Cambridge Analytica/Facebook Data Scandal

[Pramana]

The latest news alleging that Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested data from Facebook that was used in support of the Brexit "Leave" campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign adds to the narrative that the sophisticated use of Internet/social media has provided a major advantage for populist/alt-right political movements in recent years.

While it's too early to pass judgement on the actions of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the scandal raises questions about the amount of data that people are giving away free to marketers, either unaware or unconcerned that they are doing so. In this case, a personality quiz on Facebook is alleged to have been used to mine data both from respondents and from the Facebook friends of respondents. Quizzes asking for personal information circulate frequently on social media, suggesting that the extent of data mining undertaken by marketers for various purposes is large.

The other side to this narrative concerns the influence of Russian propaganda, with mounting evidence suggesting a concerted Russian effort to foment cultural divides in the United States through troll farms that employ fake news sites, social media accounts, and Twitter bots to manipulate the American electorate. On average, Americans today are less adept at distinguishing Russian propaganda than they were during the Cold War, because increasingly sophisticated Russian propaganda is designed to play into populist/alt-right distrust against mainstream media, academics, and the establishment/elites. Essentially, the alt-right has created a subculture where people are more likely to believe Internet conspiracy theories (like those involving financier George Soros) and Russian propaganda over mainstream American news sources.

Assuming that preserving liberal democracy is a value, I would suggest that a twofold strategy should include a resolute cyber intelligence response to Russian troll farms, and a social media education campaign in elementary/high schools.

The Guardian reporting on the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

The Washington Post reporting on why Americans are falling for Russian propaganda:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/13/why-americans-keep-falling-for-russian-propaganda/?utm_term=.77ca7e137bb5

[Skycaptain]

The British Attorney General is currently seeking a court order to enable the authorities to examine every computer used by this company, and to question their employees. 

There is talk of asking Mark Zuckerberg (hope the spelling is correct) to appear before a House of Commons select Committee to explain Facebook's actions, although as not being a British national all he has to do is say "no" 

[Guest]

 

So much cringe 

[Nanoic]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/20/cambridge-analytica-execs-boast-of-role-in-getting-trump-elected
They admitted to it to undercover reporters in this article. 

[Telecaster68]

Legally, Parliament can issue a summons to appear in front of a committee and technically if Zuckerberg ignored it he'd be in contempt of Parliament and could be imprisoned or fined, but that hasn't happened since the 19th century. All he has to do to avoid the summons is stay out of the UK. 

 

CA has also been accused of over blowing its own role in what it can do, so while it might've accessed huge amounts of data unlawfully, it may not have had as big an effect on the election as it wants to claim. 

[Nevyn]

Bad Cambridge Analytics! You have to pay Facebook, Google or Twitter for that kind of data. You can’t just take it. You’re not a credit agency, political party or government. 

[Telecaster68]

Er... They were acquiring it for a political party. What are you trying to say? 

[ben8884]

I believe that Zuck has been told to appear before Congress which for him is a little more difficult to avoid.

[Nevyn]

55 minutes ago, Telecaster68 said:

Er... They were acquiring it for a political party. What are you trying to say? 

That it’s common practice for everyone to data collect and then sell it. There was no breach, and nothing illegal took place. Facebook’s platform was once again used exactly like it was designed to. Everyone is only up in arms because Trump’s campaign beat them at their own game, which is targeted political advertising.

[Nevyn]

51 minutes ago, ben8884 said:

I believe that Zuck has been told to appear before Congress which for him is a little more difficult to avoid.

Awesome, this’ll be what? Second? Fourth? time Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress acting smug?

[Telecaster68]

41 minutes ago, Nevyn said:

That it’s common practice for everyone to data collect and then sell it. There was no breach, and nothing illegal took place. Facebook’s platform was once again used exactly like it was designed to. Everyone is only up in arms because Trump’s campaign beat them at their own game, which is targeted political advertising.

The problem is that collecting data for one purpose then selling it on isn't, apparently, a breach under US law. It is under UK law though. 

[iff]

50 minutes ago, Nevyn said:

That it’s common practice for everyone to data collect and then sell it. There was no breach, and nothing illegal took place. Facebook’s platform was once again used exactly like it was designed to. Everyone is only up in arms because Trump’s campaign beat them at their own game, which is targeted political advertising.

if it was a matter of just the people who had used the app that had their data used, then i would be in agreement. however the problem with this with cambridge analytica not only used the app to obtain the details of not only their own personal data but also their friends. so if my friend amber (note i have no friend called amber, the only amber i know is a singer in a band i like and that isn't even her real name) used the app, then the way cambridge analytica had set up the app meant that they could obtain my information even though i didn't, unwittingly or otherwise, consent to them obtaining my data.

 

under european data protection laws, this is illegal and as a uk company, cambridge analytica is subject to uk and european data protection laws and facebook as a company with servers in europe is also subject to european data protection laws.

[Nevyn]

Then I wish the UK luck in changing the world. It’s too bad money will talk just like it always does. 

