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FTC Probing Facebook For Use of Personal Data: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook is under investigation by a U.S. privacy watchdog over the use of personal data of 50 million users by a data analytics firm to help elect President Donald Trump. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree of its handing of user data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge, according to a person familiar with the matter. Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time. If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation.
Trump does it again!
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/crisis-manager-why-is-trump-use-of-social-data-bad-and-obama-good.html
Even a high-ball guess of 3000 dollars per day since November 29 2011 still lands the fine at less than 7 million dollars.
This isn't really that huge of a fine for a company this large.
What? The U.S. have a privacy watchdog? Well, this is certainly news to me.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Cambridge Analytica used facebook EXACTLY AS IT WAS INTENDED.
UK Parliament would like a word with Zuckerberg too. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-4...
Super easy... follow the link, accept and don't log back in for two weeks.
https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
Amazing how Obama can target voters using facebook data and it's lauded as smart and effective.
Trump targets voters and facebook doesn't care before the election(*), but now months later it's an obscene violation of peoples' privacy.
Were any laws broken? If it's illegal to hire non-citizens to do campaign research, how does the Hillary campaign paying Christopher Steele get a pass?
Is this just a company whinging about a violation of their TOS, after the fact, while ignoring hundreds of other companies who do the same thing?
What exactly is the alleged infraction here?
(*) Facebook was informed of the "breach" many months before the election, and literally didn't care.
Why should the FTC get money if Facebook violated someone's privacy rights? Should the money go to the victims?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
How many times do we get notifications of changes to EULAs and Terms and Conditions and sent to a site that has 40+ pages of legalese and are expected to read that every time they change?
We should have legislation that when a company makes a change, that one thing is pulled out, phrased in plain english and if the user doesn't explicitly click "agree" or "yes" to it, it is not binding.
Any company that dones't like it then they shouldn't be in business.
I let PayPal and eBay close my accounts because I thought their EULA and Terms were horseshit and unethical. Fuck'em.
And as we're seeing, facebook is a corrupt and unethical company. No one is going to convince me that they didn't know about all this. And I would even bet they SOLD the feature to those people - meaning, they were in on it for the revenues.
Here's an article from NYT discussing Obama's use of facebook data during his 2012 campaign.
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”
Also, this quote from [Obama’s former director for media analytics] Carol Davidsen:
[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.
http://www.al-awa2el.com/%D8%A...
Interesting how closely your false equivalence matches the Russian government's official propaganda message.
Almost like you are a Russian stooge
Back in America, Facebook and the Trump / Russia crime family are facing investigation crimes against the people of this country, and a foreign sponsored information war which is protected by a traitor and foreign agent.
Donald Trumpski belongs in prison, and you should stop spreading Russia's misinformation and supporting their propaganda campaign.
Congress needs to pass legislation that sets out the privacy rights of US citizens and regulates what information companies can collect about US citizens, as well as what they can do with that information. Unless you the only sites you go to are Slashdot and Facebook, there's no way any reasonable person can read every single privacy policy of every site they visit, (by which time the site has already started collecting data about them) keep track of changes to those privacy policies, and remember which site had what provisions in their privacy policy. Such legislation would also provide a means to actually hold companies accountable if they violate their privacy policies.
Two days later, CBS is now reporting that the Trump Campaign only used the CA data for a targeted online advertising and a single TV ad buy during the primaries, because they were playing the CA data off of the RNC, in case the RNC pulled a "resistance" and didn't want to share with the Trump campaign. They ended up not using the CA data for the general election because they didn't trust it coming from Facebook.
According to a former high level staffer on the Obama campaign, they said they knew Obama's campaign was mass harvesting the social graph and let them do it despite it being against Facebook's rules.
Facebook has been interfering with elections on a level that is utterly unconscionable and must be made an example of.
...would be to delete Facebook's databases and make them start all over again from 0. It'd help break up their monopoly too.
Also, install all Facebook's apps on Zuckerberg's phone that he has to keep on 24/7 and with him at all times and publish all the data they collect as a public live feed.
And publish a live feed of all purchases of Facebook's users' data in detail; who they are and who they represent (e.g. Cambridge Analytica representing the Trump campaign), what data and services they purchased (e.g. all your data), and what they're using it for (e.g. govts. to crack down on political dissent or to manipulate popular political sentiments).
That should provide enough information for would be Facebook users to pour over so that they can give their informed consent.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
They sold users info to the DNC for Obama in 2012, They sold to DNC for Hillary in 2016, They been having been selling access for years, this is not new.
Both the GOP and DNC now use it as a tool for elections. Governments are using it for spying at all levels. Countries are using it to oppress political opposition. Religious regimes are using it to track down posters to punish for blasphemy. Intel agencies and Police are using it thousands of times a day to spy on people.
