Meet Chris Wylie, the British liberal democrat who created Mintjewlips, Sidedish, and the rest of the Trumptards (Facebook data scandal)

[sonatine]

im not sure i understand your point but im positive that you have no interest in understanding mine.

that post is talking about culpability about hosting malicious content, and the previous post was saying that facebook put a tool on the market which CA leveraged to shred multiple democracies.

are you so desperate to find fault in company that doesnt hold your values that youre willing to equivilize those two radically disparate realities?

wouldnt it be less effort for you to just start a conservative social media site? you already own tydepoker.com so honestly you're half way there.

make it happen cap'n.

tydepoker.com is now the property of the Skatz network. I'm surprised you don't know this. We were engaged in complex, behind-the-scenes negotiations, and eventually they offered me a deal I could not refuse.

no one tells me anything anymore.

[sonatine]

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/975875310896914433

hmmmmmmmm...

[Dan Druff]

today's excellent piece about cambridge analytica

lol @ painting facebook with the same brush as a CEO calmly offering to compromise politicians with sex workers over drinks.

I'm not painting them with any same brush.

Shady companies specializing in dirty election tactics have existed since long before we were born. I'm not saying it's right, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be held accountable, but to be honest, Facebook should be held to a lot higher standard of expectation than shady election data companies.

The disturbing thing to me here is that Facebook was so complicit in this, and how their intrusive privacy violations span back over a decade.

[sonatine]

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/975886569994305536

o what a tangled web..

[sonatine]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...k-trump-russia

[Texter]

Occam's razor leads me to the conclusion that Trump won because Hillary is a massive cunt.

If the dems had run Biden, like they should have, Trump would be an afterthought.

[limitles]

Occam's razor leads me to the conclusion that Trump won because Hillary is a massive cunt.

If the dems had run Biden, like they should have, Trump would be an afterthought.

Occam's Razor fuck that post dinosaur thinking

[BCR]

Honestly, there are no rules. The Dems start out every cycle with a 37-33 lead. While there are no rules, there are laws. Just fucking win by whatever means necessary and we’ll sort out who goes to prison later. Whatever it takes to manipulate those that sit in the ideological DMZ waiting to pick a side must be done. The stakes are simply too high, and I’d much rather be on the side that cheated and won than the losing side whining about the other side cheating.

As you can see, it’s really fucking hard to unseat power once seated regardless of how
obvious their misdeeds. There are situations where it’s almost immoral to not cheat/break the law/ whatever is necessary. Clearly sitting down and explaining to poor white trash how advantageous it is for them to have Dems in power isn’t working in many areas. If you have to scare and manipulate and mindfuck them for the greater good, so be it. I have very little patience for whining about why we lost when we started with a big lead. I think the average Trump crossover voter is an idiot, but use that to your advantage rather than whine that the other side outsmarted you by nefarious means.

[sonatine]

Honestly, there are no rules. The Dems start out every cycle with a 37-33 lead. While there are no rules, there are laws. Just fucking win by whatever means necessary and we’ll sort out who goes to prison later. Whatever it takes to manipulate those that sit in the ideological DMZ waiting to pick a side must be done. The stakes are simply too high, and I’d much rather be on the side that cheated and won than the losing side whining about the other side cheating.

As you can see, it’s really fucking hard to unseat power once seated regardless of how
obvious their misdeeds. There are situations where it’s almost immoral to not cheat/break the law/ whatever is necessary. Clearly sitting down and explaining to poor white trash how advantageous it is for them to have Dems in power isn’t working in many areas. If you have to scare and manipulate and mindfuck them for the greater good, so be it. I have very little patience for whining about why we lost when we started with a big lead. I think the average Trump crossover voter is an idiot, but use that to your advantage rather than whine that the other side outsmarted you by nefarious means.

i take exception with this when the currency for that influence is so toxic that it turns huge swathes of the population allergic to basic, even empirical, truth.

bannon's 'the surgery was a success but the patient died' assault on the intellectually vulnerable means that we really could see a president rush limbaugh or president alex jones or president arpaio in our lifetimes.

to me thats the definition of a broken system, all the more so considering the somehow even greater existential threat this new generation of nuclear weapons brings.

