Any good?
I’d take a close look at the EU’s GDPR.
Most online tech firms are working furiously to figure out how to best get their tech compliant but is generally thinking of this as an EU-only set of behaviors to develop. Depending on how things go, i think you’ll see a lot of US based companies apply the same principles globally to try to get ahead of the problem around data collection and usage.
Just in case you had any doubts about what particular flavor of evil Cabridge Analytica is:
… Though given they hired Bannon it’s not exactly a shocker.
Via Bruce Schneier:
Worth reading the whole thing IMO.
Everyone should just automatically read everything Zeynep Tufekci publishes nowadays.
His best book by far, though Gone Away World is still my favorite. Gnomon starts out so strong I was in disbelief then I spent the rest of the book in terror that he was going to drop the ball as it became increasingly complex but he never does.
It’s likely not for everyone but this group seems like its target audience. While I’m not someone who gets lost with complex plots, this one pushed my brain hard and I would occasionally go back and re-read sections, invariably finding that he had set things up brilliantly and that earlier passages were packed with Easter eggs and context not apparent the first time.
It’s also a book and sticks with you for weeks as you turn it over in your mind and discussing it with someone else blows your mind all over again as you continue to uncover more hidden layers and meaning.
I don’t want to oversell it so I’ll say again it’s not for everyone and Gone Away World remains my favorite by Harkaway.
(Sorry for the side bar non Harkaway fans)
Took a couple days but they finally got a warrant.
There will soon be an article to sum everything up, but this live coverage of Christopher Wylie giving testimony in the House of Commons has been fascinating me all day:
It really is a tangled mess.
Is there anything new in the BeLeave stuff that Private Eye hasn’t already covered? As far as I can tell it’s all been aired before, but I may have missed something.
Minister K Shanmugam is awesome.
The Brexit angle here is very shaky:
- The various remain campaigns coordinated openly. (Daily call to coordinate events and messaging).
- The major leave campaigns were openly antagonistic to each other.
- The remain campaigns spent more, and had pretty open support from government.
So excuse me if I am extremely skeptical about claims that Leave coordination materially affected the result.
Did the Leave campaign break the rules? Yes, it seems overwhelmingly likely that they at least broke the spirit of the rules. But the rules on coordination were stupid and impractical and everyone either ignored or worked around them.
On the facebook angle, the Remain campaign used the same facebook advertising team responsible for the Tory 2015 campaign. They also used targetted facebook ads. Indeed, before the referendum the Remain campaign’s facebook effort was more highly regarded. They certainly had pretty good data on the UK fb graph by 2016.
https://www.ft.com/content/82be41ce-088c-11e6-a623-b84d06a39ec2
EDIT: None of this means that I don’t think better regulation of microtargetted advertising might not be a good thing. Being able to show different messages to different audiences is extremely troublesome to democratic accountability. I’m just really skeptical of the whole “result is invalid” argument.
Well, the issue being discussed today isn’t really about coordination. It’s about illegal campaign donations. Coordination comes in because the donations in question would be illegal if there was in fact coordination.
That said, yes, this thing that’s being quoted everywhere about how the Brexit result could have been different is dumb. Of course it could! It was a really narrow result, and the polls flipped half a dozen times in the weeks leading up to the result. Literally anything could have changed the result, including the weather.
This. There’s way too much attention being paid to the data (not that it isn’t an issue) and not nearly enough to stuff like “dark posting”. But ultimately, this was all possible because people are gullible, selfish, and stupid.
Yup. Any vote will be subject to the vagaries of fate. At best the whether, at worst overspending or foreign interference. We have rules and authorities in place to minimise these things, but the effect will always be there. But hopefully it will be small.
But one corollary of this is that responsible governance means not making large, sweeping decisions on very narrow margins. Perhaps lifting the lid on Cambridge Analytica’s activities just presents that point more starkly.
Seriously though, it’s time for some reform on Terms of Service and EULAs. There is so much shit in there that no human can read through it all and parse it. There needs to be a synopsis, since they’re always a fucking novel anyway.
No, I say address it from the opposite end, that of data privacy. No one is ever going to care about terms of service or EULAs, no matter what you do.
Sure, but ToS and EULAs should be readable by human beings.
It also keeps fuckwits like Zuckerberg from pretending anyone agrees to what is in them.
More machinations by the analysts-for-hire?
I don’t understand why they aren’t also going after SCL Records.