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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.
There's at least one big difference (besides the biggest difference which is that what the Obama data team did was nothing like what Trump's Cambridge Analytica team did, but let's put that aside for now). The people who were on Obama's data team were American citizens or were authorized to work in the US. Cambridge Analytica had a team made up primarily of foreign nationals who did not have US visas, green cards or work permits.
And, there is a law against that. Foreign nationals without green cards cannot work on US election campaigns even if they are volunteers.
https://www.fec.gov/updates/fo...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
You are welcome on my lawn.