[BCR]

I feel you. We have a major critical thinking problem. That isn’t a new phenomenon. I remember reading some absurd printed out Clinton conspiracy shit in the mid-90s. I just don’t see what’s to be done about it unless you’re in power. These people exist. Sometimes you have to herd them into your camp and wait for them to die while implementing something better for the generations to come. I really don’t see what other solution there is once the genie is out of the bottle.

[sonatine]

I feel you. We have a major critical thinking problem. That isn’t a new phenomenon. I remember reading some absurd printed out Clinton conspiracy shit in the mid-90s. I just don’t see what’s to be done about it unless you’re in power. These people exist. Sometimes you have to herd them into your camp and wait for them to die while implementing something better for the generations to come. I really don’t see what other solution there is once the genie is out of the bottle.

funny you would mention the clinton conspiracies.

trump just hired that new lawyer whose been making the media rounds, accusing the deep state of framing him.

his name sounded familiar so i did some digging;


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...uple022798.htm


i kinda hope the democrats lean into this and just start absolutely wrecking the religious right with Weaponized Total Nonsense.

[Dan Druff]

Well whaddya know... the Electronic Freedom Foundation agrees with me.

Most companies offer privacy settings, and some even let you leave and take your data with you. But they don't make it easy, and critics say social networks and internet companies should give users far more say about which data ends up in advertisers' hands -- and when.

"Tech companies can and should do more to protect users, including giving users far more control over what data is collected and how that data is used," said the Electronic Freedom Foundation in a statement. "That starts with meaningful transparency."

Once you share something on any digital service, your personal information leaves your control. Cambridge Analytica serves as a stark reminder of that.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/tech...ach/index.html

[sonatine]

Well whaddya know... the Electronic Freedom Foundation agrees with me.

Most companies offer privacy settings, and some even let you leave and take your data with you. But they don't make it easy, and critics say social networks and internet companies should give users far more say about which data ends up in advertisers' hands -- and when.

"Tech companies can and should do more to protect users, including giving users far more control over what data is collected and how that data is used," said the Electronic Freedom Foundation in a statement. "That starts with meaningful transparency."

Once you share something on any digital service, your personal information leaves your control. Cambridge Analytica serves as a stark reminder of that.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/tech...ach/index.html

its alarming that you see things in such polarized terms, that if someone doesnt thumbs up what you say you assume they are disagree with you. no one said facebook is exempt from responsibility here to my knowledge. i and others simply pointed out that CA were mercenaries willing to destroy the fabric of society at the behest of absolutely anyone willing to cut them a check, which is infinitely worse than facebook having an exploitable ToS and never grasping the potential for their data collection (the fiscal heart and soul of the company of course) to be abused.

[Dan Druff]

Well whaddya know... the Electronic Freedom Foundation agrees with me.



http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/tech...ach/index.html

its alarming that you see things in such polarized terms, that if someone doesnt thumbs up what you say you assume they are disagree with you. no one said facebook is exempt from responsibility here to my knowledge. i and others simply pointed out that CA were mercenaries willing to destroy the fabric of society at the behest of absolutely anyone willing to cut them a check, which is infinitely worse than facebook having an exploitable ToS and never grasping the potential for their data collection (the fiscal heart and soul of the company of course) to be abused.

See the bolded part above?

That's my issue with your take on the situation.

Facebook didn't just learn recently that their ToS was exploitable. They knew exactly what they were doing regarding privacy violations, but they stayed the course because it was most profitable. They even introduced a very poor and user-unfriendly set of privacy settings explicitly for this purpose. They've been under fire from privacy advocates for a long, long time.

You are painting them as a company which was just careless and then harnessed for evil.

Instead, they were highly greedy and laughed in the face of privacy concerns, and now are acting shocked that data was harvested by the wrong people -- even though they fully let the harvesting happen when given the flimsiest of flimsy excuses when the harvester was caught.

Also, notice I have not defended Cambridge Analytica. Definitely a reprehensible company. But I know that there are tons of reprehensible companies out there, many of whom are attempting to obtain my personal info for not-so-noble purposes. Huge social media operations like Facebook should be held to a higher standard. With great power comes great responsibility, etc, etc.

[Dan Druff]

BTW, Facebook is so arrogant about the situation that to this day, the same exploits remain open on their system.

