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Comment by Mortiffer | Hacker News Reader

while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company

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It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".

Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting.

Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.

One? Have you been not been paying attention to the last decade of internet advertising?

I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought.

I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?

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