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Cambridge Analytica

http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-scl-group-1-million-for-election-win-bribe-2018-3

  • The parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the political research company at the center of a massive Facebook data scandal, reportedly offered a $1.4 million bribe to win an election for a client.
  • SCL Group reportedly entrapped the leader of St. Kitts and Nevis' opposition party with a $1.4 million (?1 million) bribe to secure a win for their client.
  • The company has been caught on tape offering to bribe politicians and boasting about helping Donald Trump win the 2016 election.
 
Also, reporters suck. I've seen a couple stories about how Facebook's stock "tumbles". It's dropped 10%. Big deal. Stocks are volatile. I think I read that in a typical year, about half of all stocks will be worth less than half or more than double what they started out at at some point.
 
Facebook sucks.

I deleted my account years ago. though... I had to make an anonymous one a few months ago so I could monitor what our company social media marketing teams were doing and saying. but I gave facebook all hilariously fake profile info & used a fake email address to screw with their algorithms.

I remember talking to our digital marketing VP after facebook came in and presented their sales pitch to us and he said it was amazing how detailed they had segmented the market... they had info on users, their friends, who they knew, etc. that would blow their minds.

the value of this data is in some ways overstated, and in some not. It doesn't, as the industry will boast, provide some sort of magic key to provide perfect knowledge about consumers. On the other hand, these huge databases are routinely hacked & breached, guidelines about what can and can't be collected are routinely exceeded because there is a strong incentive to do so, and enforcement from the FTC is nil (just like Republicans want!). The potential to allow for massive ID Theft and fraud is a risk we all bear, so that facebook, equifax, google, etc etc can monetize the collection of our public data and activities.
 
the value of this data is in some ways overstated, and in some not.

I've posted links before to a study that showed how gender and racial bias appears in customer surveys. These data methods are doing the same things right now. Deciding who gets which credit card offers and what interest rates based on data that can incorporate our biases.
 
Also, reporters suck. I've seen a couple stories about how Facebook's stock "tumbles". It's dropped 10%. Big deal. Stocks are volatile. I think I read that in a typical year, about half of all stocks will be worth less than half or more than double what they started out at at some point.



hmmmmmm .....?
html5
 
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Facebook's sell-off was for three primary reasons.

1. The stock is up 25% Y-over-Y and better over the past couple years. Folks made money ...and FB is up 1.5% this morning.

2. The political risk of the Cambridge investigation/consequences and unknown FB involvement

3. Tech on the whole has been seeing profit taking and the FANG stocks got slammed on the whole yesterday.


I still have a FB account but rarely use it and went through a process to Uncheck a bunch of boxes yesterday to eliminate the sharing process. Just to Uncheck the boxes took some trying. Did the same with Twitter this morning - amazing the data Twitter has on me. Everything from snowboarding to Michigan football to my income range.

Fucking creepy.
 
http://www.businessinsider.com/camb...ives-and-mercer-family-launch-emerdata-2018-3

You would think, if Cambridge Analytica was so good at swaying opinion that we'd see an effort to sway opinion about them. I was thinking that you could argue that Obama really got the ball rolling down this slippery slope, but I haven't seen that idea on facebook or reddit yet.

you could argue that and you would be right. Cambridge Analytica did virtually the same thing the Obama administration did during his re-election campaign (and possibly his election as well, I don't know if the technology was around then). Facebook knew about it too - the big difference is FB management wanted Obama elected so they had no problem with it. All of a sudden, people they don't like are doing the same thing and now it's suddenly a huge problem, violation of trust, etc, etc (although not illegal).

https://www.dailywire.com/news/2844...m_content=032018-news&utm_campaign=modelnames
 
you could argue that and you would be right. Cambridge Analytica did virtually the same thing the Obama administration did during his re-election campaign (and possibly his election as well, I don't know if the technology was around then). Facebook knew about it too - the big difference is FB management wanted Obama elected so they had no problem with it. All of a sudden, people they don't like are doing the same thing and now it's suddenly a huge problem, violation of trust, etc, etc (although not illegal).

https://www.dailywire.com/news/2844...m_content=032018-news&utm_campaign=modelnames

As far as I know, Obama's team didn't mislead anyone about the purpose of signing up.
 
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But what about ......
But what about ......
But what about ......

It's an effective technique. Those CA guys aren't wrong. Trying to win arguments the way traditional debates are won is a mistake. Appealing to emotions is what works.

...at least that's how I feel about it.
 
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you could argue that and you would be right. Cambridge Analytica did virtually the same thing the Obama administration did during his re-election campaign (and possibly his election as well, I don't know if the technology was around then). Facebook knew about it too - the big difference is FB management wanted Obama elected so they had no problem with it. All of a sudden, people they don't like are doing the same thing and now it's suddenly a huge problem, violation of trust, etc, etc (although not illegal).

https://www.dailywire.com/news/2844...m_content=032018-news&utm_campaign=modelnames

oops. gulo triggered spartahack.

better clarify you didn't mean this thread as a partisan attack on Trump.
 
https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/c...ly_involved_in_french_election_warns/dfm4o80/

This 11 month old post about CA is really something. Reads like tinfoil hat stuff, except that now some of it seems to be real.

plenty of other groups collect the same shit through facebook's API's.

though, as you noted, CA sneakily changed their collection policy AFTER they signed up, and facebook never noticed or cared.

the surprising thing is that facebook still didn't care about monitoring this stuff after all the privacy flak they've gotten from regulators, including a settlement with the FTC.

But I can almost guarantee that except for a handful of outliers, no ones really paying attention to this stuff at the company level... you may have "white hat" hackers or privacy bloggers look into what's being collected here and there, and an occasional whistleblower, but the companies just sign contracts, click to accept terms, then do whatever they want.

no one talks to eachother... the data collection people don't go back to the attorney or privacy officer and say "Hey the contract or our privacy policy says we won't do "X" but we really want to. How can we provide adequate notice to users about the change?" they just go ahead and do it.
 
It's an effective technique. Those CA guys aren't wrong. Trying to win arguments the way traditional debates are won is a mistake. Appealing to emotions is what works.

...at least that's how I feel about it.


But what about ....how I feel about it? What about how MichChamp feels about it ....huh?

I don't disagree with the specific situation with CA, I'm noting the general tendency of folks these days. But it's no different than say when something like Nassar happens at msu and state fans say, "Yeah, but what about Brendan Gibbons?!"
 
OMFG... Stop the presses. Spartanmack may have been right about something, Link:
?According to Carol Davidsen, a member of Obama?s data team, ?Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn?t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.? The social graph is Facebook?s map of relationships between users and brands on its platform. And after the election, she recently acknowledged, Facebook was ?very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn?t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.'?​
 
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