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."

Comments

Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[Train0987]

"The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama" - https://politics.slashdot.org/...

Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America:
"“They [Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted." https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708...

Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[Train0987]

The Obama campaign invented the deep-dive into Facebook data for their 2008 and 2012 campaigns. They not only openly bragged about doing what CA did and far more, but somehow the media fawned all over him for it. Odd, that:

https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://swampland.time.com/2012...

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you're a liar. Obama used readily available public data and analytics databases. Cambridge used an essentially fake app that was deployed to collect private data that was not otherwise publicly available, under the pretense of research. Over 99% of the people that hit 'no' to the question of whether or not they would like their data shared also had their data compromised, anyway. Then that data was given to the campaign. Lies all the way down. Probably not illegal, but to characterize blatant theft of personal data through outright lying to consumers to be akin to data mining public information is more than disingenuous, it reeks of GOP operatives attempting to downplay this rather shifty incident. BTW, the principals in Cambridge are foreign nationals, who are explicitly and outright barred, in no uncertain terms, from participating in American elections. And they've done it at least twice (starting with Macro Rubio.) You clearly have not read in-depth about this at all and are only interested (per usual) in regurgitating the GOP talking points, of which you have no context or meaning.

My main beef with all this is not what Cambridge did but on Facebook's utter lack of accountability or process to raise red flags while originally allowing access to this information. They're very careful to use terms like 'policies' without talking about why this didn't go across the desk of a lawyer or two, or a privacy advocate, and raise a few red flags along the way. Their sheepish request to the effect "Will you please, pretty please, delete this data we gave you?" leads me to believe there was no proper terms of service, NDA or privacy agreement in place before they let some dude collect all that data and do whatever he wanted with it.

Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[Woldscum]

https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708...

"A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.
  In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, 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."

“They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted."

"Davidsen began the tweet thread with a link to a Time article outlining the Obama campaign's Facebook targeting campaign, which she said was codenamed “Project Taargus”

Re: Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

A: We're punishing you

B: That seems like a double standard, here's why.

A: whataboutism!

Re:Slashdot loved Obama Campaigns data analytics

[sabbede]

Wait, "right wing authoritarianism is on the rise", so government authority has to be expanded over social media? Which you don't expect Republicans to do??

Do I need to point out how absurdly self-contradictory that is? Because I will.

You said that the Right is both authoritarian, which you imply is bad, and not authoritarian enough, which you're also saying is bad. A double contradiction!

That aside, do you know what Authoritarianism is?

Wait a second...narrative shifting

[argStyopa]

...when I first heard this story, it was that Facebook sold an analytics firm a shit-ton of data on their users. You can argue all day long whether FB's gathering was moral or no, but the sale seemed straightforward.

Now this has morphed into "..it was revealed that political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users,..." . ...which has an entirely more malignant sound. Coincidence?

So - did CA "harvest" this data in any sort of illegitimate way, or does that have more to do with the person/party they did it FOR than anything?

Re:Wait a second...narrative shifting

[AmiMoJo]

The created a Facebook app. It looked innocent, one of those stupid personality tests. But in the ToS that no-one read it said it would grab your private data AND the private data of your friends.

That last bit is definitely illegal. You can't agree to give up personal data on behalf of your friends. About 300k people took the test, 50m people's data was stolen.

Be careful what you click

[Orne]

“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”

So, what really happened is that a bunch of people installed a bunch of Facebook apps, and the users authorized their personal data to be used by the app. What happened after that was standard Facebook Business Model stuff, they sell your eyeballs to advertisers and take a 30% share of sales. It's how all social media stays in business, by passively collecting data about you, where you eat, your income levels, what you buy, etc. All in the name of "targeted advertising", which we as users frankly embrace. We love seeing ads for things that may interest us, companies like the opportunity of us buying stuff, FB loves collecting data and giving it to the govern.... I mean collecting data.

So, if we the public are clicking Accept every time we want to do a survey, or use a service, or install an app.... the horse is out of the barn. Then we get to Cambridge Analytica, who is accused of using personality quiz apps to gather information.. yeah, which is pretty much the whole purpose of those little quizzes to find your interests. The user answers a bazillion personal questions, and it spits out "Your Medieval Name Would Be Patsy", but what do you think happens to all that data after you click Commit? They aren't even building a profile of you, because Facebook already did that work by getting you to fill it out yourself. CA figured out, like Obama did in 2012. What do you think "big data" is really all about? Joining all these little data sets, like purchased this here, travelled there, likes flying, hates TSA, lives here, people that live here tend to earn this much, people that travel there and live here tend to vote this way, so hook them up with some targeted political ads and bam, you've increased your probability of an election win.

What crime is being alleged here?

[mi]

A private firm used computers and access to social networks to learn about people's opinions on various political matters. What's the crime in that?.. Why would this even be unethical, much less illegal?

Maybe, this violated Facebook's TOS — but that's the most, that can even be alleged here... If that...

Re:What crime is being alleged here?

[Zocalo]

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.

Re:Oh really?

[Archangel Michael]

A lot of people stayed home because they just couldn't pull the trigger for Hillary. There was plenty of reasons to not vote for her. Including the ongoing meltdown she's still has over her second failed attempt at being president. And the worst part is, Trump beat the only person he was capable of beating, because she stank so bad.

Now, you can blame that loss on all sorts of reasons, but the plain fact is, she sucked as a candidate. Most of the reason she lost was her own making.

Re:Oh really?

[Uberbah]

If you are being honest though you will also have to acknowledge the fact that she won the popular vote by a huge margin.

And as long as we're being honest, you know there's no such thing as a popular vote for president in the United States. Millions of people stay home or vote third party because they know full well their state is going for one party or the other. If everyone's vote actually counts, both candidates would have actually run completely different campaigns with completely different outcomes. Democrats in Texas would have a reason to go to the polls as well as Republicans in California.

Paying attention, Russiagaters?

[Uberbah]

This a company that has bragged about subverting American elections - but they're based in the U.K., so don't expect to see Democrats or Rachael Maddow freaking out about them 24/7 for the next two years or more.