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Facebook Gave Data About 57 Billion Friendships To Academic (theguardian.com)
Before Facebook suspended Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting "scam" at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57bn Facebook friendships. From a report: Facebook provided the dataset of "every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level" to Kogan's University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015. Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time. A University of Cambridge press release on the study's publication noted that the paper was "the first output of ongoing research collaborations between Spectre's lab in Cambridge and Facebook." Facebook did not respond to queries about whether any other collaborations occurred. "The sheer volume of the 57bn friend pairs implies a pre-existing relationship," said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. "It's not common for Facebook to share that kind of data. It suggests a trusted partnership between Aleksandr Kogan/Spectre and Facebook."
this could be a major political issue if it doesn't turn out they did the same for the other side. The Dems might make it a campaign issue with FB stuck in the middle. The one thing they've got to be afraid of most is regulation. After all, you are the product. It's not the adverts where they make all their money, it's selling all that sweet, sweet demographic data.
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This is kind of what Facebook does... how do you think they went from 0$ to 15 billion $ a year in advertising over a few years?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Huge social media company mines data for years. Trades data for money. Are we going after google next? What about the cell phone companies? Grocery store loyalty cards?
Seriously. The people have decided.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
It doesn't matter whether it had any effect on the election -- the perception on the left is that it had. To them FB will be forever tainted with the unbearable thought that it helped Trump win. If this drives people away from FB and social media, or at least curbs the addiction, that alone will be a phenomenal consequence of Trump presidency.