Cambridge Analytica.

[onalongsabbatical]

I'm going to be in London next week visiting the British Museum, among other thoroughly respectable activities. Headquarters of Cambridge Analytica are round the corner. AIBU to be sorely tempted to go and smear something nasty on their windows? Or at least go and give them a big, nasty stare - Paddington-bear-like?

There's some quibbling at the moment about whether this constitutes a "data breach" of Facebook at the moment. So for clarity...

Different people are using different definitions of "breach". Techies use "breach" to mean they attempted to protect data with technology and someone broke in through the technical protections.

Facebook didn't even try to protect the data, so this isn't a "breach" in the techies' language.

Laypeople are going "We trusted you with our data and now without our knowledge some other bugger has it and is using it against us," and are understandably describing this as a "breach."

Fuller explanation here:

Why We're Not Calling the Cambridge Analytica Story a 'Data Breach'
Facebook insists that Cambridge Analytica didn't get information on 50 million Americans because of a 'data breach.' It's right. What really happened is much worse.
motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjzvk/facebook-cambridge-analytica-not-a-data-breach

Facebook’s vice president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal wrote that “the claim that this is a data breach is completely false,” because the researcher who made the app obtained the data from “users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent.”

Saying that “everyone involved” consented seems misleading, given that only around 270,000 out of the 50 million people who got their data harvested reportedly signed up for the app. The others probably had no idea this app even existed. And since Facebook changes its privacy settings so frequently, we also don't know if the people who agreed to use the app fully understood what kind of data they were giving up. And no one at the time knew the data would later be handed out to a shadowy data analytics firm hired by the Trump campaign.
[...]
As Zeynep Tufekci, the author of Twitter And Tear Gas, put it, Facebook’s vehement defense that this was not a data breach is itself actually a damning statement of what’s wrong with Facebook, and Silicon Valley’s ad industry in general.

“If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used & misused,” Tufekci, a University of North Carolina professor who studies the social impact of technology, wrote on Twitter. “There is no informed consent because it's not possible to reasonably inform or consent.”

Facebook’s security team, Tufekci concluded, can’t mitigate the company’s business model, which is predicated on collecting as much of our data, and our friend’s data, as possible.

I agree that this has been staring us in the face for quite some time.

The thing about CA is that they are really fucking clever. And apart from this FB data breach, they've been operating within the boundaries of the law.

FB itself is probably more insidious. I barely post on the thing, yet I've noticed in the last year or so that it knows a staggering amount about me (presumably because it has access to my browsing history). I've stopped leaving it open as a matter of course, but that's probably not going to do much.

As consumers, we've been sleep walking into this.

And look at the shameless promotion of Amazon's Echo spyware in the 'Amazon Easter Deals' threads at the top of AIBU...

Perking

People willingly gave up their data! They do bloody personality tests on FB! I mean FFS! Personality types is strongly linked with voting intentions. The personality test on FB was news some time back and even Jordan Peterson was talking about it about a year ago. By harvesting about 100 likes, they can pretty much profile your entire life, demographic, voting intention, likihood to divorce and other head busting stuff

I get that many people don't understand the technology but there has been an utter unwillingness to learn. As I have said, I have tried to start a conversation about it several times on MN. I also have done so with my friends and family and they regard my 'paranoia' as some adorable quirk.

But effectively, you are allowing them to price you as a product, whether it's for financial products, medical products, consumer products, the information that you are providing about yourself allows them to profile you in a way such that, for example, they will detemine the premiums for life assurance. If you let them into your FB profile, every click, every like, even keyboard strokes are analysed.

FGS stop giving them the contents of your head.

This might be a good time to remind people that Facebook was after yet another chunk of information about our behaviour and personal connections last year, as well as the commission :

Facebook Messenger payments comes to UK
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41894014

Facebook is collaborating with all the major banks and credit card firms to launch Messenger payments, which will require both the sender and recipient of money to register their payment cards.
[...]
Facebook claims Messenger payments will catch on because "people are looking for simplicity and emotion".
[...]
Facebook is also introducing something called M suggestions, a virtual assistant that recognises when you are talking about payments. It will suggest the new service as a quick and easy solution. We'll see how users enjoy being nudged in this manner.

as well as the commission

Sorry, that bit shouldn't have made it in. The service is "free" from monetary charge.

They must be near my office then. I will sneer as I walk past.

I was particularly struck by the "looking for emotion" bit. Because actually no, no one is looking for emotions from their bank transfers.

But emotion is very important to Facebook, just as it is to Cambridge Analytica, as a means to manipulate users – presumably into using FB for payments. Little cookie of Happy for being an obedient drone, anyone?

Do it OP. I share your anger and also have bail £ x

I can’t actually believe people are surprised at this.

Why are also people shocked by having call girls or honey traps sent to politicians or get someone to bribe them with fake deals? The Sun used to do this all the time. Remember Fake Sheikh?

Slightly bigger scale, Mission.

This is about selecting who becomes the government of a country, not just about exposing dodgy individuals.

In fact, it's not about exposing dodgy individuals at all, because the dodgy individuals in the client's party aren't in any way exposed and may be actively supported by CA.

