So long as the news-story "Putin elected Trump" exists, this isn't going away. Only once we're sure that it's only "our guys" can use Facebook to manipulate public opinion will this go away.

That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...

Do you think if the situation was reversed like Hillary was elected because Chinese hackers used FB, fake news etc the situation would be different? If yes why is that? I am not from US so I do not understand why that would be true since the 2 camps are very balanced.

How big is the group of US citizens that dislike both Trump and Hilary and would have been similarly outraged regardless of who would have used this tactics.

I'm also not from the US but from following US politics the two competing sides seem to react to different types of outrage.

With Obama in power and the GOP "in opposition" you have this "low brow" story around Obama's US citizenship. With Bill Clinton you had a "low brow" scandal around sex and Monica Lewinsky. These seem to provoke the GOP base on nationalistic and religious levels.

Meanwhile, with Trump in power and Dems in opposition, you have a "high brow" story around fake news and Russian-manipulated elections, despite Hillary also have a "Russian scandal" in the closet https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174.... Seems this story appeals well to the Dem base.

So I'd expect if Hillary had one, a Chinese hacker story would be too "high brow" to create outrage with the GOP base. You'd probably have some other low brow story being echoed by Fox News e.g. Pizzagate.

There's also the "low brow" (?) one with Stormy Daniels though, as well as the supposed video where Trump gets pissed on by Russian prostitutes.

The Daniels case just ended, with her pretty much admitting there's no evidence. Another case of trolling IMO; first we had fake news, lately we have trolling, where a SHOCKING! revelation is announced and talked about for a week (remember that memo?), everyone in the media focuses on it and makes a lot of possible scenarios, aaand then it turns out it wasn't a serious thing. But there's been an impact already.

The Stormy Daniels legal case is still active AFAIK.

Well the low brow Stormy story is the current big Trump story on Reddit. I think politics itself has regressed somewhat nowadays and no matter who is in power, you will hear such stories about them

I am not from US but I want this FB thing to be kept into the light and some changes done, when it happens in smaller countries there is no chance of any change to happen.

I'm not even sure it's about like/dislike. Trump winning the election was a huge surprise, even to some Trump supporters. Many people are looking for a reason to "explain" the election of Trump. It makes stories about Russian meddling much easier to believe and experience outrage over.

Had it been Hillary, I don't think there would've been this kind of outrage. She was the "obvious" choice for president. It would be hard to believe a story about Chinese hackers since she didn't need that kind of help anyway. If it did come out that there was some kind of foreign influence, it would've been much easier to downplay it as negligible since the election of Hillary wouldn't have been much a surprise.

> a few million profiles deleted

Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.

First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.

This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.

You need to just remove it from your phone. I promise you won't miss it. I did this a few years ago. It's freed up so much more time to Reddit.

I never facebooked. You need to do much more than that to remove their tracking, since many pages have a Facebook like button, which tells Facebook what you are browsing based on your ip, which they undoubtedly already know is you.

They track you whether you join or not.

I actually got my girlfriend on to Signal because of all of this. Her last use case was FB Messenger to talk to friends out west on the cheap. I got her to install Signal and she discovered a bunch of people on her contact list were already using it, including her boss. As soon as she tried it and found out there were video and audio chat as well, she was really excited.

There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.

> Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.

There are browser plugins which automatically delete cookies when a tab is closed. They work wonderfully as automatic log out by default.

I use a separate Chrome profile specifically for Facebook, to keep its cookies quarantined.

Facebook will analyse this to get a better psychological profile of you and serve you more tech-related and privacy-centered ads. /s

I'm not so sure that /s is necessary here.

Maybe a bit off topic:

I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore...

I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...)

Is there a good alternative for these 2 things:

- Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends? - Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)

You could upload the photos to S3 and share links to the friends that are interested (i.e. those who text/call and ask "How was your vacation?"). There's not really a need to post the photos for any of your FB friends to see - most of them don't care.

