It's fascinating that widespread outrage over privacy finally materializes when data is used for hated political causes. Commerce, law enforcement not so much... but "Trump" or "Obama" and suddenly people care.
The Facebook outrage is interesting since it is tied to Trump. When Obama did it, no one cared. For example, there's a video of Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager, talking about how they obtained the entire Facebook social graph and used it to target voters. [1] I don't remember any "delete Facebook" campaigns back then.
I'm struggling to understand why people keep bringing up the Obama comparison. At the start of the 2016 elections everyone, Sanders, Clinton, Jeb!, Trump were doing what Obama did in 2012. The outrage isn't soley in the fact that the CA campaign used FB data.
1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached.
2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news.
Comparing the CA scandal to Obama is willfully ignoring these two facts that has led to the current backlash.
Society, to the frustration of many of us on this forum, has implicitly decided to trust Facebook with the personal data of millions and has allowed the mass-resale of user data, provided that everyone else plays by the "rules" (for example, you can target me to sell ads, but only as long as you trying to sell me TVs). CA (and transitively, Trump) broke these rules.
Folks bring up the Obama comparison... because... well... its a pretty comparable situation.
I'm not so charitable towards the public.
I wouldn't place any bets that the striking wave of outrage directed at Facebook right now isn't strictly related to the outcome. In this case, that outcome is Trump in the White-house. Not that that isn't a good reason to be outraged - but I don't think its a very principled reason.
That's a rather suspiciously self-serving and self-reassuring characterization of each scenario, that I don't think holds up with a bit of intellectual honesty.
In either case, similar amounts of personal data was harvested from facebook, for whatever purposes the clients cared to use it for, to predictable results.
EDIT: And that's all besides the point - the problem isn't that someone with bad intentions got ahold of data and used in a way they shouldn't have, the problem is people are just getting ahold of data they should not have - period.
> 2016 Trump campaign, data was used to stir up FUD and/or discourage voting.
How so? Unless they were working with the rest of the media outlets and pushing the "Trump has no chance" / "He will never be the president" story. Do you know of any such campaigns? I mostly see it as a mass media hubris. The same outlets Clinton was expecting to help her ended up undermining the election for her, because, well if Trump only has 1% of winning, why bother putting on the shoes and going out to vote.
People are trying so hard to create the false equivalency on this issue, too. Nobody ever did what Trump, Cambridge Analytica (Mercers/Bannon), Russia, Wikileaks/Assange did in coordination (allegedly, for now).
Russian hacked the DNC and Podesta. They coordinated on the content and messaging around cherry picked emails with the Trump campaign, and they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary.
The hacking part is me just repeating the assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The coordination is my suspicion based on known interactions with high level Trump campaign surrogates (Trump Jr, Stone) and Assange. The DNC/Podesta hack attribution is Crowdstrike's.
> assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The
Is that Comey's hearing? I remember listening to that. He believed that Russians hacked the DNC but he has not seen any evidence of it and he (the FBI) had no access to the servers. He says it comes from believing Crowdstrike. It seems the only solid peace of evidence comes from this one company.
Crowdstrike has made up stuff before. In their report about the war in Ukraine they published a made up number about the losses of artillery units. The Ukrainians publicly called them out on it http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2017/01/06/informacziya-po-vtrati... and they were forced to update their report https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/idc-vendor-pro... They put more effort into the zombie soldier from the front page than the content of the report itself. Given the thousands and thousand of hours and all the pages and books written on this topic, they'd be a lot more evidence than just the Crowdstrike's report.
> they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary.
Assange denies they came from the Russians or a state actor. He could be lying, Hillary certainly wanted to "drone that guy". But as an organization, if he was speaking on behalf of Wikileaks, they have been pretty factual. They obviously pick what they report on but once they say something I have not seen them blatantly lying.
Thanks for the link! The first part is saw is point out how Trump is contradicting himself. There is a whole sub-reddit (trump vs trump I think) and is basically just that. He is saying contradictory thing about anything, I don't see that as proof of collusion.
The timeline re-iterates that the evidence came from Crowdstrike. I'd hope there'd be more evidence than that. Maybe let DHS should take a look those machines. They should be able to find someone interested enough to investigate that. Wonder why they didn't / won't do it
I see what you mean by Trump Jr. coordinating with Assange on tweeting a about emails and how Assange wanted Jr to "leak" a tax report from Trump. Yeah that does look shady, agreed.
One thing I still don't see is Russians colluding with Trump compared to the volume of news and articles convinced of it: "he looked at him at the G20 summit", "he congratulated him on a bogus election", "he acts like he is subservient to him", "they have a piss tape". Those are fun to listen to and pretty effective, certainly keep people clicking and retweeting, but there needs to be something more solid there I think.
Re: Russia/Trump. Consider that instead of the Putin cronies and Russian government people and entities recommended by Treasury and State the Trump administration sanctiones a list of 96 Russian billionaires from Forbes.
Not Comey's hearing, no. There are other hearings that you can search for by copying and pasting what I wrote verbatim into Google to find.
If you disagree with Crowdstrike's methodologies, then by all means let's get specific. They were the principle investigators on the case. They are well regarded. I didn't read the Ukraine link you provided because 1. I have no idea if the team was even the same and 2. it's likely they've been wrong once before, so it's immaterial.
