C’mon, Zuckerberg, don’t be so hard on yourself.
For now, if you’d like keep your data from going through Facebook’s API, you can take control of your privacy settings. Keep in mind that this disables ALL platform apps (like Farmville, Twitter, or Instagram) and you will not be able to log into sites using your Facebook login…
…If disabling platform entirely is too much, there is another setting that can help: limiting the personal information accessible by apps that others use. By default, other people who can see your info can bring it with them when they use apps, and your info becomes available to those apps. You can limit this as follows.
From the same page, click “Edit” under “Apps Others Use.” Then uncheck the types of information that you don’t want others’ apps to be able to access. For most people reading this post, that will mean unchecking every category.
(Though of course when it comes to CEOs “suspended” often means “sent on a nice luxurious vacation until things quiet down” - especially with a privately held company.)
Another executive, Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, was recorded saying: “He won by 40,000 votes in three states. The margins were tiny.”
Whatever else happens to Cambridge Analytica, you can bet Trump won’t be using them again. There should be a rant coming soon saying, “My margins were yuuuuuuge, the biggest ever. Nobody has bigger margins than me! FAKE NEWS!”
Heh, yep, turns out Nix was suspended from a meaningless shell company. He won’t even have to go on vacation.
Feel free to delete your account, but this will not delete the data they have already collected on you, and they will not forget who you are, but continue to track you through your friends and contacts. This is true even if you have NEVER HAD an account:
“Facebook even creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers. That is, even if you are not on Facebook, the company may well have compiled a profile of you, inferred from data provided by your friends or from other data. This is an involuntary dossier from which you cannot opt out in the United States.”
Thankfully, I don’t have friends either.
This is a good tip, but really, it’s like someone who watches me get mugged offering advice on not getting mugged. Their default should.have prevented sharing of information about others in your social circle. It’s obtuse to think that, “well all users need to do is opt out of all this messed up shit.”
If I make a mistake at work, I have to try to own it, apologize for it, and rectify that mistake. Facebook has literally done NONE of that. Even if not a mistake in their eyes, surely the uproar should tell them they need changes.
And we have heard nary a peep about any.
In addition to the ‘stolen’ Facebook data, it’s worth noting that the Russians likely stole Democratic voter analytic data when they hacked the DNC, which they probably ‘shared’ with CA, the RNC and the trump campaign. (CA/SCL also had a hand in 44 Republican races in 2012. Gotta wonder how far back the data hacking has been going on.) There’s also a Denver Post story that the CO state Republican party employed CA as well (which successfully won the majority in that state by one vote.) The Republican talking point - dutiifully repeated by the NYT’s Maga Habberman and Kenneth Vogel - is that “they didn’t get what they paid for.” To be sure, not all of this is illegal or sketchy, but we’ll probably never the know the full extent.
This Tweeter thread from an unknown person (the crowd goes wild) is a decent summary and touches on how a barebones, cash strapped campaign staffed with clownish, cartoon-level villains and amateurs was able to win a US Presidential election.
Link to the first Tweet, thread spool summary in the spoiler.
Summary
Let me preface this by saying that in my work, I’ve run my fair share of ads on social media. (THREAD)
Granted, it was to convince people to play Rach 2 in once-in-a-lifetime master classes, or learn to conduct La Cenerentola, but the tools were still what’s available to everyone else. Unless, of course, you engage in illegal and unethical behavior. It’s important that we understand what this all means, and that it’s not just techie stuff for someone else to figure out.