This article has a good account of how Cambridge Analytica assisted the 2016 Trump Campaign, and of targeted voter suppression.

Ie if you know people wouldn't touch you with a barge pole, try to dissuade them from voting at all.

Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go

Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

I think you've missed the point Mission.

I have been getting PayPal messages asking whether I want my receipts in messenger. i wondered then why I old want this.

I'd quite like to know the links between PayPal and Facebook come to think of it.

Explains how you could be targeted on Facebook even if a) you didn't take a dodgy quiz, and b) weren't friends with someone who took a dodgy quiz.

Cambridge Analytica's Ad Targeting Is the Reason Facebook Exists
motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxgzb/cambridge-analytica-facebook-ad-targeting-third-party-apps

The way Cambridge Analytica obtained the data of millions of Americans has been done—and in many ways is still being done—by many different data broker firms throughout the United States and the world. The same data that is used every day to sell shoes and meditation apps is used to sell us political candidates, too. Whether Cambridge Analytica misused the data or obtained it in some nefarious way is beside the point—thousands of apps have been used to gather information about millions of Facebook users, and there is little stopping them from selling that data to other people.
[...]
Data brokers create databases of information that’s pulled from Facebook and elsewhere. And once taken off the platform, data can be analyzed and re-imported later to be used to target people. Facebook allows advertisers to upload .CSV spreadsheets of information about people and use that information to specifically target people using its “Custom Audiences” product. That data can then be further used to target “Lookalike Audiences” on Facebook—people that data brokers might not know much about but who Facebook itself does know a lot about, according to Mislove.
[...]
“If I was Cambridge Analytica, I would have taken 50 million users worth of data, crunched the numbers and figured out who was susceptible to influence,” Mislove said. “Then I’d upload that data back to Facebook as a custom audience and ask Facebook for lookalikes of those people, who are new people I didn’t know about but who are susceptible.”

Cambridge Analytica's Ad Targeting Is the Reason Facebook Exists
this is very true, FB's raison d'être is to milk us for data

I understand that. I’m just not shocked by it. The tactics for electing someone have gone from journalistic print to online. Do you think this is new?

@kitten So Facebook have more ways to discover what and where you’re spending money.

Oooops forgot you are meant to use the full name when you @ someone. Sorry if there’s a user called kitten wondering why they’ve been tagged

at stray kitten!

The whole concept of Facebook is fucking ridiculous if you think about it. You used to have to send round marketing surveys, rifle through mail, send round private detectives to get any info on people. Now people happily put it up for free then are shocked when (surprise surprise) it's used for corporate or political interests.

Just because Facebook is "normal" doesn't mean it's not fucking stupid.

a common response to the face book is spying on you line is 'so what I'm not doing anything interesting, if they want to study my boring life then good luck to them'
Missing the point, it's not that there are facebook employees poring over the details of our individual lives more that enormous amounts of data enable the big tech companies to manipulate us at a population level ...throwing elections etc

@YoloSwaggins

Twitters worse!! “Look at me! This is what I’m doing right now! Oh and while you’re at it, I have 50,000 followers that love me also! Did I show you guys a pic of the new bag I bought? I got it today from Topshop. It cost £60 but so worth it”

Well done, you’ve just announced that you’re happy to spend x amount of money at x shop and have x amount of followers which means if you happen to ‘come across’ (I.e targeted) an advert for a more expensive bag, there’s a chance you’ll buy it and post it. They make money and get free advertising without having to pay for it.

Mm, I don't think it's just that the medium has changed from print to online – it's what becomes possible when you do that.

So for example, a Daily Mail headline saying "Boris Johnson wears knickers on his head every day", which appears in print or on the Mail Online, can be seen by the whole country. Including other news outlets which can then interview Johnson's buddies who say "No, he only wears them in bed", or can point and laugh at the Mail for falling for the story at all. It's also clear who is propagating the story, so the reader can factor that in when assessing credibility.

Whereas a targeted message which only appears on the social media of a few carefully chosen people can't easily be challenged or rebutted – because who even knows it's there? It may also appear to come from a trusted friend and gain some credibility just from that.

Or maybe there's an identical smear with just the names changed each time, sent to carefully chosen targets. Again, if this was happening in a widely distributed printed newspaper, it would immediately be obvious that this was repetitive spam. But small, isolated groups each getting only the personalised version meant for them, won't see the repetitiveness. As Nix said, it's important not to let people realise it's propaganda.

The ultra-low cost medium and automation mean a campaign can simultaneously publish 1000s of mutually contradictory promises and claims, with little fear of being called out.

The dynamics are just completely different when you can tell a different story to each person, while hiding what you're saying to others. It's very divide and rule.

Just realised you were talking specifically about entrapment with dodgy deals or using prostituted women. Yeah, Cambridge Analytica certainly seem to have combined favourites from every possible playbook.

@PerkingFaintly I had specifically gone into that but I was talking about in general. I don’t disagree that now we are in a digital world the possibilities of corruption have gone through the roof, I was just saying I am not surprised by any of it. I’m not defending it by the way!! Just that I’m not shocked. Politics is a dirty game.

Yeah, I'm shocked at the extent, and at the sheer brazenness of Nix in public... but not anything else.