I literally don't understand the words you wrote about Wikileaks. Yes, I don't believe Assange.
I don't get your reaction to the link. You think they colluded, but think it's overcovered in the media? You want DHS to investigate the DNC hack 2 years after the fact? Who ever mentioned Reddit? Donald Trump is a liar so he is not guilty of collusion?
You seem intent on minimizing this to the point of being gratuitously contrary. Thank you for the discussion.
> I didn't read the Ukraine link you provided because 1. I have no idea if the team was even the same and 2. it's likely they've been wrong once before, so it's immaterial.
Just pointing out the same company had made pretty large factual errors in their report were even the people on the side they supported had to publicly refute them.
Not only that but the founder of Crowdstrike might be a bit biased. He is a member of the Atlantic Council http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/experts/list/dmitri-alp... which traditionally is critical of Russia. That's fine, it's good thing they are but it introduces a conflict of interest. Moreover he is a donor to the Clinton Foundation to the tune of $10M. Again nothing wrong with that per se. He is free to donate, but that also is a conflict of interest. And had this been a forgotten memo or a minor incident, that's fine, but it seems a whole lot of articles, reporting, twitter messages, TV time and hearings were based on just the finding of this one company.
> I literally don't understand the words you wrote about Wikileaks. Yes, I don't believe Assange.
Sorry for being confusing. I mean to say Wikileaks have been pretty factual. They pick their stories based on their political bias or most media impact but once they say something, I have not seem them blatantly lie before. So when he said "these did not come from Russia or a another state actor" I'd have to see more evidence to say "clearly he is lying"
> I don't get your reaction to the link.
Again for for confusion. I thanked you for the link. I wasn't being facetious. I learned something new about Assange nagging on Trump Jr to leak tax documents and asking them to mention more of leaked emails.
> You want DHS to investigate the DNC hack 2 years after the fact?
I want to see more solid claims behind a year+ of wasted propaganda effort. There has to be something more credible there.
> Who ever mentioned Reddit?
I did. Because the first part of the article was talking how Trump contradicts himself. Yeah he contradicts himself. It looks like trolling to me and everyone is taking the bait so he knows how to waste everyone's time and get them to talk about his spelling mistakes and contradictions. I don't see how that is proof of collusion between him and Russia.
> Donald Trump is a liar so he is not guilty of collusion?
I say he is liar and a troll based on what I have seen. Haven't decided if he does it consciously and deliberately or it is just his personalty and he just says whatever he feels currently without thinking to match with anything he said in the past.
> You seem intent on minimizing this to the point of being gratuitously contrary. Thank you for the discussion.
Nah just trying to get to the bottom of things. I find this focus on Russia collusion pretty interesting. I've been talking about media and how PR works for a while. Personally I think it is disappointing to see this much effort wasted, because that time, energy could have been spent on something else.
Looks good so far. Pretty exciting, can't wait to find more info. Would be good to have the name and hopefully an indictment. I understand it probably won't be acted on unless the person travels overseas but still. It seems there is some real evidence there - a particular IP address.
In general, I never quite could figure out Guccifer 2.0. It seemed like it was multiple people, just based on going from terribly broken English to fluent within the same paragraph. Which would be consistent with this part of the story
---
Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English that the persona’s earlier efforts.
---
> Do you retract your statement?
Not yet. I'd want wait and see what happens with this one. There was another similar story of a written confession from someone in jail who claimed they were order to hack the DNC. http://www.newsweek.com/russian-hacker-stealing-clintons-ema... that one says it was FSB not GRU but they probably work together. I haven't heard much since.
Don't you remember Trump telling the Russians or Wikileake to release some more stolen emails? The rest of the connection is not yet public, although there are lots and lots of connect-the-dots conclusions to be drawn.
> Trump telling the Russians or Wikileake to release some more stolen emails?
That was on public TV with reporters around. I remember that, pretty sure it was a joke. Is that the only evidence of Russian collusion?
To go back, it all started with Russian altering votes. As in, hiding in Wisconsin, in the bushes with laptops, giving Trump extra votes. We even had recount which both Stein and Clinton supported. People were donating towards it and everything.
Then it went Putin and Trump are exchanging secret hand gestures at G20.
Then some Trump people were in the same hotel at some meeting at Putin people, so that was considered "collusion".
Then it was the piss "dossier".
I still don't see solid evidence of collusion vis-a-vis the amount of time and energy devoted to talking about. Many articles today even start with "Given that Trump colluded with Russia...". So used as an established fact and I think it is far from it.
You have a former Obama campaign staffer saying that what they did raised alarms with Facebook. Hence, what they were doing was not OK by someone’s standard. Plus, the intent of the app is irrelevant. By using it you authorized it to get information on everyone in your friend list, something they’ve since disabled for, wait for it, privacy reasons because it’s not like the people on your friend list were ever asked for _their_ consent during the harvesting process.
Based on the first-hand statements from Obama's campaign manager [1], I don't think we can characterize how they got the data as licit. It was, at the very least, wink-wink-nudge-nudge under the table. Facebook either really did know they could do that and didn't care, or their surprise was genuine, but they didn't stop it. Nor did the campaign have permission from everyone. Nor were they any more subtle as to how they used it.
To the extent that there was no deception in the Obama's campaign's usage, it was because there was no communication at all. This is not an improvement! And they got more data from this "no communication at all" than CA did.
