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Mark Zuckerberg AWOL From Facebook's Data Leak Damage Control Session (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's not just that he's silent in public. Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg declined to face his employees on Tuesday to explain the company's role in a widening international scandal over the 2016 election. Facebook employees on Tuesday got the opportunity for an internal briefing and question-and-answer session about Facebook's role with the Trump-aligned data firm Cambridge Analytica. It was the first the company held to brief and reassure employees after, ahead of damaging news reports, Facebook abruptly suspended Cambridge Analytica. But Zuckerberg himself wasn't there, The Daily Beast has learned. Instead, the session was conducted by a Facebook attorney, Paul Grewal, according to a source familiar with the meeting. That was the same approach the company used on Capitol Hill this past fall, when it sent its top attorney, Colin Stretch, to brief Congress about the prevalence of Russian propaganda, to include paid ads and inauthentic accounts, on its platform. Further reading: Where in the world is Mark Zuckerberg? Frustrated Facebook execs are asking.
If you don't appear . . . and don't answer questions . . . you don't commit perjury.
Hey, even a US government IRS employee refused to testify in front of Congress. Of course, Zuck just sent his lawyer.
He's not going to say anything in public or on the record until his legal team has sorted their strategy out.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Why is it a scandal when a company is working for a conservative/GOP candidate but not even a story when it isn't. This type of data collection has been going on for years.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
And by strategy you mean "narrative"...
That company is used by a TON of other companies and entities, just because they also happened to be employed by Trump at the time, doesn't mean that they haven't done the same for countless others, even people on the other side of the aisle. The blatant politicization of EVERYTHING is getting so fricking annoying. Soon every breath you take will be analyzed to see if it "leans to the left, or the right, politically speaking".
It's kind of telling when your company needs to do a "damage control session" because the public finally figured out what your business model is.
Here's a hint: if there's a company with a market cap of almost $500 billion, and you don't know what their product is, you're probably the product. Cambridge Analytica is the customer, they buy you.
I would be more interested in hearing about what data they actually got and what they paid for it, I want to know more about that market value.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
If you are an executive at FB you dug this hole on your own. You made the FB system work the way it did, you were fine with the low level of privacy protections you had in place, and were super fine with packaging, selling, re-selling and marketing people's digital lives. You are remunerated handsomely for those decisions and probably gave yourself lots of credit for being so strong, so independent, so smart in all those meetings. But now that your decisions are viewed under a different light, you go crying for you parents (Zuck and Sharon). Yes, they also need to be held to account, but not much more than you FB execs.
They didn't collect anything. It was all fed to them by users.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As opposed to Clinton supporters...two peas in a pod...
Except that isn't what happened at all. They allowed a researcher access for research purposes and that guy violated the terms of his agreement and sold the data. What should be happening however is a massive lawsuit against that researcher (he should lose all the money he made, plus an additional punitive amount) and possibly Cambridge Analytica too if there is evidence they knew.
Personally I'm not concerned about the current leadership at major tech companies, yes they collect far too much data about individuals - however they want to use it themselves, not sell it to third parties. The tech companies you should be worried about are all the other ad networks, analytics services and plugins (e.g. gravatar, diquss) who are also slurping up just as much data and are happy to sell it to everyone.
The allowed Obama to do it and didn't bat an eyelid.
So Big Data for Oabama, Good.
Big Data for Trump, Bad (even though he didn't even use it in the general campaign...RNC data was more accurate).
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.