Quote Originally Posted by BCR View Post
Really interesting article.

Props to Bannon and Mercer for being open enough to listen and see the potential. Honestly, I view the article as complimentary to them, rather than sinister.

Unrelated to politics. I’ve had discussions with a lot of people about what they give away on Facebook, or what insight there is to be gained.

Like I’ve asked single female friends that date if they don’t understand that if you give me what you like to listen to or read and a couple other interests, I essentially can be what you want every time upon meeting you, and whether they think about that when they meet men. I’ve asked my buddies in sales if they use it on potential clients. If I peruse your likes and tastes, it’s incredibly easy to build rapport with someone. So many things tend to correlate and you can peg someone pretty predictably. Obviously advertising has been onto this for 50 years, but never has there been a tool like Facebook where people just give away their personal preferences to the general public.

I do this in general pretty frequently. My girlfriend the other night just mentioned having drinks with her friend and a husband I’d never met. I look at the dude’s profile, see he’s bow hunter/Nascar/ country music dude and just say fuck no. If he happened to also like good literature or anything that points to an eclectic range, I may say yeah, but his was simply boilerplate rural. I’ve met that dude a million times. Salt of the earth often, but no one I want to hang out with because they’re never going to say anything of interest to me. Honestly, just weeding people out is the most useful thing about Facebook. Saves a lot of time.

That they took this long to aim it in a big picture way at elections is more surprising than that they did. It’s disappointing that he was first there to be had by the left, but they fucked up. Can’t hate the people who saw the value.
Nod.

The thing that takes this into prosecutorial waters is when they took a few hundred thousand people who said 'yes you can have my data' and then used that to pivot to scraping an average of 160 of their friends data each time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person...le_information

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is legally protected. How its gathered, transferred, and stored is the subject of stringent and well defined laws. Orgs spend millions of dollars a year on lawyers and infosec teams, because if you trip over your own dick with PII it can sink your battleship real fast.

Basically Wylie/Bannon built a neutron bomb that only destroys democracies and then sold it to a variety of military and intelligence agencies before screaming YOLO and using it themselves, somehow while finding the time to literally give a powerpoint to Team Putin on how to build their own from the ground up.

And if Bannon told Trump Jr to slide some of that PII to the Russians, we can see why Vanessa is doing the criminal defense attorney shuffle.