Yes. Everyone was doing it. I totally agree we have a systematic problem here. But everyone was doing it and we have a systematic problem here works in all directions at once. Trump can't be singled out.
In fact, Trump may not even have used the data significantly [2], which makes it even more blatently obvious to the rest of America and the world that it's not a matter of principle, it's all a matter of who did it and whether or not we can tar certain people with it.
The question I have, and rather a lot of watching Americans and even the world have, is: Does "Silicon Valley" care about our privacy, no matter who is violating it? Or is "Silicon Valley" only suddenly concerned because the wrong people may tangentially have gotten something out of it, but when the "right people" do it Silicon Valley will do everything in its still-considerable power to cover for them?
One answer leads to beginning to recover the respect the public even quite recently had for Silicon Valley, but may require a lot of people in Silicon Valley to admit that, yes, "their guys" have been abusive and some corrective actions may need to be taken. (And for quite a lot of people, not just an ambient "yeah, some other people need to do something but not really me" but you, you dear reader, need to understand that abuses occurred and stop covering for them because they were done by the "right person".)
The other answer leads to a world in which this week was merely the warning shot in a war that Silicon Valley is basically structurally doomed to lose [3], no matter how invincible it may feel right now, and proving to the world at large that all their fears about Silicon Valley are completely, 100% justified. Which is it going to be? The hard way that's right in the long term, or the short-term psychologically satisfying answer that leads to doom in the long term?
[3]: Vast, vast quantities of Silicon Valley power and money are tied up in the premise that even now only a vanishing fraction of their market power has been exploited, and the best days are still ahead. If America and the world at large (the vast, vast bulk of which is not Silicon Valley liberal!) decide that Silicon Valley is the enemy, then all the stock valuations for things like Google and Facebook will more-or-less turn on a dime from "Companies that have immense growth potential in front of them" to "Companies very likely to be in short-term decline". The stock market carnage and loss in power and prestige that will go with that will be historic. Silicon Valley would be well advised not to play with this fire.
Assuming it is true, for which I have yet to see any evidence, what is the substance of point #2?
I have trouble finding these arguments convincing in light of concrete data.
I have looked at examples of the fake news posts on Facebook, as reported by the media. Two of them say that you can tweet or SMS to vote instead of going in person. Is this all it takes to disrupt an American election?
I saw two other posts - one for a fake event called miners for Trump, and one that says Hillary Clinton has a low approval rating with military veterans. Is there someone making a serious argument that Hillary voters saw this and changed their minds? Folks were on the fence but this is what pushed them to vote for President Trump? I don't find that believable. The posts are weak and hardly convincing, if at all.
There was also an anti Trump march after the election which was attended by a large number of people including Michael Moore, which turned out to be organised by Russians on Facebook. That one was effective but seemed to be aimed at the President.
This is the kind of hoax stuff that you used to see in email forwards, and those have been doing the rounds for years. Seeing them on Facebook is not a new phenomenon, it's just a different platform.
I find this line of reasoning very sketchy because I have yet to see any content or post that makes a compelling argument based on false facts. If you have seen any such posts I would like to see them.
I'm also confused about why CA needed the data they took from Kogan in order to do this. How does one relate to the other? Let's pretend I have Kogans data right here with me and I have a few of these fake posts, what do I do next? Do I start adding some of these folks as friends and start sharing content with them? How did they use the Kogan data exactly?
By comparison I think some of the memes and hoaxes that the online Trump groups (mostly young Americans) came up with were quite well made. There was a campaign called #DraftOurDaughters that purposely perpetrated a hoax that Hillary Clinton wanted to draft women to fight wars in the middle East. There were also several campaigns to draw attention to the practice of spirit cooking, which was referenced once or twice in John Podesta's emails. I remember being in a discord voice chat one day in 2016 with a few folks from 4chan's /pol/ board and there was work being done where the emails were being made into pamphlets to pass around at church to reach some of the less tech savvy folks, and older folks who were not on Twitter and didn't know much about Wikileaks.
As for point #1, given that nobody consented to their data going to either Obama or Trump I think the comparison is quite valid. CA broke an arbitrary platform policy whereas the Obama campaign got the data with their blessing. I don't think that is a good thing, or that it makes their use of people's personal data acceptable.
You've piqued my interest with this comment because, read literally, you seem to be against hate.
Hating isn't illegal, immoral or even necessarily a bad idea. Hate can be justified. Hate is dangerous in politics as is any strong emotion. Trying to hold a country together demands compromise, which in turn requires moderation.
Facebook is empowering mass surveillance and propaganda, and encourages outrage and knee-jerk reactions. Trying to separate out who is using that power for good or ill and judge equivalence based on that is risky. If the judgment is wrong great damage will be done.
It is better to to acknowledge that power in itself is dangerous, and political power should be carefully controlled. Controlling and limiting political power has been a very successful strategy leading to excellent results in the past.
I agree with all of the above, and I'm not saying that what they did is illegal (for that reason - though IMO it was illegal through election laws). I'm saying it's not useful to claim "Obama's campaign did the same" when these guys were bragging about creating divisive, bigoted, violent content and aiming them at a susceptible audience. [1]
They [Facebook] were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
---
You just have to be on the right "side" that's all.
