I understand that the HN consensus desperately wants your statement to be true, but that doesn’t make it so.

Since there appears to be some confusion (it took me a few passes as well), I interpreted your statement as the following:

> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a discount from what previously only large nation-state actors could afford.

The implication, if I'm reading correctly, is that any mom-and-pop millionaire could practically launch the same sort of campaign on the platform. Or perhaps more succinctly and dramatically,

Facebook commoditized the weaponization of data.

Am I understanding correctly?

We saw a successful candidate from outside that space because the efficiency of Facebook's ad platform, plus a unique and possibly Russian-intelligence-supplied savvy in wielding it, obviated the need for (as much) donor consensus to achieve a winning level of influence. I don't know about "any mom and pop millionaire," but you need less of them in your court than you used to.

That scandal that has everyone up in arms is Facebook's complicity in Trump's election, which is a consequence of its enablement of extremists in general, which is a consequence of its ad platform's cost-efficiency, which is a consequence of its troves of user data. But it's not data that started a drumbeat of public intellectuals calling for heavy-handed intervention in the New York Times editorial section (a fingerprint we've seen before). It's influence. The establishment is (correctly) not trying to engage populism in a meme war. It's fighting back the way it knows how.

Through the application of advanced techniques and data, Facebook enabled the circumvention of that at a shockingly lower cost than in the past.

What effects though? The idea that CA’s strategies were effective has been disproven [1].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

I’m curious exactly what you mean by this. If you’re saying that their paid ads system works well, that isn’t specific to political influence. Further, the recent scandal was over data abuse by third parties, and the reported effects of that have been proven to be dramatically overblown [1], so I assume that isn’t what you’re referring to. Finally, the notion that enough votes to change the election results were suppressed/changed by some Russian fake news articles mostly written in broken English is laughable.

So what exactly are you referring to here?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

The most recent wave of Facebook's ongoing scandal revealed that data abuse by third parties was one implementation detail of Facebook's complicity in Trump's election. Facebook's troubles (calls for breakup, regulation, etc) started over its crime of making political influence too readily available to extremist ideologies.

Also, not to get political, but would you be this upset over it if the other side had won and it turned out that they had employed a similar strategy (even if it had been proven ineffective, as CA’s strategy has)?

Fact: the "wrong" candidate was elected (according to >50% of voters and >80% of American billionnaires). (wrong between quotes because obviously in a democracy there is no wrong election outcome, and that's a very good thing indeed, even if it is not what I would have liked)

Fact: he did so while being dramatically outspent by the other candidate (and with pretty much all tv stations supporting one candidate with the one exception being Fox, which cannot reasonably be accused of uniform support for Trump)

Fact: The entire bay area is up in arms about this, and has shown itself prepared to destroy people's careers over this.

(and yes, it was the economic situation created by Bush, and (much more so) by Obama, I get it. However, most voters do not get this)

Now you're right. Even if the Russians supported Trump, it cannot have been a great factor. Fake news is another issue that I find hard to believe swayed the election. And, truth be told, there is both democrats and republicans rigging votes, it's not going to make a huge difference.

You're right, BUT, seeing this, as a democrat in California or Florida, requires realizing

1) that they've lost. They were in power and fucked up the economy bad enough that they lost the election. The thing about elections is simple: there is always a change of the guard if the economy does badly. Always.

2) (on the part of large tv stations, newspapers, etc) that they've lost their influence. That Jeff Bezos' money spent on the Washington Post was just wasted money. That the owners of NBC, CBS, ABC ... cannot influence people more than facebook can.

3) Have you seen any interviews with Hillary's election team ? I mean I voted for her (DESPITE the war comments, wtf Hillary ?), but damn, these people are NOT taking a "live and let live" attitude here. At one point I thought she was going to attack the interviewer (for asking "why she failed" after she explained that they didn't fail, they were robbed).

So if you haven't noticed yet, people, especially in the Bay Area, are attacking anything and everything that is even remotely perceived as being on the side of Trump. And of course, Facebook has/had Peter Thiel, and nobody is happy with him.

You are right, the fault is with the democrats and how they handled governing, and how they handled the election, not with Facebook, Russians, Peter Thiel or whoever else will get blamed next month. The fault is with them. They can either admit fault or attack these evil outsiders, and, well, clearly they don't agree the fault is with them.

Any conversation that even veers slightly in the direction of politics immediately gets prefaced with a warning that Trump got elected. And we all know, this is a warning that if you support him, for the love of God, keep your mouth shut (I'm convinced that this merely hides his support, and he therefore has a LOT more support than is generally thought. I mean between 1/3 and 1/4 voted for him in the heart of the Bay Area. Where are these people ?).

Personally I find blaming myself a very healthy attitude to failure. Step 1. It's my fault. Why ? Because what I do myself is the only thing I can change, and that's the only tool I have to create a different outcome next time. So that's where I need to focus my effort. And yes, I can attack who "made me fail", real or perceived, or with conspiracies, but it's not going to get me a different outcome, it'll simply cement in the failure.

Would you care to elaborate? I'm curious and not entirely sure what you mean by this, sorry.

> Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach.

I don't think OP is claiming they did, but rather that it was part of the evolution towards thinking of data as a liability rather than an asset.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

I'm so saddened to see that so many organizations have collected and overstepped their boundaries without justification.

There continues to be so much good, totally legitimate work to be done with data.

This was obvious. The only people who didnt see this in tech were the tech optimists.

Anyone else who has had to deal with humanity at large has warned that whatever was created would be used to help the powerful retain power.

The time for revolution was back in the 1990s. But that got lost in the baggage and dreams of being a unicorn.

This is just reversion to the mean, if anyone missed this, they havent developed the right balance of cynicism and optimism which helps identify the koolaid from the water

That is to say, I agree, it was obvious for a long time and information asymmetry has always been a tool of survival, advantage, control, etc. and not just in humans.

However, having lived through and been a tiny part of the "data revolution", and having seen some of the bad parts personally, as well as what we could do with data if everything was done in the open with good, clear intent and permission... that part of it still makes me sad.

I mean, the way the human race is going in general makes me sad, so yeah, perhaps I should not be surprised to see reality affect this area.

But, I'm still optimistic that some of us really are doing good and honest work with data and that there is still much more to be done.

Still, suffice to say, we've been slaughtering each other quite capably despite the level of technology we've been at.

The size of the company doesn't matter. One person with an API and a database can do as much damage as a massive company.

Source: i'm currently paid to create ML and data analytic clusters for startups and to give some advices on regulation.

Cheating can take the form of: pollution, privacy violations, abuses of human behavior, exploitation of natural resources, corruption, etc. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a single F500 company that isn't benefiting from some form of cheating that is inadequately regulated at present.

Look, corporation etc. etc. are just tools for humanity to deal with complexity. To break it down into parts which we can manage.

IF we had larger brains we would have bigger corporations.

If we were a hive intelligence, we would have different configurations of corporations.

But we would always create a tool to expand into complexity for the efficiency gains or productivity gains we get.

In short - EVERY tool made that gives an advantage moves the system onto the next level of complexity till we fail.

If you have small corporations, then they will band together to become quasi corporations.

It may not be a profit motive but governments' motives are sporadically focused on the public welfare at best.

It comes down to money in politics, where said money is a necessity to maintain an agent position within the system. This motive alone is enough to turn protagonist agents within the system into antagonist agents against the system.

I'd rather we make the government more focused and responsibilities more specific. We need to remove the incentives for throwing money into politics rather than try to play corruption whack-a-mole.

Company: "Merging this and that will benefit the customer." USGov: "Ok, good enough for me!"

That's the only reason why the media at large cares about FB's data leak right now. That's especially not something to trade over today since the leaky API was fixed in 2014 or something.

Considering all of the leaks/breaches that happen, FB is an outlier and not indicative unless something changes with regulations and the law.

It's like one of those 3d pictures. The "hidden" image was always there in plain sight. People just overlooked it until they stared at it hard enough.

Also, keep in the various oil disasters. Dealing in oil also comes with it's own risks. No need to switch from that analogy. In this light, likening data to radioactive materials seems to me like spreading fud...

If you can avoid it, don't collect it.

If you must collect it, destroy it as soon as possible.

If you must keep it, prepare to fork out for the best security and insurance against breaches.

And never, ever, share it.

I always thought this to be the key difference between the treatment of data in the USA and Europe. In Europe the culture of personal data protection is much more developed. In the USA it looks like citizens don't care and corporations abuse it to an absurd extent.

You can witness this by using any service for the first time: an American start-up will immediately subscribe you to their mailing list without asking any questions - the relevant info is (probably) in their Terms and Conditions. In Europe, you are most likely presented with a separate box that even cant't be selected by default. In some countries you need to have separate boxes for different scenarios of personal data use. These regulations clearly favor the user and upset the marketing folks. People often criticize the EU for bureaucracy, but I'm not even sure the USA has an office responsible for cases like this one, someone who cares and can intervene on behalf of the citizens.

Its half-life is very long, even decades after you can still find traces amount of it in the (under)ground.

That unless you enrich it to the point that you will be considered a rogue actor if you're not a member of The Club already.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...

THAT should be something that an individual can sue Facebook over.

Current price of Brent crude is $67.57, per ~300Lbs comes to ~22.5 cents per pound, or about 4.5 Lbs/USD$.

So you'd have to give about 100+Lbs of crude for your pound of Uranium ore

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...

Like so much other information, it sits on both sides of the balance sheet: Both an asset (if used correctly) and a liability (if collected and kept carelessly).

One important takeaway here is that if you think the "worries over tech firms" and their data are bad now, just wait until there's a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl level incident with all their data, like millions of identifable browsing records or grindr logs being dumped on an onion site somewhere.

Nothing will focus the mind of Facebook more than a declining stock price (and personal fortunes).

Until today you could leak users data and nothing would happen to the stock price.

Let's not pretend that there's no way to misapply this data and that a lot of people won't be incentivized to do so.

Your example perfectly illustrates the power of data, and the potential for revenue, negative and positive.