[Pramana]

I'm wondering what would happen if, instead of privacy protection laws for social media, we had a public domain law whereby all information placed on social media was deemed to be placed within the public domain? How many people would change their social media use accordingly? I'm guessing very few.

[Tarfeather]

This is all according to plan (the plan of the powerful, that is). Ordinarily, education would be the remedy for this kind of issue, as educated people who think critically are not very likely to fall for any kind of propaganda. That's why since the 1960s there's been a coordinated effort by owners of media outlets, lobbyists, etc. to 1) Mold our education system in such a way that brainwashing becomes easier 2) Use media to spread propaganda to the now very susceptible population. And yes, of course this will make it easier for fascists to spread their ideas, because that whole ideology relies exactly on people who have been brainwashed into blindly trusting authority.

 

If you want to solve the problem, attack it at its root, the education system. However, you won't get any politician to do that, because that would directly go against the interests of their donors. Discussing policy on issues like this is pointless, it should rather be discussed how to displace corrupt politicians and replace them with ones that actually care about the issues (cf. Bernie Sanders).

 

 

Oh, and about the selling data thing. Companies like Facebook or Google don't want to sell their data. They want to sell products based on that data (e.g. ads) without letting anyone else actually have that data. What you should be more concerned about is the fact that a single company has all that data in the first place.

[Tarfeather]

9 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

The problem is that collecting data for one purpose then selling it on isn't, apparently, a breach under US law. It is under UK law though. 

It actually was illegal before Trump. Trump did make it legal by executive order.

[Yatogami]

Didn't Obama use the same tactics in his reelection? Obama had used data from both Google and Facebook. This story construed and twisted.

 

This is one of those double standards with political parties where each abuse something, till one side loses and gets mad, and ruins it for everyone. 

 

Hopefully, they can make it illegal to sell any data.

[Dreamer23]

I really don't get why this is so much in the news.

A company legally acquired data from consenting adults - everyone does it.

I get that they kept the data after being told they had to delete it due to a breach of contract, but that is

a) not Facebook's fault

b) not really interesting news

Just another filler for media that just jumps onto anything even loosely related to Trump.

 

(And just to be clear: I don't like Trump and would vote Democrat if I was a US citizen, but this is just an objectively irrelevant story)

[Telecaster68]

Millions, literally, of the people whose data was supplied hadn't given their permission though. They were just friends of the 170,000 who had and they knew nothing about it. 

 

In Europe, that's illegal. 

[Skycaptain]

32 minutes ago, Telecaster68 said:

Millions, literally, of the people whose data was supplied hadn't given their permission though. They were just friends of the 170,000 who had and they knew nothing about it. 

 

In Europe, that's illegal. 

Exactly. Its not Facebook, an American based business who are in hot water here, but Cambridge Analytica, a UK based company who are accused of breaking UK law. 

[Telecaster68]

Although, Zuckerberg has now admitted that FB should've made their T&C clearer, been more careful who they sold data to, and kept a tighter rein on what they did with it, so he's conceding there are ethical problems too. It's not helped by FB being extremely slippery about telling 

the authorities what they were up to. 

[iff]

12 hours ago, Malum said:

Didn't Obama use the same tactics in his reelection? Obama had used data from both Google and Facebook. This story construed and twisted.

 

This is one of those double standards with political parties where each abuse something, till one side loses and gets mad, and ruins it for everyone. 

 

Hopefully, they can make it illegal to sell any data.

According to https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/obama-campaign-advisers-say-they-used-facebook-data-properly/2018/03/21/e932ec7e-2d48-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html

 

The Obama campaign said they had the consent of the actual person for that, not the consent of a random Facebook friend to use another person's data.

 

This is why there is a difference between the two.

[paperbackreader]

There's a couple of things at play here

 

I think it is likely if the users have allowed for most of their information and profile to be public then it would be classified as publicly available information and therefore no direct breach anyway UNLESS there are portions of that data that is not public. Whether they have or have not given permission will become moot if the users have made it available publicly. 

 

However data scrapers and miners frequently collate publicly available info about us from many sources to build a bigger picture of who we are and consent is... Well who remembers the last time they actually read the terms and conditions in full? !

 

With the onset of the GDPR in May even your IP Address is personal information, especially if it could be collected and combined with other data. So there will be new rules that orgs have to comply with to ensure they don't retain info longer than necessary for lawful processing, and gives you a right to be forgotten (exclusions apply) , And this is done to protect us against piecing together a larger picture of who we are... 

[Telecaster68]

I think what may have happened is that the friends may have set their info to 'friends only', so the app was effectively impersonating the person who signed up to it, to gain access to info that wasn't available to just anyone. 

[ripley]

8 hours ago, Dreamer23 said:

I really don't get why this is so much in the news.

A company legally acquired data from consenting adults - everyone does it.

They didn’t gather it legally. And many people weren’t consenting, if I’ve understood the practice properly.