Before you let anyone poo-poo the Cambridge Analytica story (which I saw from a NEW YORK TIMES journo yesterday), here are some key things to remember:
-Cambridge Analytica is a subsidiary of SCL group
-SCL group was immediately given a huge contract with US Department of State following the inauguration. Contract was reportedly to fight ISIS via propaganda. -Mike Flynn was forced to update his FARA stating that he’d taken payments from SCL Group - shortly before he was indicted and pled guilty (chicagotribune.com/news/nationwor…)
-Facebook says it’s not a data breach. They deliberately wrote their terms of service in such a way that it didn’t qualify as such. They looked the other way when Cambridge Analytica illegally scraped the data of millions of us. And since they weren’t calling it a breach, they didn’t notify the authorities either, who would have seen their shit show and blew the lid off the whole operation. -The users on Facebook is their most valuable asset. It’s what advertisers pay billions for. We’re supposed to believe that they were okay with some rogue company having unauthorized access to 50 million of their users? Users in one of the richest countries in the world - prime targets for advertising dollars? That they were okay with them having access to this for YEARS? PLEASE. -Facebook was embedded in the campaigns (they helpfully offered this), working with the stolen data. Facebook knew when it was stolen, and they knew when they were working with this stolen data on behalf of Trump and others. They KNEW. (link to sourcing on above) (politico.com/story/2017/10/…)
-there is every reason to believe that the voter registration hacks, Equifax hacks, and god knows what else are related
-Corey Lewandowski was in communication with Cambridge Analytica as early as 2015, before Trump had even announced. -servers at Trump Tower, Alfa Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Spectrum Health (owned by the DeVos family) were all in communication with each other and were the target of a FISA application in October of 2016 (slate.com/articles/news_…)
What a great way to move around illegally obtained data, and add even more illegally obtained data! -immediately following the election, Kushner gives an exclusive interview to Forbes, and the resulting article pushes the idea that Kushner’s a boy wonder when it comes to social strategy, and gosh - they just figured things out on a shoestring budget, and look at them now! (here’s the article) (forbes.com/sites/stevenbe…)
-Trump won the electoral college by 70,000 well-placed votes
With the kind of data they had available - data that was STOLEN - they weren’t running ads along the lines of "this person likes the Gap, Hamilton, and vacationing at the beach, and is probably liberal.”
They were running ads disguised as news stories, linked to fake news sites + stories, and targeting along the lines of "this person is located in this key voting district, has $17 in their bank account, is paranoid, has used the word ner in their private FB messages, has talked about violence towards women in their comments, and hasn’t worked in 2 years". If they also had access to health data (which I think they did), they could target people with mental illness. Microtargeting is achieved by uploading a custom audience to the Facebook ad manager - meaning, after they’ve found all the ppl in say, Pennsylvania who’ve used the word ner in their private messages, they separate these people from everyone else. Then they run ads targeting these people and only these people. They don’t have to waste money casting a wide net and seeing what sticks. They already know what will stick. Then, with a pixel (basically, a tracker placed on a website), they can see if the person has visited the sites they’ve linked to. They could see if these people were sharing stories, liking, clicking, or commenting. And they could target these people over and over and over and over: because you can then create ANOTHER custom audience based on behaviors from your FIRST custom audience. They could have Trump coordinate his messaging in speeches with what was being run in these ads, and what was being covered on the news - all the news, not just Fox - 24/7 because, ratings. Remember how Trump kicked off his campaign with disgusting comments about Mexican human beings? What he said to Megyn Kelly on live TV? He was talking to his custom audience, all cued up in the Facebook ads manager, and ready to go. (by the way, people on the far left were targeted too)
Continuing: they achieved social proof with an army of trolls and bots who made it look like many other people agreed with these extreme ideas, and look like the fake news was legitimate. The trolls and bots shared the links, made comments on fake and legitimate news articles. Trolls even created fake events and attempted to create situations in which violence would erupt (and then be covered extensively, and used to further push the narrative of ppl of color and/or on the left being thugs). Social proof was solidified, and Cambridge Analytica got to refine their stolen data even more, by luring vulnerable people into private groups where they could ask them questions and encourage them to take action. In the end, it was 70,000 people - people with a specific psychological profile, which they had access to because they’d stolen it - who swung key states. If you think this is impossible, consider that companies convince people on a daily basis to leave their homes and buy a $30,000 car. WITHOUT stolen data about the most intimate parts of their lives. And WITHOUT these people being afraid that their very lives depend on buying a car/going to McDonald’s/shopping at Walmart-Mart. I’d posit that the rest were filled in by people who told everyone “he doesn’t mean what he’s saying” and stood to gain the most from what Trump was promising: rich, white straight men. And they just got what they were promised - a giant cash grab that goes against what every so-called conservative has said they believe in. And let’s not forget the far religious right! See: Council for National Policy. There was a reason Trump had little to no ad spend in other areas of media, like TV. He didn’t need it. They had a STOLEN profile of just about every single American - likely down to their bowel movements - and used those profiles to manipulate those who were vulnerable. So, in summary, this is a BFD. And it was only ONE of the things they were doing, as we’re finding out. ||END||
Sorry, just wanted to add one more thing. This is another important question we need to ask: who ELSE has this data now? and WTF are they doing to us with it? If you haven’t read or watched the stories, Facebook didn’t ask CA to do anything about the stolen data until August of 2016 - YEARS after it had happened. Even then, they didn’t follow up, AND the named source (Wylie) has stated that this data was EMAILED, UNENCRYPTED. Looks like the NRA works with Cambridge Analytica. What are they doing with this data? Who are they targeting? What are they convincing them to do? (theguardian.com/us-news/2016/s…)
Wired with a good story about all of this
Also, the guy who sent out that initial survey that ended up mining all the data?
