Re:Zuckerberg Has No Way Out of Facebook's Quagmire
by AndrewKemendo on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @09:07PM
(#16644470)
1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached.
At the end of the day in both cases, the analytics group (CA or Obama for America) obtained the data of millions of users that did not directly and explicitly authorize their data to be analyzed. ~50M in the case of CA and ~180M in the case of OFA.
Neither CA nor OFA broke any statues or laws, they both worked around loopholes and tricks in Facebook's TOS & API.
2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news.
I haven't yet heard this exact argument made for why this specific case was bad, though I suspect it's implied, but it seems like that is just a piece of the problem. Interestingly however, the contents of the targeted ads seems immaterial to the most important argument which is that this was a "breach" of private user data - a completely separate argument.
Your last point I think sums it up well, Trump and his cronies used the system against itself and people don't like it. Full stop. It wasn't the fact that he used it, because others did, it was the fact that he used it in a way that we didn't expect or like (not that it broke laws).
I mean say what you will but it truly embodies the hacker ethos.
At the end of the day in both cases, the analytics group (CA or Obama for America) obtained the data of millions of users that did not directly and explicitly authorize their data to be analyzed. ~50M in the case of CA and ~180M in the case of OFA.
Neither CA nor OFA broke any statues or laws, they both worked around loopholes and tricks in Facebook's TOS & API.
2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news.
I haven't yet heard this exact argument made for why this specific case was bad, though I suspect it's implied, but it seems like that is just a piece of the problem. Interestingly however, the contents of the targeted ads seems immaterial to the most important argument which is that this was a "breach" of private user data - a completely separate argument.
Your last point I think sums it up well, Trump and his cronies used the system against itself and people don't like it. Full stop. It wasn't the fact that he used it, because others did, it was the fact that he used it in a way that we didn't expect or like (not that it broke laws).
I mean say what you will but it truly embodies the hacker ethos.