Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Under Pressure as EU, US Urge Probes of Data Practices (reuters.com)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced calls on Monday from U.S. and European lawmakers to explain how a consultancy that worked on President Donald Trump's election campaign gained access to data on 50 million Facebook users. From a report: Facebook's shares fell more than 7 percent, wiping around $40 billion off its market value, set for their biggest drop since September 2012, as investors worried that new legislation could damage the company's lucrative advertising business. "The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook's data practices, and the picture is not pretty," said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about Silicon Valley's use of data. Lawmakers in the United States, Britain and Europe have called for investigations into media reports that political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the private data on more than 50 million Facebook users to support Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign. Further reading: An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.
"In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidson, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.
When Facebook found out what they were doing, they were “surprised,” she said. But she also claimed they didn’t stop them once they found out" https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708...
And these:
https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07...
https://www.technologyreview.c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://swampland.time.com/2012...
They BRAGGED about doing the same things (and worse) than what they're accusing Cambridge of doing.
It was bragged, because it was used to get people excited about the candidate, and have them go out and vote for him.
What this was using the data to find people insecurities, and setup information to hate the other guy, and have people not vote, or be so polarized that they will be afraid to choose the lesser evil.
Like all technology there are lines to be crossed, because you can use technology for good or bad.
In this election, I didn't find too many people who were wild for Trump, but they just hated Hillary more. And in many coverage when asked why they hate Clinton, they sometimes pointed to a fake news article they read on Facebook.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well that search didn't take long...
Behold, "The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama"
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
This just came across the transom. Apparently, Cambridge Analytica was doing more than just data mining for the Trump campaign.
https://boingboing.net/2018/03...
https://www.channel4.com/news/...
You are welcome on my lawn.