I wonder if anyone went back and ensure they deleted all the data they harvested, then went back and verified that they didn't lie. And in case they didn't, wonder what the media response would be and how many articles would be written about it.
Cambridge Analytica did far worse than Obama's team. They lied about the purpose of the app to steal social graph data. But fundamentally, the abuse of social graph information is the same. They may have gone to different ends (getting people to vote for obama, vs getting people to not vote for clinton), but they are fundamentally the same types of activity.
You can't tell it was appropriate for Obama's social media team to steal the social graph and use that to target people (who did not approve their information being obtained).
That's the entire political discourse these days, isn't it? X had dealing with, or "has connections" to Y, therefore everything Y does can be imputed to X.
There's a Russian behind every curtain! They're perhaps the most powerful country on earth! Literally everything (from Bernie to Jill Stein to Trump to the NRA) is Russina backed! ZOMG!
What about the founder of Wikileaks working for Russian propaganda media, which is what we're discussing here? I'm not sure what your motivation to deflect on this is.
Because it's a false equivalency. Nobody is accusing Julian Assange of something that he isn't guilty of, and it's attempting to change the subject when faced with the facts.
No, it's an element of political discourse that is entirely necessary. Given how cheap and effective this sort of tactic is in the current media and information landscape, why would someone interested in destabilizing a country not do it?
Well, you consider it to be cheap and effective -- in 2018.
But back in 2016: Obama said there was “no serious” person who would suggest it was possible to rig American elections, adding, “I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.” [0]
I wonder how public opinion shifted. Back in 2016, the idea of rigging elections with facebook ads was alex-jones-level of tinfoil conspiracy, and now we are discussing it as an obvious, cheap and effective tactic.
Your election in 2000 was stolen with the help of technically faulty (at least) voting machines. The fact that the possibility was considered tinfoil conspiracy in 2016 just means that politicians are rather skilled at reassuring the public.
Obama probably felt that he would have damaged the democratic party by saying anything else.
Whataboutism isn't new, nor is it intellectually dishonest to point out when it's being used. Soviets started using it during the cold war era, and it's still in use as a deflection tactic today.
You are absolutely correct, however I would argue that it has only relatively recently entered the common HN lexicon. The vast majority (~675 out of 704^) of comments using it here in the comments are < 2 yrs old.
Admittedly the first comment on HN that used the term is 7 years old, but that comment [0] predates the creation of the wikipedia article (frequently trotted out when invoking the term here) by about a year.
As an aside, I'd love see a dataviz app that shows the lifecycle of terminology and memes that thrive in various internet discussion boards.
Its also become a bit of a convenient shield for many to avoid confronting/admitting their own side's double-standards or bad-faith power politicking.
Not accusing you of the above, but "Whataboutism" is as old as double-standards it draws attention to. But IMHO the accusation is more often use for ill than for good.
Do you really think most of the outraged public understand the nuanced differences between the two? The reason the public is outraged is because of an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies.
Ah yes, Channel 4, the most implacable enemy of Trump. And that time they did an exposé of how Poundland wasn’t actually cheap, it was due to their vendetta against Poundland, and not at all due to the fact that they do bloody investigative journalism.
What would you prefer them to do, in depth investigations into how fuzzy cats are? Generally, in investigative journalism, someone gets hurt. It’s not a conspiracy against poor innocent Trump, just the nature of the beast.
Just wondering... If there are differences, which you concede, then maybe it's those differences and not "an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies" driving the difference in outrage?
They aren't nuanced differences, at all. And a substantial majority of the public can be counted as "Trump's enemies" (whatever that paranoid label may mean) probably because they understand how different 2016 was than any other campaign in the US, ever.
I'm curious how they find these people to interview....the one fellow who plans to move his marketing to Twitter for example...he does have a Twitter account, but he has no tweets, so she couldn't have found him that way.
I doubt there's been any sort of a reliable survey on this, yet once again numerous media outlets are portraying extreme public outrage at this. My spider sense tells me the outrage isn't coming from the public.
1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached.
At the end of the day in both cases, the analytics group (CA or Obama for America) obtained the data of millions of users that did not directly and explicitly authorize their data to be analyzed. ~50M in the case of CA and ~180M in the case of OFA.
Neither CA nor OFA broke any statues or laws, they both worked around loopholes and tricks in Facebook's TOS & API.
2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news.
I haven't yet heard this exact argument made for why this specific case was bad, though I suspect it's implied, but it seems like that is just a piece of the problem. Interestingly however, the contents of the targeted ads seems immaterial to the most important argument which is that this was a "breach" of private user data - a completely separate argument.
Your last point I think sums it up well, Trump and his cronies used the system against itself and people don't like it. Full stop. It wasn't the fact that he used it, because others did, it was the fact that he used it in a way that we didn't expect or like (not that it broke laws).
I mean say what you will but it truly embodies the hacker ethos.
2012: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? How cool is that? Haha bet you Republican dinosaurs had thought of that, huh?
2018: getting information about all of your friends by simply using an app? This is utterly terrifying!
And save me the “it’s different because it was a campaign app.” Did the app get the consent from all the friends whose data was harvested? I’m thinking... no.
> Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
So a former Obama staffer is saying they harvested data in a manner that raised red flags with Facebook, news articles of the time detailed the manner in which friend data was harvested automatically (i.e., without consent) and yet, no one in 2012 or after stopped and said, “hey wait, that’s not OK.” Throw aside all the talk about false equivalences, what the 2012 Obama campaign did with data was obviously not OK by Facebook or anyone else’s standards and yet... crickets. It really is a case of “it’s OK when we do it” for Democrats. Anyone wanna wager that Facebook will really revisit this case like Zuckerberg promised to do?
> I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.
So a bunch of MT users voluntarily gave their information over, for $2, knowing that it would be used for research purposes, and clearly (at least on reddit) skeptical of giving over their information. But that's theft and that's wrong.
A bunch of Obama for President enthusiasts voluntarily give their information to his campaign, knowing that it would be used for research purposes. That's categorically different, for some reason.
Please stop spreading the "Obama did it too!" canard, they didn't exceed authorization.
So in this formulation you're making Facebook out to be some kind of super-governmental authority on the proper or improper use of this potentially civilization shifting cache of data.
This issue here isn't, oh noes! Trump broke Facebook's rules, bad Trump!
This issue here is that this cache of data exists and we've seen it put to use in a variety of ways that elicit dismay from a variety of people.
This issue here is that Facebook exists, has constructed this system, exploitative of human behaviour and psychology, and collected this data.
Think back to the Chamath and Parker stories a few months ago.
This is a much bigger issue than the doings of a single political campaign.
Are we just going to leave it up to Zuck and Sheryl to work out how they can best profit from this system and data while hoping they don't destroy society in the process?
What if Zuckerberg were to die in a plane crash tomorrow and an enfant terrible, a young Maxima Rex were to subsequently rise to the throne while holding political views polar opposite to both you and her father, would you be just as enthusiastic about her deciding what are and aren't "authorizable" uses of this data?
You're saying that Facebook was the main guilty party for Obama but not so guilty, just negligent with Trump? In that case, why are people upset at Facebook? It's less guilty than before. They should be pleased with Facebook's tighter authorization and blame only CA/etc.
That doesn't justify the fact that data was harvested for what amounts to targeted propaganda.
And this isn't some kind of whataboutism. Attention needs to be drawn to these abuses of private data, regardless of where they occur or whether they are technically legal.
Sometimes people who scrutinize things fail to see it from the working class's perspective (the "poorly educated" be they white or black, or something else.) I think there are quite a few people on HN who never hung out with poor people or never paid attention to how they may think, in some situations.
If their "horse" wins, whatever the means, they're glad it wins. Case in point is O.J. Everyone knew he got away with a crime, but despite that, people were happy to see him stick it to the man. If Obama won on FB data, people who voted for him, on balance, would not care. People who voted for Trump, on balance, would not care, if he won on the back of FB data --we don't know the actual degree of the usage, but for argument's sake, let's pretend it was material.
Even "highly educated" people are susceptible to this bias.
Explain Deflategate and the OJ trial reactions. I also grew up with them. It's not condescending, it's been observational. I didn't claim it's universal or it's like that for everything in their lives, but if one of their horses cheats a bit, gets away with something, it's not the end of the world.
I'll grant you that's true in the media --but when I was in those circles, i.e. poor, it wasn't just the loudest. Normal people would have similar reactions. I think there is a bit of, "hey, we're owed one, it's not dignified, but if that's what it took, so be it."
Maybe I missed the part in that video where he says they pulled private user data? If Trump generated his own social graph, I don't think there would be outrage.. instead they've got something worse than a breach on their hands.
"Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."
"They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."
"Using data" (said at least a hundred times in that video) or even using Facebook data is not what the outrage is about. I missed the part in the video about third-party developers trawling user (and non-user) data and then giving (selling) it to other third-parties. And the part where the Obama campaign was one of those third-parties...
Obama seemed to do it in a less negative way. The Obama campaign used it to encourage people to get out and vote. The ads run in the Trump campaign seem far more nefarious and suppressive of voting, targeting minority populations and other would be democratic voters. Seems far, far darker than anything Obama did, and in many ways, fairly anti American. So not surprising that people take notice of that kind of stuff.
It's not that interesting. Obama is a typical politician. Trump is a bullshitting, dysfunctional, con-artist who would never have been elected under normal circumstances. Trump is not politics as usual.
Well, there are some trends (such as dropping life expectancy for whites without college degree [0]), which are without precedent. It's literally unheard for developed country to have a dropping life expectancy in XX century.
So, maybe US being functional democracy, with working feeback loop from voters to elites (no sarcasm here) did something extraordinary because of extraordinary circumstances.
I hold no strong opinion here, but this is something worth evaluating, IMO.
Oh, there's a ton extraordinary going on. Our economic system has been a farce for years. We financialized everything and fake a working economy. The financial sector's portion of the GDP is so high, it's patently pathological. The internet is still young but has finally reached the vast majority of everyone. We're in the last years of any chance to avoid massive climate catastrophe as we already experience the early realities of climate change. And automation is truly in the beginnings of taking over the last unskilled jobs where (unlike all past cases) it won't merely be a shift from one industry to another. I could go on…
I was not saying that everything today would be normal if not for Trump.
Typical politicians are dishonest but they accept the premise of honesty. In other words, they care that they can plausibly claim to be honest. They form lies in ways to attempt to get away with it and be accepted as true.
