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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

> It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government.

Who’s the enemy here? The Russian government scraping Facebook, or the company that’s making such things possible?

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If their intention is to subvert American democracy, then yes, the Russian government is the enemy in this case.

Facebook is subverting American democracy by censoring news that's outside of the status quo. They're now censoring American media as well [1].

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...

Has American democracy been contacted out to Facebook? FYI Google created search by scraping sites.

Google never created search. According to Andreessen they were the 23rd company he saw. And by then there were established controls to stop Google from indexing your sites i.e. robots.txt.

These Russian companies are not following the rules Facebook has set so it's not really analogous to Google.

Not obeying robots.txt is at most a civil matter, such as Craigslist vs. 3Taps (largely unsettled btw, because internet is public by design). My question still stands.

The article is about a foreign government using data sold (or given for free) by an American anti-privacy company to build a facial recognition database. We seem to be plenty capable of subverting our own democracy without anybody’s help.

I was about to say, "you can't be serious," but upon further reflection..

The answer is obviously the Russian government.

Or just a private firm[0], since models need training data and Facebook has a truly staggering amount, all pre-tagged. There is also a small amount of irony in the fact that Facebook's initial incarnations were pre-seeded with scraped data from Harvard student websites.

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0. For example: https://www.businessinsider.com/ntechlab-google-facial-recog...

So what about the American and Western companies whose accounts haven't been removed and are doing this too?

Social media monitoring is a big business worldwide, many of the largest have longstanding government contracts. Facial profiles for the people you are targeting is only an api call away.

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