They claim that they're being more strict with apps requesting people's sensitive information, requiring legitimate reasons to do so, but come on.... most of this info shouldn't be accessible in the first place.

For example, why should third party apps see people's friends lists? Facebook could easily make it a black box situation, where the app could send out invites to the entire friends list without actually seeing who is on the list. Most of this shit should never be accessible to outside apps, even if the user gives permission, as it starts to be something which can be reverse engineered. For example, even if I am very careful with protecting my friends list, if 50% of my friends use a popular app and provide THEIR friends list, then 50% of my friends list is known anyway. That's some real bullshit right there, as this information isn't needed for any reason besides data harvesting.

Facebook isn't changing any of this.

They're also not changing the incredibly intrusive "public page" situation I mentioned earlier, which is what allowed Cambridge Analytica to go from 270,000 app users to harvesting 50 million Facebook users' information -- all completely operating within Facebook terms of service. And it could easily be done again.

Facebook completely lacks the ability for users to say, "Yeah, don't share this with anyone at any time without my permission." There are so many areas where you completely lack control, even if you're very diligent with protecting your own privacy there.

[Dan Druff]

This is also how Facebook apps are accessing your info without your knowledge, even if you think your profile is locked down.

Login to your Facebook account and go here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

Then click Edit on "Apps Others Use".

You'll see something like this:




I had no idea this feature even existed. It didn't used to. But up through right now, if any of my FRIENDS ran an app, the app could see MY bio, city, website, whether I was online, and worst of all, activities/interests/likes.

This still has not been changed, and most people don't know this feature exists (I didn't until right now).

Awful.

I suggest you go look into this yourself and uncheck everything.

[sonatine]

I'll tell you who agrees with you whole heartedly druff; FB investors, who are suing the dickshit out of FB over this.

[Dan Druff]

Zuck finally speaks on the situation:

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/...71?pnref=story

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Here's a timeline of the events:

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll outline those steps here:

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term.

[sonatine]

Sincerely, a guy worth billions of dollars who cant wait to step down as soon as the board allows it.

[Dan Druff]

Zuck's statement is so full of shit, I don't even know where to begin.

As a frequent Facebook user of 9 years, I can tell you that he's engaging in a combination of lies and half-truths in his statement.

This shows me that they still don't "get it" over at Facebook. They honestly think that they did nothing wrong, and in fact they took care of all problems 3-4 years ago, so the status quo is just fine.



So let's break this down.

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

The above has basically been Facebook's bullshit go-to excuse every time privacy advocates complain about their violations and abuses.

"We're a social media platform, and sharing of info is important!"

Then they usually cite an innocuous example like the one above, where people are simply willingly sharing their birthday and location with their friends.

Except that's not at all what's going on here, nor was anyone's problem the willing sharing of information with intended individuals.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.

Ah, how quickly we skip 6 important years!

Zuck neglects to mention that privacy advocates were constantly on Facebook's ass for privacy abuses. Zuck kept trotting out that same BS "lol we're social media, bro, so we're being social" answer.

But there were huge holes. One of the gigantic ones was the fact that apps had the ability to grab almost all information from your Facebook account (pretty much everything besides passwords and private messages), and the user had no visibility into the fact that this was happening!

After a lot of pressure, Facebook finally changed it to where the user was warned which pieces of personal information they were giving away, and had to click through one more time to authorize it.

However, Facebook oddly allowed apps to harvest data from the users' friends without the friends' permission, thus creating this huge loophole -- one which has not yet been fully closed!

The question is WHY this was allowed.

Why were apps initially allowed to grab user data without the user's permission or knowledge?

Why allow apps to grab information from someone's Facebook friends without those friends' knowledge or consent?

It's bullshit that Facebook was naive and didn't realize the implications. Privacy advocates had been screaming about all of these holes for a long time.

It's also no coincidence that Facebook, which otherwise has an easy and intuitive interface, makes changing security settings confusing and difficult.

This is so Facebook checks off the "we are protecting your privacy" box, without most users actually protecting themselves. (Furthermore, even knowledgeable users couldn't protect themselves, given intentional weakness of the privacy settings.)

