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Cambridge Analytica May Have Had Facebook Data From 87 Million People (recode.net)
Cambridge Analytica may have had data from more unwitting Facebook usersthan originally thought. From a report: Facebook now says that the data firm, which collected data about users without their permission, may have collected data on as many as 87 million people. Original reports from the New York Times pegged that number at closer to 50 million people. "In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people -- mostly in the U.S." may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica by apps that they or their friends used," Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a blog post Wednesday. From Facebook's blog post, "Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. "
Ok, after observing issues like data leaks it looks like the corporate plan is to report some low number that will get people upset but hide the real and often scary number for a later 'confession'. This way people won't be upset with the now much bigger number.
I swear that they must teach this in evil^H^H^H^H MBA school.
Trump, against the expectations of EVERYBODY, won the election and certain people went completely insane.... with WONDERFUL side-effects we would not have experienced had Hillary Clinton won as everybody expected.
(a) All the flailing and excuse making by team Hillary has lead to the freak-out over Cambridge Analytica.... which may FINALLY have awakened a previously asleep-at-the-touchscreen generation to the point that "free" services like Facebook have actually been making billions of dollars spying on its users and selling everything it learned about them to the highest bidder and with apparently ZERO concern for the interests/concernes or its users. Remember in 2008 and 20012 the Obama team got lots of social media data like this (they openly bragged about it after the 2012 victory, including harvesting friend links etc as CA is now accused of doing). Had this only helped Democrats, Democrats would STILL be very happy about it, but since it seems to have helped Trump, a bi-partisan skepticism has now arisen.
(b) All the Trump-Russia "collusion" rants have, after many months of work by very competent lawyers who supported Obama and Hillary, produced no evidence at all against Trump, BUT has finally shaken many people from the position Obama took in the summer of 2016 that it was impossible to tamper with American elections and anybody suggesting it was an idiot. Now, finally but for different reasons, the partisans on BOTH sides of the political aisle are concerned about election security and integrity.
(c) With Trump in the White House, the Obama holdovers were unable to restrain themselves and they leaked all sorts of anti-Trump stuff to their friends in the press which produced a year of anti-Trump headlines. In doing so, they inadvertantly exposed a massive amount of corruption in the FISA court scheme, the FBI, and the DOJ, and it's now probably impossible for those agencies to get the same sort of blind-faith and loyal support they are used to when they go back to congress for more powers to spy on Americans in the future. Had Hillary won, all the spying and badness would have happened but the public would never have found out.
Funny thing is, anybody upset by Cambridge Analytica had all the info they needed to be just as angry years ago.... they just lacked the partisan political kick-in-the-butt to take notice and get concerned.
Love or hate Trump al you want, but his butt in the big chair has been the slap upside the head that many people needed to start seeing certain things more clearly. Perhaps for at least a part of the population, the sleepwalking is over. I have my onw feelings about Trump's character and policies, which is not the subject of this post, but I personally LOVE the side-effects and am starting to think they may end up being well worth it. Sorta like Snowden and Assange: you might not like everything they did, but it ends up being a good thing we learned some things we needed to learn.