Originally Posted by
gimmick
Solid projecting. Pretty much you're the only one that has said that FB's excuse was that it was for educational purposes. Academic purposes, more precisely research. It's a thing they do in science. Perfectly legal on FB's side. You can get anthrax from CDC for research with the right credentials. You can't get anthrax for educational purposes.
There's really no need to pick a favorite here and then excuse everyone else. It's perfectly fine that CA broke the law, FB is a scummy greedy corporation and people are idiots. Stupidity for the most parts isn't a crime. Being scummy and greedy also not a crime.
LOL "research".
It's Facebook's moral (and possibly legal) responsibility to separate claims of "research" from commercial data harvesting. In fact, this is one of those situations where the default should have been to instantly distrust and apply an extremely high standard for what constitutes "research", rather than just accepting a quick explanation and continuing to allow it. You know, like your anthrax example. I can't just stroll into the CDC and say, "Hey, I'd like some anthrax for research purposes. Ok, cool? Thanks."
Glad we can at least agree that FB is a scummy, greedy corporation.
Yes, many people are idiots, especially when it comes to matters such as online privacy, where in general everyone is still way underinformed and undereducated.
But people of all political persuasions are idiots when it comes to stuff like this, and in this case, the main target was easily manipulated swing voters. Trump and his campaign were very smart in realizing they didn't need to preach to the choir, whereas Hillary oddly was mainly trying to appeal to big city liberals.