anyway) started taking place over there. It went from “Why won’t you just join Facebook, it’s so much fun” to a kind of “What’s wrong with you? Are you just antisocial? Do you hate people?” kind of undercurrent.
I’ve always been a very private person. The thought of just broadcasting everything going on to the world at large has always creeped me the fuck out.
And keeping in touch with people? Guess what, if I want to keep in touch with someone I do. If we can’t be bothered to call, text, or email even occasionally, it’s probably not a very important relationship.
What’s so stupid about all of this is that Facebook didn’t have to be this stupid, ever.
About four years ago, I was discussing Facebook and security issues with a friend who works as a social media manager and has security-related tech people on his team. It was his opinion that Facebook was “fairly safe” at that time, if only because that was where the entire value of their IP lay.
As he explained it, they had incredible amounts of demographic data on their users, and that was actually their currency. You’re an advertiser who wants to get your name/product/service in front of married women 25-49? Great. Facebook can do that, and at least back in the day, they were very stingy about parceling out that information to others, as they seemed to recognize how valuable being the holder and gatekeeper of that data was.
But…they obviously never closed the backdoor, or figured out (or cared to figure out) a way to prevent individual app installs from scraping starting from an individual install point and working out based on contact lists. That failure to firewall contact data is just a horrific engineering and security fail. They gave away the prime currency of their entire platform for free as a result.
Yep, this is no doubt why their stock took a hit. Not because they’re evil jerks who circulated the information of tens of millions of people without their permission - the market doesn’t care about evil, and the current government isn’t going to do anything about it - but because they failed to effectively monetize their evil.
So, how much longer until that Channel 4 followup airs? Think it’ll have more juicy details?
It’s at 3pm eastern.
Hopefully, it will be on Channel 4’s Youtube Channel soon after that, as they did with the previous show.
The crazy part, of course, is that this:
is their core business model. The outrage is that FB’s data protection policies are toothless.
In this case FB did their normal “sell the data to an academic” thing, but he was a Russian who passed the data to CA. This was in violation of his agreement with FB but they literally did nothing but tell him to stop doing it and asked CA to please delete and not use the data.
I created FB back in the day, added a few people thought it sucked, logged on every 6 months purely to re-do the privacy settings then deleted when they bought Occulus, not really because of it, but it was an event that reminded me I could save 10 mins a year re-doing privacy settings.
I have gone back to Twitter after 9 months off though, I wish I hadn’t its a shit flinging contest with a billion shit filled monkeys