What's the issue here? Selective information distribution is rooted in the society, people are O.K. with some information to be known to some people while kept secret from others due to implication differences.

I.E. I'm fine to be profiled for selling me chocolates but I'm not O.K. to be profiled to be manipulated to select public officials or to make my mind about controversial topics like the god, abortions, guns etc. I expect to be exposed in a proper way to these topics, i.e. proper journalism and discussions.

This can be changed, regardless of whether any of us is ready to throw up our hands about the whole situation as it stands.

Look at health records. HIPAA is rather successful at keeping your health data narrowly confined to those that need it. There is nothing that prevents similar laws to work for financial data, location data, etc.

The only roadblock is people saying they “don’t personally think legislation is the answer”. Because there is literally nothing but law that can have an effect.

The sales director for a drug manufacturer knows that you’ve filled a prescription before the claim is filed.

Enfamil and Gerber knew the estimated due date of our baby — although the only interaction we had with anyone was a miscarriage at 8 weeks and a near fatal complication.

I agree that HIPPA is technically very weak.

But let's also agree that preventing gossip about private health info is a good thing -- a definite step in the right direction.

Laws are about building and reinforcing the culture we want to build. In that light, HIPPA is a long way from a failure: it sets the standard that "health care privacy is to be taken seriously, and as a society we believe it is important enough to legislate", if nothing else.

Are you sure it wasnt something like this?

See, for example, GDPR.

Facebook lets companies bid for ads to show you, based on Facebook’s data about your interests and demographics. If you never engage with the ads there is no information leakage.

It’s the difference between telling a random person “I’ll tell my gay friends about your party” and “Did you know that Bob is dating Steve?”.

So if you believe Facebook sells your information, then you also believe that Facebook is directly lying about it on a help page about that specific topic. Sometimes conspiracy theories are true, so it's not impossible that that's what happening, but it's not like Facebook is openly selling your information.

Until 2014 or so an app could request permission to view almost any data a user stores on Facebook. That's not great, but hey, you could argue it's not Facebook's fault that people don't understand permission prompts (I'd disagree with you, but...). But those same prompts allowed users to give away their friend's data, so absolutely anyone you're friends with could take some stupid personality test and give away your information in the process, and there was no way you'd even know.

Facebook said that they don't sell your information. Which is true -- they aren't a data broker. But they implicitly state that your data is shared, subject to the limited controls available. You cannot stop Amazon and Facebook from sharing, for example.

But what if you do?

That's not true.

I have never seen Facebook allowing large scale harvesting of their data.

And it would qualify as data breaches in places like EU which do not tolerate this sort of thing.

I'm no facebook fan by the way, but there's no reason for facebook to sell their most important asset when they can allow you to pay to use it, without ever seeing it

Not only conglomerates but anyone with the money and know-how. Example P&G proxy fight:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-procter-gamble-trian-inve...

Neubecker said he has seen several ads on his Facebook feed that link to Trian’s “Revitalize P&G” website and to videos of Peltz and former P&G Chief Financial Officer Clayton Daley, who is advising Trian.

The video of Peltz features him sitting in Trian’s Park Avenue, New York City headquarters, discussing P&G’s future, gripping a Trian-labeled coffee mug that reads “Sales up, expenses down.”

In response, P&G has called upon more than a century of product marketing experience with its own “Vote Blue” campaign.

One YouTube video begins with an image of P&G’s blue logo and a banner proclaiming “Every Single Vote Matters!”. A narrator and series of slick images offer step-by-step instructions, ending by asking viewers to vote for the blue proxy card and to throw Trian’s white card in the recycling bin.

Trian won this fight.

Please provide some evidence that anyone with money and know how can harvest tens of millions of accounts from Facebook.

Your example does not address this and seems just like normal Facebook targeting to me.

I don't think Facebook has a section where someone can talk about what stocks they might hold. So, if the HF was able to target specific people who owned P&G stocks then I think it was an efficient targeting, maybe not as much of scale of US elections but enough to turn the voting in their favor.

The data that this app obtained was far deeper than what Google can crawl e.g. what a person liked.

Even so, there is a significant difference between Coke trying to sell me a flavored soft drink and a firm tweaking my emotions to get me to abstain from voting with false information or to vote against my best interests with false information.

There are definitely people who are susceptible to psycho-graphic warfare and we need to protect them in order to protect our democracy.

