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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

I am really puzzled by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It's not particularly savory, but is there something happening here that it wasn't basically already known about how Facebook worked? By the protests of their own executive, the system was working as designed, and at worst Cambridge Analytica misled them about how they intended to use the data, right? There was no actual security breach here, as far as I can understand it.

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There doesn't have to be a security breach for it to be a very bad example of using data collected in one way for a completely different purpose. It violates the 'lawful basis for processing' part of privacy legislation.

Which US legislation?

That app collected data on many more than just US residents so more than just US legislation applies. This is one of those pesky little problems of doing stuff 'on the internet', especially when you start doing stuff that is purposefully or accidentally illegal.

Besides that they apparently also used similar trickery in their consultancy for the Brexit side.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/26/pressure-gr...

This is far from over.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/plenty...

Cambridge Analytica are in the UK. Which is why the Information Commissioner got a warrant to search their offices.

No. I know at least one political consultancy that does a similar work in Spain, although I only know they work with data, use micro targeting and is run by a sociologist.

Who said anything about a security breach? Most of the controversy has been about the company influencing elections using data scraped from people (and their friends) unaware of what the data was being used for.

The degree to which it influenced the election is questionable. Despite all the headlines, I haven't yet seen any convincing analysis of the impact of facebook on the election (I'm not sure how one would even go about doing so). So far it seems like it's just a convenient vehicle for people that dislike the outcome of the election to express indignation.

Don't be naive

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762

Can you point to the part of that article containing evidence of to what degree they affected the election?

The admission by the company executive.

That's interesting. How would he know the degree to which he influenced the election? Believing any claims to somehow fact rather than plain old self-promotion seems rather naive, or am I missing something?

Even if we presume those sentiments are completely sincere and disinterested, I don't know why we should believe he is an authority on US elections whose claims can simply be accepted at face value.

I would tend to agree.

It's often not hard to convince people of something they want to believe.

This is obviously unmeasurable - there isn't convincing analysis because there can't be convincing analysis, as you admit.

The fact that people were willing to spend an amount of money that breached electoral law in the UK, and presumably even more in the US, suggests that there was some reason for them to do so. This happened only because experts in this field believed it would influence the outcome of the election.

That's your evidence.

It became a "problem" because it helped Trump win.

This is exactly it. At least it stops the news from droning on and on about Russia.

I thought Clinton spent large amounts of money on data and the Democrats admitted the data was bad or at least that was their excuse. How much did CA pay for this data? I still find it crazy that Trump campaign spent 30% of what Hillary did and still won. The Russians used 100k$ worth of ads to sway the election. This stuff doesn't t add up.

Do you have any sources for your claim about how the Clinton campaign acquired FB data and how they used it? Was any of it acquired fraudulently and/or in violation of FB's ToS, like CA's data was?

Sigh....the technical legality of obtaining the data is not the point of contention. Do you think that is what this is about, whether CA "broke the law"?

Do you have any sources for your claim that the parent poster claimed the democrats purchased Facebook data?

This is a thread about how CA acquired and used data from Facebook, so I assume the parent comment was trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison. The alternative is that the poster was disingenuously trying to imply a false equivalence.

I said she spent money on data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/hillary-clinton-dnc-...

It doesn't have to add up, most people are too busy with their real lives to manually search and find reliable details (what we get from the media is not reliably unbiased or true), and then read and understand them, so they believe what they see and hear repeated over and over on the TV, radio, and newspaper: the American President is controlled by Vladimir Putin. Even most smart people don't seem to care about actual evidence.

We can freely infer things just from reading his own Twitter feed. Such as the silence of the Salisbury poisoning vs. the instant reaction to other UK terrorist incidents.

Oh please. His administration threw out 60 ambassadors in response to this very incident, and this is hardly the first instance of them acting against Russian interests. This paranoid Manchurian Candidate stuff needs to die already.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-tal...

Except he didn’t. He told russia to replace their 60 diplomats. That’s pretty much ,in relation, the equivalent of a threat to bitch slap you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/world/europe/trump-russia...

> Trump and Western Allies Expel Scores of Russians in Sweeping Rebuke Over U.K. Poisoning

> WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russians from the United States on Monday, adding to a growing cascade of similar actions taken by western allies in response to Russia’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

> [...]

> On March 15, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a series of Russian organizations and individuals for interference in the 2016 presidential election and other “malicious cyberattacks,” its most significant action against Moscow until Monday.

> [...]

> Mr. Trump has said that, despite its denials, Russia was likely behind it. “It looks like it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 15, adding that he had spoken with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

You have to wonder how far Trump has to go before something he does is considered hostile to Russia. Does he have to nuke Saint Petersburg?

https://twitter.com/OrenDorell/status/979764266646622209

Russian news confirmed it and later us state department.

Russian news https://amp.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=3001089&3001089&3001089=&id...

Business insider https://www.google.se/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/theres-a...

From this you infer that he is under the control of Putin? He is pro Russia no doubt, but I don't think that is what's being asserted by the media. I'd prefer they stick to facts, do you disagree?

He's "pro-Russia" in the sense that he seems to have some sort of admiration for Putin's tough-guy persona, but I can't see much other sense in which that's meaningfully true.

I agree, but unfortunately that minor inconvenience won't stop newspaper reporters from writing evidence free articles implying the contrary.

Yes, that's a good point. Russia, Cambridge Analytica... anything that allows people to feel like the Trump phenomenon is a nefarious foreign import rather than homegrown. I'm no fan of Trump, but I'm incredibly dismayed that all the Democrats have talked about since he was elected is "Russian meddling."

This answer ignores some known details of the story. Cambridge Analytica didn't just buy targeted ads from Facebook. They used a sockpuppet to release a fake "take a personality profile" app, which then allowed them to gather tons of data against the Facebook terms of use.

The CEO of Cambridge Analytica has also been recorded telling a (fake) potential client that they routinely blackmail people using prostitutes and who knows what else.

So unless you can show that Clinton's campaign was doing the same things, your claim is a false equivalence.

I find it hard to believe that the American public is up in arms about someone violating Facebook's terms of use.

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