Door Prizes?
LMAO
Door Prizes?
LMAO
Who gets the other 50k in prizes? or does the greedy ceo eat that half all by his self
Interesting article, but the biggest culprit here is Facebook, and for some reason I'm not seeing that narrative in this thread.
Even the article itself is highly critical of Facebook:
Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”.“Facebook has denied and denied and denied this,” Dehaye says when told of the Observer’s new evidence. “It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”
I have said for years that Facebook is an awful, highly intrusive company. For over a decade, they have enticed members to share information about themselves, changed privacy settings (often resetting them or making them highly confusing for the user), and allowing third-party apps to harvest tons of profile data.
In fact, Facebook's intrusiveness indirectly led to the birth of my only child. In 2008, a girl I once knew from college joined Facebook, and was enticed to upload her e-mail contact list "so we can check if these people have Facebook accounts, and connect you with them."
Not being particularly computer or privacy savvy, she happily shipped them her e-mail contacts -- complete with each name and associated e-mail address. Facebook made it incredibly easy to do so.
Imagine my surprise in July 2009 when I created my Facebook account, and within seconds, it suggested this girl as my first "friend". I felt like Facebook had somehow reached into my soul. Since I did know this girl (someone I had never dated nor had romantic interest in), and had kept in occasional contact with her, indeed I added her as my first friend. Just two weeks later, Facebook intrusively determined that somehow I knew another person on that girl's friends list, and indeed it was correct. It was another girl we both knew in college -- one whom I had a friendship with, but ran out of time before graduating to ever ask her out. I also accepted that suggestion, and lo and behold, she became pregnant with Benjamin just 7 months later.
On the surface, it's a sweet story, but it underscores how far back the Facebook information intrusion goes.
Every time I saw an interesting looking third-party Facebook app ("Take this political test to see how much you match with each party!"), I would attempt to click through, and then be given a quick warning page that I would be providing the app owners with my full contact list, my e-mail address, my phone number, and other identifying information. Being a longtime privacy advocate, I would immediately close it and not accept the intrusive terms. Most people would shrug their shoulders and think, "Ahhh... this seems fun, and what's the worst that can happen?"
In fact, until a stink was created about it, Facebook used to allow apps to simply harvest this information WITHOUT warning you first, and giving you a chance to bail out.
Is it any wonder that Facebook's deadly combination of extreme data collection and lax privacy standards was eventually abused for political gain?
Furthermore, Facebook has long hid behind claims that it's "creating a community" when taken to task for its egregious and confusing privacy violations. In reality they just don't give a shit about anyone's privacy.
For example, let's say you join a closed group called "I Love Hung Black Transsexuals". With it being a closed (private) group, you have little worry of embarrassment. After all, the membership list of the group isn't searchable, nor will anything show up in search engines.
Then one day the owner of the group is unhappy that its membership isn't as high as he'd like, so he changes the setting from "closed" to "public".
Guess what?
Everything you've ever posted there is now searchable.
And if you post anything new without realizing the setting of the group has been changed to public, everyone on your friends list will see in their feed exactly what you write there.
Most people don't realize things like this. They have no idea that the privacy of anything you post -- or any group you join -- is set by the group owner or the message recipient. If you have a Facebook friend with their own privacy settings on public, any thread you respond to of theirs will be searchable and all of your friends will also see it in their feeds.
I could go on all night about the countless privacy violations and questionable actions I've seen on the part of Facebook.
That's part of the reason I laughed when people were panicking about the NSA and their monitoring a few years back. Remember that? Seems so long ago now. I knew that having the NSA monitor our phone calls en masse was the least of our problems. We had a much bigger monster right under or beds -- one we willingly let into our homes every day.
I do have some questions about the claims made in the article.
It says that users gave permission to access their Facebook friends' data, but I can't see how that's possible. When you allow a Facebook app to access your profile, the only information on your friends you're giving is simply that they're on your list. So the app knows who your friends are, but that's pretty much it.
The only way it could obtain more would be through either scraping the public profiles of those friends, or perhaps by tricking these users into entering their Facebook password, thus giving much farther reaching access (such as everything you have in common with them, their contact info, your messages with them, etc).
The article doesn't make this clear.
Here's the relevant snippet:
So while it's still unclear how the friends' data was harvested, it does seem Facebook noticed that they were harvesting massive data via that app, and Facebook just lol'd at it because they were told it was for "educational purposes".At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.
What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.
“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”
Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.
Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next – how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more.
The question you might have is WHY.
Why does Facebook violate its users' privacy so badly? Why do they care so little? What do they gain when third party apps harvest user information?
I can only surmise that Facebook has this entire intrusive model built for purposes of targeted advertising. The better you know your customers, the more effective (and expensive) ads will be. Apps are just an extension of that -- and Facebook likely saw the commercial potential of those, so they simply played fast and loose with user privacy in order to entice more app developers to be interested in their platform.
While it is easy to read this article and cast another stone at evil Steve Bannon, while laughing at the "Trumptards" who fell for the fake news and psychological ops, you need to take a step back and understand the true culprit here.
Politics are politics. Candidates will usually do whatever it takes to win. Doesn't matter the political party. The Trump campaign did this far more effectively than any of his opponents, but that was only the result of execution, not intent. Remember, Hillary's campaign got its hands plenty dirty in this contest.
Furthermore, I'm seeing an unfortunate arrogance in this thread essentially casting Trump voters as ignorant dupes, whereas most Democratic voters are painted as "too smart" to have fallen for stuff like this.
Incorrect. You wouldn't believe how many Democrats I saw falling for obvious fake news and fabricated anti-Trump/anti-Republican clickbait.
