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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.
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.
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.
Having the data easily accessible lowers the bar for what constitutes a "powerful enemy". Now if you want to ruin your life there's no need to piss off some state actor with government databases at their fingertips, you only have to piss off some random guy on a message board posting from his moms basement with access to google.
For example, with enough real details about you and sufficient motivation, I could create a fake social media presence in your name, get it all "verified", post a bunch of hate-filled rants about minorities, then report the fake you to your employer. Start a big social media shitstorm leveraging some groups of well meaning idiots, and suddenly you've lost your job (check out what happened to people who had photos of themselves at antifa/neonazi rallies and were targeted by the other side). Maybe you can get it sorted out in the end (or maybe not), but it's still a massive headache for you to clear up if it sticks even for just a few hours.