A UK Commons Committee Chair Says He's Seen Evidence a Facebook Engineer Flagged Russian Entities Pulling Billions of Points of Data Every Day in 2014 (buzzfeed.com)

A UK Commons committee chair claims a seized trove of Facebook documents reveals that a company engineer flagged Russian "entities" were using a Pinterest API to pull billions of points of Facebook data every day in 2014. From a report: Damian Collins appeared to use parliamentary privilege to outline the detail from the sealed documents, during a fiery session of questioning of Facebook executive Richard Allan before the first sitting of the "international grand committee on disinformation and fake news" in London on Tuesday. The most contentious moment came during an exchange between Allan and the chair of the committee over what's alleged to be in a set of documents that are subject to the protective order of a California court.

During the questioning of Allan on Tuesday, Collins said the emails would not be released. But he did outline details from an alleged incident which, if true, would raise further questions about how Facebook responded to learning about data being taken from the platform. "An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day," Collins said. "Now was that reported to any external body at the time?" Allan dismissed the claim by focusing on the source of the information, Six4Three, labelling it a "hostile litigant." Further reading: Facebook Exec Admits Zuckerberg Not Appearing Before UK Parliament Doesn't Look Great (CNBC); 'The Problem is Facebook,' Lawmakers From Nine Countries Tell Zuckerberg's Accountability Stand-in (TechCrunch); and "When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit": The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg (VanityFair).

Comments

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to really stop Russia from using social media for their state interests is to crack down on free speech. We don't need more censorship, even when it appears to further our interests. People need to stop being so naive and start to understand that the content they consume is biased and sometimes outright false. If people were more skeptical of propaganda and could start to think for themselves, this wouldn't be an issue. Until then, society will be vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors. No, Facebook cannot be trusted, and that should also be readily apparent to anyone with a clue.

Let's support free speech and focus on educating our citizens about propaganda and trolling by malicious actors rather than censoring free speech. Slashdot used to be a bastion of free speech, but it seems like that's being thrown out the window. Deletion of comments once amounted to sacrilege here, yet many threads have disappeared in recent days and have obviously been deleted. That's a damn shame.

Perhaps, instead of worrying about the Russian trolls, content distributors should change their AI-curated news feeds. Instead of showing users they will agree with to maximize "engagement", show content that represents a variety of views. If users aren't in echo chambers and get to see a variety of views, they will probably be less susceptible to manipulation by propaganda.

Re:Excitement

[AlwinBarni]

This Red Scare 2.0 is lit!

The unfortunate thing is, with all of the Kabuki theater going on about Russia, everyone is totally ignoring China pretty much...

Diverting discussion away from the topic? We're not talking about China but about Russia's meddling here. Will there be any other leak, we'll discuss it.

... stuff on China, ... hardly anything to do with Russia ...

OK, still diverting, kind of start to have suspicions about the source of this post.

The people that think they are stoking anything are delusional.

Quite to contrary, the people claiming Russia' meddling have evidence of this happening, seems like not only during 2016 elections, but also during UK brexit referendum.

Re:Public API

[AmiMoJo]

As we know from the Cambridge Analystica debacle Facebook APIs are not very secure. CA was able to pull a lot of data they were not supposed to have access to, and even when Facebook discovered it they didn't cut it off immediately.

It looks like the same thing happened here. They knew and did fuck all about it because they were getting paid. In Europe this is a massive violation of privacy laws at the very least, and possible other crimes due to the fact that the breech allowed our enemies to screw with our democracy.

Re:Excitement

[grep -v '.*' *]

people claiming Russia' meddling have evidence of this happening

I'm sorry, not to downplay this (and I'm in the US), but: we've supposedly occasionally been interfering with other (smaller usually) government elections for decades, and probably attempted for our larger enemies. WHY ON EARTH would we think we'd be completely immune from this to start with?

Now there are different levels of tampering: you directly change the vote count by ballot tampering (changing / adding ballots), losing boxes, changing computer collection results, all that.

Or get people to change their votes: pay them directly, misleading news articles, direct / deflect attention to / from something real OR imagined (how does it go: hide a lie in the midths of a truth), or somehow form a popular movement that does what you want.

So there's hacking the election mechanics proper, where the vote count doesn't match what was truly "done", vs hack the people to vote the way you want. We've been doing it to ourselves for years (vote my way because ... KIDS!), why would you think foreign entities would be any different?

Evidence of interference? I'd be shocked if you COULDN'T find any interference. Now like antibodies it needs to be defended against and unless we're going retroactive it needs to be fixed going forward, but ... I am shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that gambling is going on in here!