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Facebook Hires Firm To Conduct Forensic Audit of Cambridge Analytica Data (cbsnews.com)
After it was revealed that political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users, the social media company has been scrutinized for not better protecting its users. Today, CBS News reports that Facebook has recently hired Stroz Friedberg, a digital forensics firm, to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica. According to a press release issued by Facebook on Monday, Cambridge Analytica has agreed to "comply and afford the firm complete access to their servers and systems." From the report: The social network said it asked Christopher Wylie and University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan to submit to an audit. Facebook says Kogan has verbally agreed to participate, but Wylie has declined. Wylie is a former employee of Cambridge Analytica who described the company's use of illicit data in interviews late last week. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie were banned from Facebook on Friday. Cambridge Analytica did not immediately confirm that it had agreed to comply with the audit. The firm has denied the allegations that it improperly collected and used the data. A spokeswoman for Stroz Friedberg declined to comment on the firm's involvement with an audit.
"We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims," Facebook officials said in a statement. "We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We also want to be clear that today when developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a robust review to identify potential policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. This is part of a comprehensive internal and external review that we are conducting to determine the accuracy of the claims that the Facebook data in question still exists. If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made."
"We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims," Facebook officials said in a statement. "We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We also want to be clear that today when developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a robust review to identify potential policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. This is part of a comprehensive internal and external review that we are conducting to determine the accuracy of the claims that the Facebook data in question still exists. If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made."
Slightly different situation. Facebook sold data to the Obama campaign. Cambridge Analytica harvested data that they didn't pay Facebook for. Facebook wants their cut.
In terms of illegal activity that seems to be all that can be claimed, and it's a civil issue at that. So far, anyway. Facebook appears to have gone into full-on panic mode all of a sudden which makes me think there's a lot more to this than has been made public yet. Or they just really, really, fear the regulation that seems like it's almost inevitable at this point, at least in the EU, and I dare say Trump will tweet out the US' position soon enough. IIRC, Zuck's a Democrat and Trump's not that fond of Democrats *or* Silicon Valley execs, so place your bets...
Supposedly Facebook's CSO, Alex Stamos, who actually wanted Facebook to look into the Russian misinformation campaign during the US elections, is leaving Facebook after clashes with other senior management, most notably Sheryl Sandberg. Even more potentially damning is that according to Carole Cadwalladr Facebook staff were in Cambridge Analytica's London offices "securing data" when agents of the UK's ICO turned up to do the same. Whether this occured before Cambridge Analytica became the subject of a formal request for a seach warrant is a little unclear though. I think this is starting to look like it's might have got some real legs to it, so I'm going to stock up on the popcorn and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica can at least count their blessings on one thing though; they managed to have all this blow up in their faces *before* the GDPR kicked in.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708...
Ex-Obama Campaign Director Drops Bombshell Claim on Facebook: 'They Were on Our Side'
It's hilarious that the left had to invent the term "whataboutism"
It's merely a new label for the fallacy, a subspecies of argumentum ad hominem, traditionally known as the tu quoque fallacy. It remains a fallacy no matter who calls it or by what name they call it. The putative wrongdoing of a speaker is no answer to that speaker's accusations of wrongdoing. This is not, or should not be, a left vs right issue.
If you are not capable of mounting an argument (or defence) any more substantial than "no you are!" perhaps arguing (or defending) isn't your forte?
Any particular wrong doing by other parties is a separate question. Whatever wrongs the Obama campaign may have committed, especially if they encompass criminality, should certainly be pursued in their own right. However, not only is a claim that Obama's campaign was just as bad, a fortiori that was "10x worse," hopelessly irrelevant as an answer to the accusations now being levelled against Cambridge Analytica --nothing in the articles presented above to bolster this fallacy even approaches the level of malfeasance suggested by the recent news that is coming out about CA's activities.