Slashdot Mirror
My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data (theatlantic.com)
Ian Bogost, writing for The Atlantic: Already in 2010, it felt like a malicious attention market where people treated friends as latent resources to be optimized. Compulsion rather than choice devoured people's time. Apps like FarmVille sold relief for the artificial inconveniences they themselves had imposed. In response, I made a satirical social game called Cow Clicker. Players clicked a cute cow, which mooed and scored a "click." Six hours later, they could do so again. They could also invite friends' cows to their pasture, buy virtual cows with real money, compete for status, click to send a real cow to the developing world from Oxfam, outsource clicks to their toddlers with a mobile app, and much more. It became strangely popular, until eventually, I shut the whole thing down in a bovine rapture -- the "cowpocalypse." It's kind of a complicated story.
But one worth revisiting today, in the context of the scandal over Facebook's sanctioning of user-data exfiltration via its application platform. It's not just that abusing the Facebook platform for deliberately nefarious ends was easy to do (it was). But worse, in those days, it was hard to avoid extracting private data, for years even, without even trying. I did it with a silly cow game. Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend's couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void.
But one worth revisiting today, in the context of the scandal over Facebook's sanctioning of user-data exfiltration via its application platform. It's not just that abusing the Facebook platform for deliberately nefarious ends was easy to do (it was). But worse, in those days, it was hard to avoid extracting private data, for years even, without even trying. I did it with a silly cow game. Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend's couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void.
shit about facebook that matters
Cow Clicker? That sounds like a more accurate name for Tinder.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Remember the hacker group "Cult of the Dead Cow?" Never trust the Bovine Threat.
Obama's social media app collected all the information about people's friends when someone installed it and they bragged about using this data to successfully target people for votes. Everything you put on Facebook is being sold to some advertiser or special interest somewhere. It's part of the deal of using a "free" service. People who are angry that Trump may have used the same technology as everyone else since the early years of Facebook are ignorant or hypocritical.
....you might be a billionaire today, rather than reminiscing over some virtual cow patties. Angry cows...
I don't know how this is suddenly making the news when it has been well known for years. It is nice to see people starting to car about privacy again, but anything Facebook related should be assumed to be collecting and profiting off your data until proven otherwise.
I've never used bookFace on this browser, or on any phone or tablet...
and of course never clicked on bovines...
Facebook's just going to add him to a list of developers to audit, probably! Look: He even said he still has the info!
I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running
I'm pretty sure that retaining Facebook user details is specifically against the developer terms, and it was even back when Farmville was still all the rage.....
I own property in NYC and it's already public record where I live and what I own. So you combine with other data and find out that I surf porn. Big deal, pornhub is huge because millions of other people do so as well.
WTF are you going to do with the data? sell it? Everyone else already has this too.
Click to continue
Why admit all that? The warm fuzzy feeling one gets from telling people they were one of the "insiders", a sort of counterfeit absolution.
It's a formulaic style that seems to be gaining popularity and appears along with most movements.
People come out of the woodwork and write to whatever rag will publish them, coming clean to all the proles about how they used to do some questionable action and how easily they got away with it.
Anyone who has every looked at Facebook's Graph API knows that when you build a "Facebook App", you have the option to ask for more detailed access to the user's information (basic public profile information which you could screen-scrape anyhow is included).
The user gets a quite clear pop-up where he has to allow access to this information.
Once in a while, Facebook even tells the user "Hey! You might wanna go through your enabled Apps and disable some!"
So I don't understand the outrage? User permits developer access to his data. Developer is bound by Facebook API's ToS (which are often ignored, I guess).
The thing is it's not "your" data if you live in the United States. Europe has strict data protection laws, the data belongs to the person who provides it and you may only use it for purposes they have already agreed to. This actually causes problem with things like medical research where it's actually illegal to use new techniques against old samples because people did not agree to the new use. You have to go back to them and get consent which can be inconvenient, costly or even impossible if they are deceased.
In the United States data belongs to the person who collects it. If you give an app permission to trawl your contacts, that data now belongs to them to do whatever they want. In this case the app developer did have an agreement with Facebook, but Facebook has absolutely no ability to prevent the developer from doing whatever he wants with the data he collected. They can sue him for breaching the agreement, but there's no way they can get the data back. It's already out there. There's no way to prove someone else doesn't have copy; that's the whole nature of electronic data. Of course none of this is ever mentioned when the story is covered by the media.
I really don't understand why this story is getting so much attention. From the coverage I've seen it seems to be because this can be linked to a firm that the Trump campaign used. Facebook is already well known to not be trustworthy with your private data. You really shouldn't put anything you don't want made publicly available on a social media website, even if you think you've restricted who can view it. Haven't most Facebook users had the site auto-post something without their consent? I know I once used an app that wanted to use photos from my Facebook albums. I uploaded a picture to my mobile album so I could import it in the app and Facebook posted the damn thing to all of my friends. But it's kind of silly to single out Facebook when there are thousands of smartphone applications, retailers and other companies that are doing the same thing. Some of the applications available for download are nothing more than trojan horses used to gain access to your information.
I do not have a Facebook account and I am reasonably sure that the "app" did not run on my phone.
What, do you think I am 12?
Looks like Trump must have paid someone to write this game for him to get MORE data on people!