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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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"Aleksandr Spectre"? Are you fucking kidding me? Was it so cartoonishly evil that Facebook's legal and ethics team didn't believe it was real?
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?"
What I find amusing about this whole thing is that the Trump campaign never used the data, because they didn't trust it.
The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data's reporting -- principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value.
So Facebook giving all that data to the Trump campaign had no effect on the election whatsoever.
All this outrage and calls for regulation and boycotting - because it was Trump of course - over something that Trump didn't use.
I don't care who y'are - that's funny right thare!
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.
and focused on the Adverts. It's now front and center and in the minds of regular people. There's also a sizable Anti-Trump faction in America (he did lose the popular vote after all) that is going to seize on this and keep it from going away. Facebook'll end up caught in the middle of a political fight. Worst case scenario a bunch of new privacy regulations get passed that make a significant portion of their business illegal.
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Really, Obama used a company run by the Mercers and Bannon? You have ANY evidence to back up that ridiculous assertion?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc sell our data. When you go to these companies, I can buy who you are, your address, your pix, and most of all, your name, etc. .
With Google, I can buy clean data for stats, but it will not come with address, pix, names, OR, I can buy access to you. That is I can direct Ads at ppl that live in Houston Texas and then sell them cheap ACs from China. While I can not direct it to an individual, I can give criteria that would allow me to focus on those most likely to buy junk.
That is the right approach. It is fair, and honest. Google is not giving it to gov, unless they have a warrant. And Google has fought giving it to some of the nations that will use it for political purposes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is an interesting number. Steven Pinker argued our brains evolved in extended family clan social structure. And that our brains are incapable of holding more than 200 persons. We extended the "persons" to entities. Most people can not name more than 50 friends or relatives strictly from memory. With address books and contacts etc they can stretch it to about 150 to 200 range. If asked to "like" or "dislike" people, entities, national groups, any grouping, most people can not go beyond 200 without resorting to paper, notes and other aids.
People wore distinctive clothing, religious marks, war paints and other external symbols so that strangers will know who they are. Treating aggregate groups of people and marking the whole group friendly, hostile, to be obeyed, to be ruled is a mental leap that took some 10,000 years to form. Starting from the sedentism created by domestication of dogs, then animals and then plants at around 20,000 years ago, we could become peaceful enough to live in larger and larger agglomerations by about 7000 years ago. That was the start of aggregation from clans to tribes, tribes to nations, nations to empires.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
No they won't come to grip with it. Political dissent has been happening since the Bronze Age. If people could get along, we wouldn't have had so many stupid (civil) wars by now.
Who cares when CA was founded? Facebook is the issue here. CA just bought data from Facebook. Facebook was more than happy to sell it without any contract or enforceable terms in place. Facebook was also happy to include data that they shouldn't have been collecting (per user preferences).
Obama used Facebook data the same way. He was applauded for it.
Someone seriously under counted the Earths population!
even then, if it can be monetized, you're still being sold.
The only scandal here is the shear number of people unaware that the purpose of all social media is to sell your private information...
"Google isn't free, the cost is your information" - Eric Schmidt Former CEO Google.
so just go head, fill your house with Alexa, Google home, Nest, FitBit, Apple watch, use websites to analyze your DNA... and pay no attention to those annoying little ELUA popup's where you waive all your rights. Then be shocked when they sell that information..considering it's their business model.
Not really no.
In Obama's case Facebook users went to Obama's re-election page and were asked if they'd like to provide information. So yes they're the same in that the campaigns used Facebook data but one asked permission in a context that made it painfully obvious what it was for and the other didn't ask permission and there was no obvious link to it's purpose until years later.
So, yeah, not quite the same thing.
Obama's campaign was not relying on such data. They were spoon fed all the data they asked for from Facebook, regardless of whether they had opted in on his campaign page. Where the fuck did you get that story from?
If only there was some way to search the internet for information. I'd envision some web portal thingy where you type in a string and it searches for you, if such a thing existed in might pop up pages from say 2012 that were relevant at the time, though maybe it's possible that the same people who had the foresight to change his birth certificate had the same foresight to plant the story in case they needed it.
http://www.adweek.com/digital/...
That article describes the Facebook app his campaign used. Romney had one too.
Again the difference is the app made it painfully clear that it wasn't a quiz or a chance to win a free pony, it was to support his campaign. I don't have a Facebook page, never will so at some level I don't really give a shit, but false equivalences are false equivalences regardless.
Help me understand this.
There are roughly 7.6 billion people on earth.
Consider that most people do not have Facebook accounts, thus cannot be 'friended'.
A 2017 survey shows ~2.2 billion Facebook users.
That leaves an average friends per Facebook user at 25.9.
So, then, for any researcher to have "friendships" data on me, they know who I have "friended".
How can this be "anonymised"?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.