It's hilarious how they are simply dismissing this as "given the way our platform worked at the time", as if that's totally okay.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today.

Notice that this is 2014 -- a full seven years after Facebook allowed apps, and after many years of privacy advocates complaining about the violations these apps were causing.

Again, WHY were apps like Kogan's able to access so much info in the first place?

Because Facebook had a symbiotic relationship with these apps, and they didn't want to screw things up, so they didn't want to restrict privacy violations and therefore disincentivize app development.

Facebook's view was, "Our users love these apps, and in many cases the app owners turn into paying customers. The users are the product, and not the customer. Therefore, we have to keep the app developers happy. If their main motivation to develop these apps is to harvest data, we don't want to take that motivation away."

Also note the last disturbing sentence. "These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today." Notice the "so much" part. So Facebook is conceding (in a roundabout way) that such apps can still be used to harvest data, but just not as much. LOL

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

This is extremely laughable.

In reality, Facebook was aware Kogan's app was harvesting data from millions of accounts, and actually questioned it. Kogan responded, "lol academic research obv", and Facebook backed off. 50 million profiles' data harvested, and Facebook was not at all curious as to what was going on, beyond a quick surface inquiry. Speaks volumes.

But even worse, the letter to "formally certify they deleted all improperly acquired data" was useless.

Rule #1 of personal information -- one I've known since my days in the 1980s hacker community -- is that you can't put the information genie back in the bottle. Once information is out there, it's out there. Once it's been distributed to even one undesired entity, you have lost control of it. By this statement's own admission above, Cambridge Analytica had SHARED the data already, so whether they deleted it themselves was irrelevant at that point.

It would be like me certifying that I deleted Joe Sebok's cock off my laptop. That wouldn't mean Joe Sebok's cock was off the internet -- just that my own laptop no longer had it.

Zuck isn't that stupid. He knows very well that this "certification" was meaningless, but it was Facebook's attempt to cover themselves legally, should this story ever come out (which it did, 3 years later). Now they can claim, "Hey, Cambridge Analytica certified they deleted it, so it's their problem now!"

Um, no.

That paragraph really is insulting to the reader's intelligence.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

Okay, finally a small (albeit nonspecific) admission of guilt.

But just when we think we're going to get to the mea culpas and learn about meaningful changes coming to Facebook's handling of user data, we get the following backpedaling garbage...

In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way.

More "we already solved most of the problem" bullshit, which is totally untrue.

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Hate to tell you, Zuck, but if these app developers already harvested our Facebook data, they don't need you anymore.

They already have our data, so they don't give a shit if you ban them.

Also, such bans are laughable and toothless. A banned app developer can simply sign up under another name and create another app to abuse the system.

This "banning" expedition is only symbolic, and does the users no practical good.

But you know what WOULD be useful? Disclosing exactly who else harvested mass amounts of data, and what was taken. But notice Facebook isn't offering to do that.

Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days.

LOL at the 3 month thing. These apps don't wait 3 months to harvest data. They do it immediately. Even if they changed 3 months to 3 days, this would be mostly meaningless.

The approval/contract thing for app developers looking for private data is a good start, but I am skeptical how much oversight there will be. I have to imagine that a lot of developers looking to do bad things will simply sign contracts under fake names and bullshit Facebook regarding what they're intending to do with the data, so this will be impossible to police until the abuses have already occurred.

Here's an idea: How about simply not allowing apps to pull most data from Facebook accounts, under any circumstances?

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

So you're finally admitting that you hid it before, but instead you're spinning it as if you're doing a good thing now by finally making users aware these settings exist.

Why were so few users aware of this before? Do you expect us to believe it's unintentional, despite 10+ years of complaints about this from privacy advocates?

I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term.

It takes longer to fix than we'd like?

Your website has existed for over 10 years, and is the biggest social media platform in the world.

Just now you're discovering the need to fix all of this?

And you're still not proposing any meaningful changes, such as truly educating users that their posts are viewable by the public if their friends or groups they're in are set to "public". Or how about a setting to make your profile truly private and not to show ANY information such as your group memberships, likes, and "public" posts?

No, this is all mostly meaningless blather and useless "bans" of bad actors, in order to stay the course of your business model to continue harvesting data of unwitting users for massive profit.

Fuck off.