Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
It would be nice to have Zuckerburg asked under oath about who he's willing to sell everyone's data to. Also which politicians he's given it to for free.
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.
It is amazing how many idiots can't distinguish between 'election interference' and "helping elect Trump". Including the editors on this site.
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.
It's already public knowledge that the same information was shared with the Obama reelection campaign but no one complained at the time because, well, you know...
"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."
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, is it? Let me re-quote the relevant part:
"per violation.".
If each person being breached is a violation, you're looking at 50 million times 7 million. That's a BIG number.
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.
Trump does it again!
Thanks, Obama!
Literally - Obama did just that, and he did worse - strip mining private data from cable TV boxes.
Data You Can Believe In
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
...
But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.
...
But hey, it was all OK four years ago because Obama did it.
Bias.
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.
No, they did not. They used the data to harm us since Zuck supports Trump. Zuck now owns everything bad Trump has and will do as president. Before, Facebook used their data to help the people by helping make sure McCain never became our ruler. That is different.
...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.
If the service is free, YOU are the product.
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.
$3000 // your "high-ball" guess // 2011, final days of nov, all of dec // 2012, leap year // 2013 // 2014 // 2015 // 2016, leap year // 2017 // 2018, all of jan and feb, and so far into march
x
(
(2 + 31)
+
366
+
365
+
365
+
365
+
366
+
365
+
(31 + 28 + 20)
)
x
50,000,000 people's privacy violated
Drum roll...
3.5×10^14 or 350 trillion. Fuckerberg getting raped that hard would be glorious.
What law was broken again? And Cambridge Analytica has being doing this for sometime. It's only when Trump is mentioned that people's lizard brain gets excited.
That's sarcasm right....
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.
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