Trump has no premise of honesty. He doesn't care what's true or not. He doesn't bother lying and hoping to get away with it. He just wants people to play along and he can know who's loyal by who plays along or not.
That's just one of a massive list of distinctions. The short of it is: typical politicians accept the social norms of their corrupt political world. Obama was one of those. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't give a shit about social norms, and that may be one reason some people find him refreshing — too bad that some of the social norms are positive, and throwing it all away is reckless.
Anyway, my pithy initial reply wasn't clear enough, so it works for the joke. But really, Trump is not a typical politician. He's not even anything like a typical real-estate developer.
HN is so full of already-debunked right-wing talking points, it has to stop. This place is full of as much disinformation as anywhere else. Everything in your post is a straight lie, a specific intent to deceive readers and create a false narrative about balance.
Edit: Dang, the flamebait here is the lie, disinformation and chaos created in the statement "When Obama did it, no one cared" which I was responding to. The cause of the flamebait frequently on HN is the frequently-upvoted lies and falsehoods, not my responses. My responses are entirely factual and do not contain lies or disinformation, unlike the flamebait I was responding to. I'm not allowed to reply to you directly because your software won't let me.
Would you please stop posting ideological and political flamebait to HN? This question is being discussed elsewhere in the thread, and in other threads, without quite so much of that. They're pretty low-quality discussions, but comments like this one make lower the quality a significant notch further. That we can at least avoid.
"They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."
So Obama's campaign violated the Facebook terms of service and illegally used the data they obtained, combined with funds illegally collected from a hostile foreign power, and used the user data to spread disinformation and lies about US politics?
Is that what you're saying? Because otherwise, the two cases are completely different.
Alright, while we wait for physical evidence to be public, I will take the assumption that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it is probably a duck.
With so many Russians already indicted over this and clear money flows recorded from investigative journalism, I think it is quite clear what happened with foreign funds being used from Russia -> NRA, Trump orgs, etc prior to, during and after the election.
Edit: I have been banned again from replying to HN comments, I do not understand why but I guess it has to do with a lot of people downvoting me quickly. I don't know. Anyway, here is my reply to the comment below.
> CNN
I don't understand what the entertainment company CNN is doing in this conversation. They have nothing to do with this?
> FUD
I am not spreading FUD. I am merely talking about recent news articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. I'm not sure what you mean by FUD here, but surely if there is FUD about it is the FUD that Trump is the legitimate president and that no outsiders or illegal actors had any influence on democracy in the last number of years. That would be the real FUD of the situation.
Exuse me sir, but this approach is well known as "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", or FUD in short.
It definitely works, meaning it shifts the public opinion, and quite effectively so, but I would rather examine the facts and form my own opinion after such examination. If I ever want to go to the second step without first one, I can always watch some CNN.
I'm not moving any goal posts. User sverige and everyone else has declined to even mention which "it" is being referred to in this whataboutism of "Obama did it too" stuff. My point is and has always been that there is no comparison to be made here, the usage and methods taken by Obama's campaign are totally simple and small and legal compared to the methods taken by Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/Trump et al. recently.
What the Trump campaign did was more aggressive and dishonest. They took it too far, finally inspiring a backlash. It happens with lots of things: crime, financial bubbles, etc. Eventually you hit a critical mass and a reaction starts. Once started the reaction spreads virally and feeds on itself.
It also doesn't help that Trump is allied with and most ardently supported by neo-Nazis. Not claiming all his supporters are such, but that's obviously his most vocal and enthusiastic base.
You gotta understand the ruling elites though. It was fun to watch different "Springs" happening in some distant lands. Not so much fun when "American Spring" happens in your own country, even if it's a "mild" edition.
But that is very human: we are really, really bad at grasping abstract ideas but make something concrete and we will react. I can talk about privacy with someone until their ear falls off but to most people I sound like a lunatic. Show them how we can be manipulated into sometimes literally tearing each other apart and suddenly people care.
One of my friends mentioned that Trump denying climate change galvanized a lot of support for reducing greenhouse emissions. Apparently people hate Trump more than they like our planet...
American politics has a certain "wicker man" aspect to it. We elect a representative of that which is to be destroyed. We do the same with celebrities, raising them up only to symbolically sacrifice them with scandal.
Note the explosion of vocal atheism and decline of the political power of the evangelical movement during Bush II, the rise of the alt-right during Obama, and now an explosion of social justice and #metoo type stuff during Trump.
Maybe the best strategy is to vote for your least favorite candidate?
Commerce and law enforcement don't have opposing forces with huge political propaganda/PR machines behind them. Trump is opposed by the Democrats, and Obama is opposed by the Republicans. Both parties are public sentiment manipulation machines.
What a vapid post. It's X vs Y, and everything is relative to that?
Here's an exercise for you. Identify federal law enforcement agencies, and see what public statements and actions they've taken on this. There is not partisan symmetry, but I won't give the answer away.
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how someone read or didn't read your comment. It breaks the HN guidelines badly and makes this place worse.
Am I wrong that there is a clear difference between big data marketing methods and military information operations methods?
> [SCL Group's] expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.
At least half the country feel like they were actually harmed, and even the rest sees the danger coming closer. I actually don’t care, or may even prefer, if commercial ads are perfectly targeted at me.
People care about their "football team" [party] and their small economic and social bubble. They are not good in general to see how things affect them.