Remember that story about Trump supposedly having sex with a 13-year-old child prostitute? Ever wonder why that story made its copius rounds on social media, yet never hit the mainstream news? Because it was completely fabricated. A longtime celebrity hoaxer who goes by "The Reverend Bud Green" pulled it off, and I can't tell you how many otherwise intelligent and well-educated people on my Facebook were sharing it like it was breaking news. (I knew it was a hoax because I know the good Reverend personally through some close friends in the LA entertainment industry, and later an article was published confirming that he was behind the whole thing.)
You've heard the phrase, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game"?
In this case, don't hate the manipulators of Facebook data. Hate Facebook for knowingly making this all possible, in the name of chasing the almighty dollar.
"Druff would suck his own dick if it were long enough"- Brandon "drexel" Gerson
"ann coulter literally has more common sense than pfa."-Sonatine
"Real grinders supports poker fraud"- Ray Davis
"DRILLED HER GOOD"- HONGKONGER
Facebook posted a laughable statement on Friday: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03...dge-analytica/
It does manage to provide a little clarity regarding the way the data was accessed -- and that part I believe, because I know how Facebook works and how its privacy settings can be exploited (see last post).
Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.
So that's what happened. 270,000 people gave the app permission to access a bunch of stuff from their own accounts, including their friends list. Then the app scraped the friends' profiles for anything that was publicly viewable.
FYI, even if you attempt to view "private" profiles, you can still see some limited (but potentially useful) information, such as publicly-open groups they're part of, certain "likes" they've done, their gender and other basic info, and at least 1 profile and banner picture.
Facebook has still not changed this. I just tested it right now.
So it shows they still don't give a shit, and don't think they did anything wrong.
Here is more bullshit from the Facebook statement:
These settings are cumbersome, difficult to find, and confusing to use.In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list. This is just one of the many ways we give people the tools to control their experience. Before you decide to use an app, you can review the permissions the developer is requesting and choose which information to share. You can manage or revoke those permissions at any time.
The average Facebook user does not know how to hide his friends list, for example, or that it can even be done.
In addition, most users have absolutely no clue that anything they write in a "public group" or "public profile" will be readable by everyone.
Facebook seems to have done an intentionally poor job educating its users about these counter-intuitive (lack of) privacy features, and has made changing these settings intentionally difficult.
I know my son wouldn't exist without Facebook's intrusiveness 10 years ago, but still, fuck them.
Bullshit.
People are not well informed how their posts and information can be harvested by Facebook, its users, and its apps.
In particular, most do not understand that you cannot control your own privacy there to a large degree. I can be found on anyone's friends list who doesn't hide their list. Any post I make on any group can be found through a search if that group is public (or is later changed to public). Any post I make on a person's wall becomes accessible if they change their status to public.
Facebook is intentionally difficult, silent, and confusing about this type of stuff, so people don't have their guard up.
You know those detailed privacy policies you get from banks and other companies, which they are required by law to disclose to you (and let you opt out of certain privacy intrustions)?
Those are there for a reason.
Companies which harvest large amounts of data about their customers -- even in the process of doing normal business -- need to be transparent and held accountable for what they do (or allow to be done) with the information.
You can't just say, "Well, the customers gave the info, so tough luck on them."
The customer needs to be well informed exactly who and what will be getting access to all of their stuff, and what exact privacy they do and don't have.
Also, here's the truth.
I don't even need an app or anyone's permission to access their profiles.
I could write a program right now to scrape Facebook's groups, pages, and public profiles, and get a pretty extensive database on the likes, dislikes, and views of a healthy portion of the Facebook userbase.
And I could do this with just a single Facebook account in good standing.
Do you want a medal?
I don't understand what point you're making here.
If you want me to acknowledge that you're more privacy-conscious than the average American, congratulations. So am I.
But the fact is that there was plenty of deception involved with people who DID put information on Facebook, and that's a big problem.
Furthermore, you need to understand what is meant by "personal information".
It isn't just the basic stuff like name, address, e-mail, phone number, workplace, etc.
Any detail about you on your Facebook profile could be considered personal information, as it tells a story about you.
For example, a look at my profile, without seeing a single post of mine, would clearly indicate that I'm a Jewish poker player whose politics are right of center, that I like 1970s/1980s music and TV, that I'm a Dodgers fan, that I hate SJWs, and various other little views into things I like and dislike.
I don't give a shit if this type of info is scraped because I'm public about that stuff anyway, but if I were less information savvy and more gullible, even that stuff could be used to manipulate me with fake news and other targeted bullshit.
I was already somewhat turned off by Facebook 9 years ago when it was already telling me (accurately) who on their system I knew in real life, before I did more than fill out my name.
Good logic.
Let's also not prosecute criminals who break into homes with the doors unlocked, because those homeowners only have themselves to blame.
I'm not arguing that it's smart to overshare on Facebook.
I'm arguing that Facebook is abusing its users' trust as a result of its own greed.
This exchange reminds me of how on one hand Druff argues that people who walk through town advertising that they are carrying thosuands of dollars and are unarmed/unguarded have only themselves to blame if they are robbed, but Facebook is evil and greedy because the gullible public isn’t nanny-stated into keeping their personal info private when using a free internet site.
Also, the folks who stole the info was Cambridge Analytica, not Facebook. Facebook just stored it ungaurded.
Why are you pointing out the negatives only? There are tons of good that comes from this, as Druff earlier alluded to. Having Benjamin in his life allows him to pass down all these important life lessons and ensures another generation of coupon cutting, troll battling, and upholding customer service standards.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
I think by your logic the real culprit in this burglary case isn't the criminal that broke in but the door maker. The door maker that made it really easy to leave your door unlocked and made it hard to find the lock or actually operate that mechanical behemoth.
Obv we can't blame the homeowner because using doors is really really hard. Or the actual criminal that broke in, because he was compelled to do so by the door maker. Yea this makes perfect sense.
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