And what could they do about psychologist Joseph Chancellor, who had helped found Kogan’s firm and who now worked, of all places, at Facebook?
They are a business and it definitely wasn’t in their interest to limit sharing by default. Data sale and sharing and harvesting is the wild, wild, west currently and actually needs regulation, not businesses trying to unilaterally kneecap themselves vis a vis the competition.
Don’t kid yourself that Facebook is the only company being used in this fashion.
If you doubt me,then please tell me why experian is still in business.
I don’t doubt you at all, sir. Sorry if my statement came across as such or toward you. My ire is with Facebook. And I’m positive to the bone that what you mentioned is also true, which is that the same thing is happening with a lot of social platforms with zero protections for consumer privacy. Hell, part of the click through user acceptance for these things states that exactly … they can use our data.
But I also think we might see change with laws, or at least I’m hoping we will. I’m also upset that Facebook has been given to trickle truth and statement avoidance regarding this issue and issues with Russian purchased political advertisements.
I hope so too. One of the most distressing things about the war on roe v wade is that it is based on a perceived constitutional Right to Privacy.
We should be building on that right, not tearing it down.
I’ve seen it mentioned either here or reddit that we’re in a shift of general user acceptance globally from the expectation of privacy to the removal of that. I think what they are saying is that as new generations are born within the globalized internet infrastructure and application use, there will be less and less push back of things like tracking, data privacy, etc.
I’m not sure I believe that just yet, but if you project this forward even 20 years, I can see the case for no expectation, only if nothing is done now while we still can make changes through laws.
My cynical side says that of course people raised on the Internet and smartphone apps cares about privacy. The only thing they care about is instant and free access to all media, all the time, and are willing to barter away pretty much any shred of privacy, decency, or self-respect to keep mainlining those free videos.
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I know that is both unfair and probably untrue, and that plenty of older folks my age are so sucked in to social media and streaming and YouTube that they too are willing to sign away anything to keep the drug flowing. But man, it sure seems as if once you give people candy for free, they can’t even conceive of cutting back.
Yeah, the free beer is tough to pass up.
What I hope for is transparency - I want to know who my data was sold to, what data, for how long, and for how much, so I can place an appropriate monetary value on what’s been given up.
What I really, really hope happens is this: Ever since Napster, I’ve felt that content creation and sharing should be driven by micro-transactions which pay people to share, and people can buy what they consume with that money. Pay people to share content, and they are more likely to share legitimate content (as well as gossip/porn) than torrent it. Blockchain would allow that kind of sea change:
Blockchain technology, among other things, could potentially make platforms like Facebook obsolete. Many people know blockchain as the decentralized record of bitcoin (a virtual currency) transactions. It is the technology that allows digital money to circulate around the globe, without the help of banks or governments. In other words, blockchain cuts out the middleman, and this technology can be applied to many different industries.
Imagine if you, not Facebook, controlled your own data. Or if you could rent out your apartment easily and securely, without paying a cent to Airbnb. If readers could buy digital books directly from authors and filmmakers could know how many times their movies were viewed. Musicians would be able to keep better track of when their songs were played, and get paid accordingly. Taxi drivers would transact directly with passengers without Uber knowing everyone’s location.
Nick Harkaway’s new book, Gnomon is set, in part, in a near future surveillance state based on this trend of people’s willingness to forego privacy in favor of convenience, connectivity and etc.