Fun fact: most fiscal policies have as a goal to get people to invest their money and get growth back in. Their effect is psychological. If the effects sound like they will have a positive effect in my little bubble I will start spending and investing, as I feel the Big Brother is ensuring a positive future for me. In fact, I as an individual impact the economy and not the Big Brother directly, as i) I spread the positive feeling and ii) invest. Hence, the consensus of the market is positive. See Keyene's "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (http://cas2.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/co...) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...) chapter 12. The average per person confidence for the short term affects the long term progress. People usually find no precedence to connect their privacy to the economic or political success. Now events start rolling stating otherwise. This article for instance states claims that their lack of privacy might have impacted the election, a matter most people feel affects their bubble. And rightly so. Thus why the mild reactions.
Example 2:
People in security world/academia have been paranoid about what NSA was doing. The average Joe did not care about their data till the E. Snowden fiasco. The "mob reaction" told them to care. Then it subsided a bit again. Fortunately, it left the average person maybe a bit more aware on average. The impact was more money flowing towards security research and the rest of the world took note.
As a last (desperate) solution, I hope events like this hit the public where it hurts. Equifax was not enough, but it was a wake up call for some. This Facebook scandal probably will not do the job for the average Jane/Joe, but maybe the next one will. At that point people will either have to take a step or we will wake up in an Orwellian world.
We may need an event so drastic that relates people's privacy with their bubble and fast. Remember the "sudden" economic/social disasters of today are usually decades in the making (1920s, 2007, Russian revolution, most likely "x (social) revolution", where x is your country).
More like "British pimping/extortion ring" combined with possible "Russian aynchronous warfare" but yeah you're right, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's just the subordination of my democracy and civil rights.
It's not just that. There's also mainstream media having an incentive to attack competitors. There is a legitimate case to be made if the NYTimes did exactly what Facebook did there would be even more outrage.
Also, it's Facebook losing control of data to a company that has admitted on video that they setup politicians in fake situations with hookers and use that to pressure the politician as well as create fake new stories to impugn that politician. This is a variation on blackmail and Facebook data and infrastructure is the vehicle for actualizing a part of that blackmail, even though it's libel.
There's also the pile on effect.
There's also the loss of trust in Facebook because we've been here before. Zuckerberg has variably told people to "calm down" in 2006, to claiming that privacy is no longer a social norm in 2010. And also this ideological statement “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.” The idea that privacy is itself a detriment to the world. I found it an obscenity in 2010 when he said it, and the recent events of the past year prove that this is an embedded part of what Facebook is and it cannot be removed without destroying Facebook.
Today's statement is likewise telling.
I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again.
And is it now understood, and you know what went wrong? No.
The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.
The most important actions have already been taken, are unspecified, yet this mess still happened meaning those actions were insufficient. Whether this is an assessment problem, a failure to implement safeguards problem, or bad ideology, the net result is loss of trust.
I've never trusted Facebook and everything that's happened over 10 years with this company just reinforces how right I was to not trust them. That history is 95% not Trump or Obama related.
There is a suddenness to this episode that deserves some examination. For years, Facebook has been violating people's privacy. For years, people went along with it. Perhaps on some level, people were disturbed by it, but they weren't angry enough to do anything about it.
If we were discussing economics, then we would call this a Minsky moment[1]. If you substitute "trust" for "money" then this almost fits:
"A Minsky moment is a sudden major collapse of asset values which is part of the credit cycle or business cycle. Such moments occur because long periods of prosperity and increasing value of investments lead to increasing speculation using borrowed money."
But I think we are also seeing a sudden moral panic, like the one that destroyed MySpace in 2006. danah boyd wrote about that at the time[2]:
"Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids' terms. If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic."
But those children grew up. The 16 year old of 2006 is now 28. So this moral panic is a bit different. It's not adults freaking out about what is being done to kids, it's adults freaking out about what is being done to themselves.
Mind you, I think it's obvious that Facebook has behaved very badly, so this episode of castigation is well deserved. But the suddenness of it makes me think there is also an element of panic.
Speaking for myself, but also probably for a lot of others, I've wanted Facebook to die for years now. The discomfort around the privacy and toxicity has been slowly building, but the critical mass of the thing makes it hard to break away by yourself. You lose touch with people, you miss event invites, etc.
So maybe, for a lot of people, this moment of collective outrage is an opportunity to get out. If we can all quit at once, we can all be free.
I'm not sold on the MySpace thesis. MySpace faltered due to autoplaying audio and video, obnoxious animated gifs, and ridiculous CSS customization powers given to the users. Facebook was cleaner, loaded faster, and had a better "scene" for people in the targeted demographic: college students and eventually recent graduates.
"Zuckerberg Has No Way Out of Facebook's Quagmire." Unfortunately, yes he does. It's called time. Act like you're changing things, do a little change, the least the better, and wait it out. People will bitch about it but eventually, it becomes the new normal. Even if FB fails, which it won't, there's another social network right after it.
Facebook is an addiction for several billion humans. It is in itself a quagmire, but is not going to go away any time soon.
And the business of making money off profiling private behavior online, for commercial or other purposes, is not specifically a Facebook thing, it is ingrained into the backbone of the internet itself. It won't go away any time soon.