This makes "enforcement" basically impossible because you can't have a news outlet without editorial decisions. A better way to go about it would be to try incentivize media outlets to make a good faith effort at "both sides" journalism, but members of both political sides have been attacking the media for doing just that since the 2016 election season.

Don't you think it would be better for you to take more than a cursory glance before commenting ?

Breitbart has had significant issues with fake news over its lifetime. Far more egregious and consistent than other any other news organisation not that I would necessarily call it one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News#Notable_stories

Where is this line that should be drawn, and who should draw it? Breitbart may have a higher frequency of “oops someone gave me bad info, or my reporter/editor made an unsubstantiated inference” events, but their audience is much smaller than the large outlets.

Better ban 24 hour news networks then. And any form of political advertising.

1. It is not normal marketing to have tens of millions of Facebook account data on your own private server. This isn't standard practice by any company large or small. Standard practice is to use Facebook's advertising system which does not reveal this data.

2. The wrongdoing wasn't just "breaching the terms of service" it was the transfer of account data from one party to another for the purposes of influencing an election.

3. It is not innuendo.

Only apps have limited access to the data that you agree to share in the app install dialog.

The article you linked does not even mention any of the companies.

You should read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...

Three particularly important points:

The guy who was contracted by CA to steal the data is from Russia.

He had previously undisclosed funding from the Russian government.

CA later tried to do business from a Russian oligarch.

Choice quote:

"There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”"

Sources on this?

Not hard to find information, although it is typically couched as brand reach and advertising spots. The big data sales side of FB and other sites is more sensitive and less overt

https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_per...

'Politicians running for office can be lucrative ad buyers. For those who spend enough, Facebook offers customized services to help them build effective campaigns, the same way it would Unilever NV or Coca-Cola Co. ahead of a product launch.

While Facebook declined to give the size of its politics unit, one executive said it can expand to include hundreds during the peak of an election, drawing in people from the company’s legal, information security and policy teams.'

It is harder to find information about FB's data sales policies (which are very opaque unless you speak to people high up in marketing large companies and their activities). FB's ad platform information is pretty transparent, but the quarterly numbers don't really add up for me based on spend by large firms like Procter & Gamble etc in those areas...

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences... https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/reference... https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/buying-ap... https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/targeting...

So you’re explicitly agreeing that you have no proof that Facebook is offering data for sale.

The quote you cite has nothing to do with the initial assertion: providing consultants that teach people how to use the ad manager is something completely different than selling PII.

Trump, Cambridge Analytica and how big data is reshaping politics - Gillian Tett in the FT https://www.ft.com/content/e66232e4-a30e-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c9...

The linked article, once again, provides no proof (or even mention) of any data being sold by Facebook. I have no idea why you keep piling on irrelevant articles.

That’s the exact opposite of Facebook selling them the data.

At the bottom it says to reach out to https://aboutthedata.com/ to see what data they have on you.

So I did. Then I scroll down to see "See and Edit Marketing Data about You. CLICK HERE" only to be redirected to a registration page that requires my US-based address and last 4 of SSN.

Talking about misled communication, or rather blunt deception, otherwise how the heck "click here to see data about you" lands me on registration page? I don't want to register, I want to see the data!

I’ve spent lots of time and money getting data out of FB.

You can pay to get anonymized topic data via DataSift and others, you can pay to run ads against users you have email addresses for (but you don’t get their data) or you can scrape (which is against the terms of service and they have an aggressive anti bot system to stop it - unlike Twitter).

Their political support systems are analytics support to ad buying.

That is an egregious violation of the guidelines and a bannable offense on HN. If the rest of the internet is losing its mind, that makes following HN's rules more important, not less.

> Let's not forget about that one time you

This also crosses into personal attack, which is not ok. Heated political arguments are bad enough without users trying to take each other out like this. Please don't do it on HN, regardless of how strongly you disagree.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account history unfortunately contains many examples of personal abuse. You've also broken the guideline against using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do these things, so would you please re-read the guidelines and use HN as intended from now on?

To those of you who disagree with me, keep this idea in the back of your mind for a while and remember it as you read comments. Make a serious effort to notice how many people know what other people's motives are for their beliefs, how they know the real reason for certain policy decisions, how they know what Putin or Trump are thinking and what they are going to do in the future, how they know China is going to fail now that they've gone full-on communist dictatorship (because history "guarantees" it), etc.

I honestly don't think I am imagining this, I think something very historically significant is happening to the psychology of the public.

Isaac Asimov, Column in Newsweek (21 January 1980)