Do you not follow WikiLeaks or Snowden? Come on, people. They been talking about this for YEARS...
Now because an agency Trumps campaign used goes viral on MSM, it's NOW an issue?! ITS BEEN AN ISSUE!
It's the old, "Don't care, if it doesn't happen to me" mentality.
policies that are horrible.
Why are we not developing consumer privacy laws to stop data-perv style forced data collection? User choice is going away. Heck, even GUIs are becoming amazingly stupid and un-usable.
I donâ(TM)t get all the uproar over FB. Last year, personal data on all of us was exposed by Equifax, and Congress didnâ(TM)t do shit. But FB shared data that was volunteered by its users, and Congress wants answers? Government is seriously fucked up.
I am so tired of hearing about Facebook, Russians, Meddling, all that nonsense. It's complete partisan bullshit. Nobody gives a fuck about Facebook, and nobody changed their vote based on some Facebook bullshit. It's all made up gibberish to give people something to be interested in in the media.
I don't give a shit if the Russians did anything on twitter or facebook. Nobody was like "gee, I was going to vote for Hillary but some random meme popped up and now I'm voting for her exact fucking polar opposite Donald Trump". Anyone who sells you that narrative is a fucking liar. It's beyond risible.
Facebook and Twitter are self propagating non-issues. If you don't like them, don't fucking use them. And now we have to hear this idiotic bleating about people's "private data" being "stolen". Bull fucking shit. You went online and posted your entire life for the world to see and now you're concerned about your privacy?
I feel like I'm taking god damn crazy pills reading this Facebook/Twitter bullshit day in day out. WHO FUCKING CARES. Stop using them if you don't like them. I for one am sick of seeing pseudo-news sites pick up nobodies on Twitter and making their nonsense opinions seem important to anyone.
As I understand it, users agreed to the data access when they installed the 'app' to take the personality quiz. All that data was then improperly given to CA. Except for the part about the original user giving the data to a third party, this is what Facebook does for a living. Not at all unusual. And they have a team who explicitly sells the platform to political campaigns. So nothing new here other than a desire to fuss over everything having to do with Trump.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
A government agency doing its job. Ain't it a wonder.
The Republicans are going to be in a state of shock, with government actually doing something but.....
We will see if anything happens after this "investigation" and all its "FAKE NEWS" is spread about for a while. In a week or two nothing will have happened and we will be back in our echo chambers.
It's not like any other major company and government isn't doing this already. They should try looking into what Google is already doing. People are pissed off at what the Government does. Maybe people would be better off just not posing anything online.. :D
FTC is only investigating whether Facebook violated its terms of service. Have you ever read that document? It's pages and pages of legalese that basically says Facebook can do whatever they want with your data. Ensuring that they complied with their TOS is a really, really low bar.
First of all, Obama's campaign used Facebook data LEGALLY and with EXPLICIT APPROVAL of Facebook users.
And they were so nice, they asked for it twice.
From TFA which you haven't read, cause you can only just copy/paste what other people feed you, sad creature that you are:
They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook.
When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information.
In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the usersâ(TM) Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on.
"It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list," St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said.
I.e. Obama campaign explicitly asked for permission, openly stating what the data will be used for - then took only names and photos and matched that data to existing voter lists.
But the campaignâ(TM)s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president.
Did you get that numbnuts?
They were looking for known Obama voters who may have for any reason decided not to vote in 2012.
It was a RE-ELECTION campaign! Get it?! They were digging through data the voters already gave them back in 2008!
They were digging through public records looking for who's missing this time around!
Let's compare that to Cambridge Analytica scum...
When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques.
Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica.
The business covered the costs â" more than $800,000 â" and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.
All he divulged to Facebook, and to users in fine print, was that he was collecting information for academic purposes, the social network said. It did not verify his claim.
Dr. Kogan declined to provide details of what happened, citing nondisclosure agreements with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, though he maintained that his program was âoea very standard vanilla Facebook app.â
He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague.
Of those, roughly 30 million â" a number previously reported by The Intercept â" contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles.
Only about 270,000 users â" those who participated in the survey â" had consented to having their data harvested.
I.e. Data was gathered without permission.
Data was gathered under false pretenses.
Data was far more extensive than just names and photos.
There was no prior relationship between the people whose data was mined and built into psychographic profiles - and the campaign.
These weren't old Trump voters - Cambridge Analytica was pushing scare ads to DISSUADE voters from voting.
I.e. VOTER SUPPRESSION!
Were any laws broken? If it's illegal to hire non-citizens to do campaign research, how does the Hillary campaign paying Christopher Steele get a pass?
Here, let the lawyer advising Cambridge Anal
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens