Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:04

@DoccyG True enough, but that's still just speculation. I guess we'll find out in time.

Curiosity · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:04

Grim... wrote:

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Grim... wrote:

1) CA put a survey onto Facebook

Not quite:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... s-election

Quote:

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.

Indeed, I was just about to write that but had to reply to yet another tiresome "this can't really be your opinion lul" post from the Ivory tower department.

I think the actual information collected from the friends was key. At the moment, I've seen nothing to suggest is isn't anything you could get from page-scraping.

That seems to be different from what I understand from what I’ve read in The Guardian.

Facebook will give personal data to people for certain usages (improvement of service, for example). It seems they took this data and then used it for political means (well, they used it for cash money means, but by selling their wares in the political arena).

At a minimum there’s a very strong implication that they had a lot more data than was publicly available.

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Grim... wrote:

@DoccyG True enough, but that's still just speculation. I guess we'll find out in time.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/faceb ... shut-down/

Quote:

It was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps. While this let developers build powerful, personalized products, the privacy concerns led Facebook to announce at F8 2014 that it would shut down the Friends data API in a year. Now that time has come, with the forced migration to Graph API v2.0 leading to the friends’ data API shutting down, and a few other changes happening on April 30.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/02/f8/

Quote:

Facebook announced plans to stop letting developers pull data from users’ friends, such as their photos, birthdays, status updates, and checkins.

Why? Because the idea that anyone could give someone else’s data to a developer without their permission was always kind of shady. This should boost a perception of privacy on the Facebook platform, but also deny developers the ability to build apps like photo album browsers, search engines, calendars, and location maps that could compete with Facebook’s own products.

Facebook's official API docs page doesn't go back far enough to show the old API
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/gr ... og/archive

Here's an archived image from 2013 showing what data of yours could be accessed by 3P apps installed by your friends:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/0 ... formation/

I'd say that's extensive.

Cras · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 49232

Lonewolves wrote:

Grim…, considering how our opinions on internet privacy, big corporations, capitalism and personal data are so diametrically opposed, we should probably just agree to disagree here to avoid a falling out.

You are allowed to have a discussion with differing opinions on both sides without falling out, you know

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:18

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

I'd say that's extensive.

Ah, yes indeed. And there's no reason to assume they didn't grab everything they could.

The "things they like" would be the most important one for working out stuff about them, I suspect.

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Grim... wrote:

The "things they like" would be the most important one for working out stuff about them, I suspect.

The entire history of their posts and all their photos would be more useful.

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:23

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Grim... wrote:

The "things they like" would be the most important one for working out stuff about them, I suspect.

The entire history of their posts and all their photos would be more useful.

Depends how good the AI would have been at the time.

[edit]D'uh :facepalm:

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Grim... wrote:

Depends how good the AI would have been at the time.

[edit]D'uh :facepalm:

You fucking plank.

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:25

Right?!

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

It's also worth reflecting on these points: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/1 ... _director/

First, Facebook's reaction when it discovered what had happened:

Quote:

Facebook knew about the incident in 2015 and sought assurances from all concerned that the data had been deleted. What has prompted Friday’s suspension of Cambridge Analytica was Wylie going public to various media outlets with some extraordinary claims about how the data was used.
...
He claims to have deleted the data before being formally asked to do so by Facebook in 2016, a year after the misuse was discovered by the social media firm. All he had to do was fill in a form saying he had deleted and Facebook were satisfied with that.

Also Facebook's PR line is that this is not a breach:

Quote:

The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.

It doesn't join the dots that (to my mind) suggest that if this wasn't a breach, then everything must have been working just as it intended, which might be a worse PR place for it to be in.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 17:44

The data that was collected was meant to be used for a different purpose than it ended up being used for, which is the issue I think.

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/975054469275799552

If I walk into a hospital and tell them Iâ€™m the butt inspector and they should give me pictures of all their patientsâ€™ butts and they do, thatâ€™s a data breach, regardless of whether the hospital obtained the butt pics with patient consent
— you heard it here first: tweting is bad (@alexhern) March 17, 2018

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:19

Why has the Twitter embed function turned to shit?

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:25

Seems okay. What's it done wrong?

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

If you share from twitter, you get some s=xx gunk on the URL that breaks the embed. Just delete it.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:41

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

If you share from twitter, you get some s=xx gunk on the URL that breaks the embed. Just delete it.

Nope, it's:

Code:

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/975054469275799552

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:42

Grim... wrote:

Seems okay. What's it done wrong?

It's just pasted the tweet rather than doing the fancy embed you implemented a while back.

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:47

Are you using a phone?

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:47

Gosh, that's confusing.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 18:56

Weird. No, I'm doing it from a PC. Copied the link from twitter.com using Firefox.

ApplePieOfDestiny · **Joined:** 17th Dec, 2008 **Posts:** 8293

Fine in iOS too.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 19:22

It's ok on Android. Must be a browser thing.

Bamba · **Joined:** 25th Jul, 2010 **Posts:** 11128

It worked fine for me on Firefox/Win 10 earlier. It must be a user thing.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 19:43

Bamba wrote:

It worked fine for me on Firefox/Win 10 earlier. It must be a user thing.

I still get it now.

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Lonewolves wrote:

The data that was collected was meant to be used for a different purpose than it ended up being used for, which is the issue I think.

If you take the whistleblower, Wylie, at his word then the app was used by 270,000 people but gathered data through the friends link on 50 million. That means 0.5% of people were told the data was used for one thing when it was used for another. The other 99.5% had no idea anything had even happened.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 20:06

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Lonewolves wrote:

The data that was collected was meant to be used for a different purpose than it ended up being used for, which is the issue I think.

If you take the whistleblower, Wylie, at his word then the app was used by 270,000 people but gathered data through the friends link on 50 million. That means 0.5% of people were told the data was used for one thing when it was used for another. The other 99.5% had no idea anything had even happened.

That makes it 200 times worse than I originally thought.

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Different kind of worse, I think. To my mind anyway.

Bamba · **Joined:** 25th Jul, 2010 **Posts:** 11128

Lonewolves wrote:

Bamba wrote:

It worked fine for me on Firefox/Win 10 earlier. It must be a user thing.

I still get it now.

Have you got some kind of script blocker running? That's exactly what it looks like to me at work because Twitter is blocked so the formatting doesn't come through properly.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:04

Bamba wrote:

Lonewolves wrote:

Bamba wrote:

It worked fine for me on Firefox/Win 10 earlier. It must be a user thing.

I still get it now.

Have you got some kind of script blocker running? That's exactly what it looks like to me at work because Twitter is blocked so the formatting doesn't come through properly.

Not unless Grim... has secretly installed one remotely - I wouldn't put it past him, the bugger. He wants to know what I'm eating for dinner.

Grim... · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:07

85% chance you're having curry.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:08

Grim... wrote:

85% chance you're having curry.

Burger actually! https://anniesburgershack.com/menu/main-menu

devilman · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:12

Grim... wrote:

I edited a comma into a post that was nine years old last week.

I prefer to use new-born commas.

MaliA · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:41

I think point 2 is still being argued about, but the rest I am chill with. Quietly thinking "Bloody hell, that is good work" and not deleting Facebook as a load of pole dancing videos just appeared on it.

Mr Dave · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:53

Lonewolves wrote:

Bamba wrote:

It worked fine for me on Firefox/Win 10 earlier. It must be a user thing.

I still get it now.

This is also what I get.

MaliA · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 21:57

Grim... wrote:

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Curiosity wrote:

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

a) how much do you pay for beex

Like I've not mined Beex for data.

Am I still the hottest?

myp · **Posted:** Thu Mar 22, 2018 23:39

MaliA wrote:

Grim... wrote:

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Curiosity wrote:

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

a) how much do you pay for beex

Like I've not mined Beex for data.

Am I still the hottest?

I dunno, have JBR or DBS been discounted for some reason?

Cras · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 49232

There is a sale on.

Findus Fop · **Joined:** 14th May, 2009 **Posts:** 4299

Lonewolves wrote:

Grim... wrote:

85% chance you're having curry.

Burger actually! https://anniesburgershack.com/menu/main-menu

So that's what happened to Razzle.

Sir Taxalot · **Joined:** 5th Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 4668

Lonewolves wrote:

MaliA wrote:

Grim... wrote:

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Curiosity wrote:

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

a) how much do you pay for beex

Like I've not mined Beex for data.

Am I still the hottest?

I dunno, have JBR or DBS been discounted for some reason?

What happened to Throughsilver anyway?

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Twitter thread by a Google machine learning expert

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/9765 ... 99296.html

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976563870322999296

The problem with Facebook is not *just* the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon. The more worrying issue, in my opinion, is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector. Time for a thread
— FranÃ§ois Chollet (@fchollet) March 21, 2018

Grim... · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:26

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13382

Well I've learned a new word out of all this kerfuffle, so I reckon I'm about even on the deal.

Panopticon.

Going to be a hard one to work into daily conversation though, and even then most folks will just say 'What the fuck is a panopticon?'.

myp · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:31

It's a good word Heath.

Kern · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:34

Lonewolves wrote:

It's a good word Heath.

Thank you, kind sir.
\

romanista · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:49

Grim... wrote:

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

I'd say that's extensive.

Ah, yes indeed. And there's no reason to assume they didn't grab everything they could.

The "things they like" would be the most important one for working out stuff about them, I suspect.

Mm interesting.. don;'t remember i ever got a request to 'give away' my friends interests, which i surely would have denied, even in 2011-12 when facebook still seemed 'sort of' innocent? did you actively have to deny third parties this data?

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32619

Grim... wrote:

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/8/15766 ... n-robotics

romanista · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:51

Kern wrote:

Lonewolves wrote:

It's a good word Heath.

Thank you, kind sir.

he's just saying that because he suddenly remembers he used to be called something like that...

myp · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:56

Grim... wrote:

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

Isn't that a sort of a no true Scotsman argument?

Grim... · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:58

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:

Grim... wrote:

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/8/15766 ... n-robotics

Also they were in a totally different building!

Grim... · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:59

Lonewolves wrote:

Grim... wrote:

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

Isn't that a sort of a no true Scotsman argument?

I don't think so.

MaliA · **Posted:** Fri Mar 23, 2018 10:04

Grim... wrote:

Lonewolves wrote:

Grim... wrote:

Haha I like how he says no-one should work with Facebook because they're doing naughty things with AI, and the company he works for makes military robots

Isn't that a sort of a no true Scotsman argument?

I don't think so.

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, maybe.

Be Excellent To Each Other

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
Some thoughts

Who is online

Be Excellent To Each Other

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Some thoughts

Who is online

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
Some thoughts