For discussing plans, you have the following options:

1. Group email thread

2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption)

3. Conference call

4. Slack group

5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy)

6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)

Same. When they changed the algorithm to show things other than my most recent friends updates, I removed the FB app from my phone.

I still use FB because I have a lot of international friends, but removing the FB app and replacing it with the site.

I only use Messenger for about 3 people right now, so that's going soon too.

I'm aboard this train as well. Removed both the app and messenger from my phone. Should I need to access messenger on foot I can use mbasic.facebook.com (sneaky, because the regular website disables messenger to push for app adoption, which is another button trigger for me)

I know I won't reliably remember to log out of Facebook, so I just limit my fb use to whatever my backup browser is.

To further improve your FB experience you should delete the account itself.

Source: Deleted my FB account 8 years ago

I'm much more optimistic. I suspect increase in social network investments and viable replacement coming out ~year from now. It's not very hard to copy main FB features, but baking privacy in will take some effort.

To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.

Please recall that the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US. I'm not sure the scandal has been that much publicized or that their global image has changed much to be honest.

Here in India it was on the front pages of most of the popular english newspapers.

My dad, who is 50+ years old, knew about Cambridge Analytica few months from now because of a documentary related to Donald Trump's win; he deleted his Facebook then and there.

However, I'm not sure that a majority of the people in India really care about the shady privacy permissions Facebook has slyly made them accept.

> the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US

49% of Facebook's 2017 worldwide revenues came from the U.S. and Canada [1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118... page 37

Yes but Facebook is driven by the network effect, and only 230M users are from the US, compared to the 2.2B global.

Americans are subsidising Facebook for the rest of the world? It seems like we should get more for our money.

You mean American corporations. American users aren't Facebook's customers.

All users are just product to Facebook.

It could well be that Facebook's American corporate customers are more interested in worldwide product than domestic product.

If they have more revenue per person in the US it doesn't mean that they are losing money in their international business.

My partner was born in Germany and most of her family still lives there so she keeps up with German news. She is under the impression that the scandal is getting more publicity and generating more outrage in Germany than it is here in Canada.

Here's the problem I see with this though.. One of the main values any social network provides is exploiting your network activity and social graph, and so it must be allowed into your personal/private sphere (at least to some degree).

And I use the word "exploiting" in a neutral sense here, because it can be good, in the sense of using all this data for your benefit to give you relevant and timely updates about your friends and surroundings, and let you know about things that interest you (i.e. why most people use Facebook today).

But, by its nature, that same data can also be used against you, exploited by marketers, advertisers, governments, etc..

So how do you get one without risking the other? How do you allow a social network to capture and analyze all this personal data about you - in order to return a valuable service - but then be totally (or reasonably) sure that your data will be protected and also not used against you?

Someone else mentioned HIPAA and other data protection laws that exist for medical data. I know regulation isn't a trendy topic in tech, but maybe there does need to be some clear codified rules about what companies can do with our personal/social data and what the consequences are for misuse or neglect.

Do you mean Facebook the platform or the company? The product has been slowly declining for a while now, losing (potential) users to Instagram. But since Instagram and Whatsapp belong to the same company, they likely won't collapse.

FB will acquire or crush any upcoming social networks. They actively watch out for any rising upstarts and have a lot of cash on hand.

The problem I see is that there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data. It will require a fundamentally different business model (e.g., subscription based). Maybe a philanthropic model like Wikipedia. If any of the many billionaires on Earth donated a few billion to it, it could be self-funded forever.

> there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data

There are plenty of decent business models between selling ads and pulling all stops to maximize ARPU [1]. Regulation could allow private social networks to flourish without abusing users or publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPU

I really hope this is not the case.

Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.

If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.

Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.

We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.

> a few million profiles deleted

Reference please?

It's a worst case estimate of what may happen as the fallout of this fiasco.

Ok. My estimate is that your estimate is too high :-)