 

It was a sort of snowball effect — one person might consent, but the data gathered came not just from them but everyone on their friends lists. So say, if you had 300 friends on Facebook, that’s 300 profiles of more data for the pool, but that’s also a potential 300 more people unknowingly having their behaviour online used for data gathering. It’s how they managed to gather such a huge pool. By behaviour, that means reading your posts, the posts you like, the information you put in your profile (like favourite movies, tv shows, hobbies, interests etc.), the pages you follow, the posts you share, etc.

 

The data gathered is then used to determine the publics ‘hopes’ and ‘fears’, so for instance if there’s something bad that scares or upsets a lot of people (such as let’s say trophy animal hunting), they can then centre a smear campaign around the opposition basically suggesting that they’re involved in trophy hunting, meaning less people would want to support them. It’s a modern day form of propaganda, and although the bickering and fighting between politicians is somewhat the norm I think it’s how far Cambridge Analytica went with the data gathering and twisting that bothers a lot of people. Someone on twitter said it was like a digital weapon and honestly, that makes a lot of sense to me.

 

I read a post - I think it was either on twitter or YouTube - that also made me think. And it was that people are very willing these days to put too much information online. The whistleblower says that computers can read a person better than other people because it sees many faces to them, and in a way I can see what he means when you think of those that use their Facebook like a crutch. With how open people are as to what they share these days it’s no wonder that the data can be taken and used so easily, and even though we believe our data should be private it likely really isn’t. It’s free social media and a lot of people see ‘free’ more these days than thinking ‘okay, but what does keep me safe?’ 

 

It’s no secret that our data is being used in various ways - it makes me feel uneasy, but that’s just what’s happening. You can see that just by how when you look for something on an online store you might later see the same items show up on advertisements on other websites. What I don’t like - and I think the scandal is trying to get at - is when our data is used to help manipulate something on such a large scale. Considering Cambridge Analytica’s actions are said to link to Brexit and the EU votings here in the UK too ... yeah I don’t feel comfortable.

[paperbackreader]

1 hour ago, ripley said:

They didn’t gather it legally. And many people weren’t consenting, if I’ve understood the practice properly.

 

The emphasis is precisely my problem with the reporting so far. Yes, they are talking about data leakage, X amount was leaked without knowledge - but they are not being specific about the actual stuff that has been leaked about each person (is it profile information? posts ? friends? favourite movies?) How much of that was in the 'publicsphere' anyway? Is there a material impact between the firm having the private vs the publicly available info? How is it different to any different to a broader, untargeted smear campaign where false statements may be being made?

 

Yes, data protection and data rights are important but the issue at heart here but I feel a bit like the media is doing a 'oh the potential murderer is buying a prostitute' and focusing on the prostitution issues rather than the murder - in otherwords - my gripe is that no one is exploring significantly the lack of transparency, and for the lack of a better word, 'policing' in targeted advertising and focusing on the data protection issues because GDPR is conveniently round the corner... 

[Telecaster68]

The other element in what Cambridge Analytics was doing is helping create profiles of the kind of people who might be susceptible to to micro targeting because they now have huge amounts of data. Its not dissimilar to what's always happened, except they were making claims the sheer amount of data mining they could do made it more accurate. Then add a lack of transparency about who was saying what to whom (because regulation hasn't caught up with technology yet) and you have a real democratic problem. 

 

The only upside is that CA might have hugely overstated what they could do. 

[Yatogami]

6 hours ago, iff said:

According to https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/obama-campaign-advisers-say-they-used-facebook-data-properly/2018/03/21/e932ec7e-2d48-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html

 

The Obama campaign said they had the consent of the actual person for that, not the consent of a random Facebook friend to use another person's data.

 

This is why there is a difference between the two.

This is false. There was no "proper" way. Both methods of data gathering were the same, regardless of the method. This is an elitist statement claiming only the Obama administraition knew and could use the data properly. Which is false. Anyone with money could. The whole article is misleading, and I assume to be in the same vien as every Trump piece they put out.

 

Both parties did the same exact thing, with slightly different methods. Obama asked for the information, and was given it. CA gathered it through the use of facebook quizzes. The only bad thing, is sharing it with 3rd parties. Which both parties did.

 

Datamining is a fact of using the internet. This isn't new, and is employed by corperations to sell you products. So the same applies when using it to garner votes. Its not illegal for corperations, nor is it illegal to get a grasp on your political opinions.

 

 

[Telecaster68]

The Obama campaign explicitly says it didn't share the information. And it collected it overtly, not from a third party quiz about something else entirely, and it didn't scrape details from friends. 

 

Could you just accept this isn't a liberal media conspiracy against poor victimised Republicans? 

[Nevyn]

5 minutes ago, Telecaster68 said:

The Obama campaign explicitly says it didn't share the information. And it collected it overtly, not from a third party quiz about something else entirely, and it didn't scrape details from friends. 

 

Could you just accept this isn't a liberal media conspiracy against poor victimised Republicans? 

Was there a point in bringing up republicans? Was there a point in mocking them in such a way? This is the kind of bullshit that makes a group believe they are victimized.