Facebook will of course be responsive to demands by the joint forces of tax-revenue collecting agencies + old media (who are seeing their business models dissipate into the pockets of Facebook, Google and a few more), and so we'll probably see some adjustments which will try to satisfy them; less tax-havens and a trickle of the revenue stream back to the original news creators.
I’m sorry, what quagmire? Most people either aren’t aware of the privacy issues or if they are don’t care. People like using Facebook, or at least are addicted to it.
You don't see the addiction itself as a quagmire? It sure is on its own. And "what quagmire"? You know what quagmire. The one where Facebook has been acting extremely guilty around entering Cambridge Analytica's offices and refusing to leave until police forced them out. The one where Facebook is complicit in the stolen information, whereby they had knowledge of the problem for 2+ years before acting. The one that spoils the trust of investors and users alike. That quagmire.
Sorry, I don't see it either. Yes, Facebook makes money off of users data, surprise surprise! People know that much, they aren't stupid and the deal worked just fine for both sides so far.
The current outrage is about user's data getting into the wrong hands, and a rightful outrage it is. However I don't see how fixing that problem would endanger FB's business model. Quite the contrary actually.
The Bloomberg argument is artifical and relies on the assumption that people don't want to share any data about themselves at all, which is just plain wrong. They do, as long as they can be reasonably sure that the data is "only" being used for harmless things such as targeted ads.
Wow, is it just me, or is Bloomberg really on the attack on Facebook? Every article on Facebook from them submitted here and other places like Reddit have always been quite negative, especially the headline.
So someone is trying to get journalisim to be branded as “traditional media” now.
The implication is “old and busted”, when in reality they have modern widely distributed websites which are as contemporary as any alternative medias being inferred ... which are what exactly? Twitter?
“Journalism media” seems to be an appropriate counter.
Facebook does a pretty good job of authentication, at least for nontechnical users, who are arguably the majority. If you sign up using VPN services or Tor, you get nagged for a mobile number for text verification. So Facebook either knows your IP address or mobile number. I don't consider that "de facto anonymity".
Now if you're skilled, and willing to invest some time and money, you can circumvent that. Or you can buy accounts, if you know where to shop. But that's not the case, for most Facebook users.
Mobile number checks are almost trivial to circumvent - you can get a DID with SMS capability from a VOIP provider for under a buck, just use it once and throw it away.
Thanks, good tip. However, the last time I looked at VoIP providers, they wanted to know who I was. Or at least, they wanted a credit/debit card. But maybe things have changed. And I am an amateur.
Something I've been thinking about: why doesn't WeChat, the world's 2nd largest social network with 1B MAU, suffer the issues Facebook is experiencing today?
If Facebook became more like WeChat, would they avoid these problems? If Facebook finds it does avoid such problems, will Facebook switch models in the future?
WeChat is this big because of its dominance in China and it very much operates in cooperation of the government [1]. It was subsidized by the government, it has no international competition because the government doesn't allow similar apps to operate there, and it's an "accepted reality that officials censor and monitor users".
Aka, the "privacy and collusion with the state" bar is at a very different level.
The whole operating model of the company based on invasion of privacy. Blatant invasion of privacy and data collection by Google and FB is a national security issue. No entity should be allowed to snoop on free citizens more than KGB has ever dreamed about. Orwellian!
> dreams.. "..we're closing the main Facebook app and web site.."
I think a better dream would be if FB open-sourced an advertisement-free Facebook, and provided $1B in grants to build permutations of the UI that all sync data.
Not sure if offtopic but how does Facebook make money? They talk about micro targetting me but, while I click often on adword ads because they know me, I have literally 0 times seen any interesting or a even remotely relevant ad on facebook? They know everything about me... I did an advertising engine for a big datingsite long ago which was stupid as mud but got vastly superior ads for for my demographic based on the data the site had about me than facebook has ever shown me. So am I just ‘unlucky’ or am I missing something?
At this point I very much want to know what data about me has been collected by private companies. I'm getting sick of not knowing. I'm repulsed by people divining or extrapolating. I want to fucking know.
Whatever you ever filled in or posted to the servers of a private company under your real identity is "data about me that has been collected by private companies". It's not that complicated.
Most places now (for compliance reasons) allow you to delete old accounts and old posts either through a button or if you email customer support or the webmaster.
Hopefully professional news organizations will realize how little credibility there is to social media numbers (likes, followers, etc.) and finally decide to stop reporting about trends on social media as if it is news.
There is sadly a very clear reason why China banned Facebook - its use has the potential to destroy social consensus, which is necessary for social cohesion. I’m not surprised Zuck has been hiding, in his heart of hearts, he realizes his invention has sort of destroyed America (and Britain, but I concede he probably cares less about that).
How does that explain WeChat? No, I think they quickly realized the power social media has to shape social consensus, which is what this whole scandal ultimately boils down to. They banned Facebook to eliminate competitors for their home grown (and highly controlled) domestic alternative vs. an American company.
He should resign. Or this bullshit will keep repeating. As it already has too many times.
Tech/Engineering folk are totally unfit to run social companies of the scale of YouTube/twitter/facebook etc. They don't have the skills or the experience or the sense in handling this stuff.
They know how to scale things and that's where their expertise ends and contribution should end.
They should be run by elected politicians with an advisory board filled with people who understand sociology, psychology, religion, culture, law and security. Those are the people who keep society running not the fucking plumbers.
