Cory Doctorow on tech industry regulations and Cambridge Analytica
It’s time to regulate the internet
Franklin Foer writes: As Facebook’s scandals have unfolded, the backlash against Big Tech has accelerated at a dizzying pace. Anger, however, has outpaced thinking. The most fully drawn and enthusiastically backed proposal now circulating through Congress would regulate political ads that can appear on the platform, a law that hardly curbs the company’s power or profits. And, it should be said, a law that does nothing to attack the core of the problem: the absence of governmental protections for personal…
Mark Zuckerberg in 2009: On Facebook privacy is central
Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about privacy for 15 years — here’s almost everything he’s said.
Zuckerberg breaks silence without answering key questions
Who are you sharing your life with? #regulatefacebook pic.twitter.com/r7B7Ajkt0V — Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 20, 2018 Alexis C Madrigal writes: Two years and four months after Facebook found out that Cambridge Analytica might have illicitly pulled user data from its platform, and five days after the latest round of stories about the political consultancy’s electioneering, Mark Zuckerberg finally made a statement about the situation. Despite Facebook previously contesting that it was a “data breach,” Zuckerberg offered up the exact solutions…
Steve Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data
The Washington Post reports: Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday. The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President…
Facebook employees feel increasingly responsible for the world’s problems
At an all-hands meeting for Facebook employees at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg didn’t show up. Fielding questions for just 30 minutes was the company’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal. In its dealings with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had not acted improperly, he insisted. But as Bloomberg Businessweek reports: One employee asked the same question twice: Even if Facebook played by its own rules, and the developer followed policies at the…
TV executives eager to boost ratings did more than Cambridge Analytica to elect Trump
Ross Douthat writes: No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook’s data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump’s surprise victory. But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn’t Zuckerberg’s unreal kingdom; it wasn’t even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily. It was that old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news. Start with…
Facebook is blacklisted by major European bank, Nordea
Bloomberg reports: The biggest bank in the Nordic region will no longer let its sustainable investment unit buy more stock in Facebook Inc. Nordea Bank AB has decided to “quarantine” Facebook investments in the asset management unit, “given the high-level revelations and the turmoil surrounding the company with a strong public backlash,” head of sustainable finance, Sasja Beslik, wrote on Twitter. “One-offs, fine. Usually that’s something that a company can manage in a responsible way,” Beslik said by phone. “What…
I am being used as scapegoat – academic who mined Facebook data
The Guardian reports: [Aleksandr] Kogan [a Moldovan-born researcher from Cambridge University at the center of Facebook’s data breach] said the scandal raised questions about the business model of social networking companies. Kogan said: “The project that Cambridge Analytica has allegedly done, which is use people’s Facebook data for micro-targeting, is the primary use case for most data on these platforms. Facebook and Twitter and other platforms make their money through advertising and so there’s an agreement between the user of…
Cambridge Analytica says it ran ‘all’ of Trump’s digital campaign
Channel 4 News reports: Mr Nix boasted about Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump, saying: “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.” Separately, Mr Turnbull described how the company could create proxy organisations to discreetly feed negative material about opposition candidates on to the Internet and social media. He said: “Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who…
Facebook is in the business of data surveillance
Following reports on Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of 50 million personal profiles, Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, wrote that “the claim that this is a data breach is completely false.” Zeynep Tufekci writes: Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an…
How Facebook groups are being exploited to spread misinformation
BuzzFeed reports: One week after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, those searching on Facebook for information about the upcoming March for Our Lives were likely to be shown an active group with more than 50,000 members. Called “March for Our Lives 2018 Official,” it appeared to be one of the best places to get details about the event and connect with others interested in gun control. But those who joined the group soon found themselves puzzled. The admins often…
The Cambridge Analytica-Facebook debacle: A legal primer
Andrew Keane Woods writes: If you’re [Aleksandr] Kogan, or Cambridge Analytica, expect lawsuits, public hearings and general regulatory hell. Maybe, in the extreme, jail time. If you’re Facebook, expect lawsuits, public hearings, and general regulatory hell. Maybe, in the extreme, the end of the firm as we know it. Facebook is hoping to pin this on two bad apples: Kogan and Cambridge Analytica. And bad apples they were. But this is a dangerous strategy. For Facebook, the claim that it…
Social media operates to manipulate your perceptions, impact your decisions, and change your behavior
Molly McKew writes: Social media is free because the commodity it is selling isn’t the platform, it’s you. The business of social media is to harvest and sell information about you, through various means. All social media companies — not just Facebook, but Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and a range of other apps and services — work this way. They profit by profiling you, targeting posts to you that will keep you engaged on the platform, and collecting more…
Facebook’s rules for accessing user data lured more than just Cambridge Analytica
The Washington Post reports: Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign’s data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences. Cambridge Analytica — unlike…
How Facebook’s stock structure gives Mark Zuckerberg the freedom to ignore his critics
Troy Wolverton writes: If Mark Zuckerberg were a normal CEO, he might — emphasis on might— be fearing for his job right now. At a typical company, a scandal the likes of the one involving Cambridge Analytica’s illegitimate harvesting and possession of data on 50 million Facebook users might have directors asking some uncomfortable questions of the executive team. Those questions might be particularly pointed if that same company and executive team had already been at the center of a…