Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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What was the cost of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the average user?

There were a lot of people in the data set, certainly, but how many can quantify damages?

If anything the Cambridge Analytica scandal was (disturbing) "win" for privacy loss: a lot of the Cambridge Analytica demographics markers were baked into the Facebook ad platform and became standard ad demographics soon after. The Cambridge Analytica scandal as played out looked like Facebook was stamping out bad privacy practices using its platform, but the real message was Facebook eliminating a competitor to their ad business by eliminating their access to Facebook's data. Lucky for Facebook the PR mostly stuck with the face value of "stamping out bad privacy practices", but even a lot of the people that saw/realized it was simply Facebook eliminating a competitor have mostly shrugged and continued to use Facebook (though Facebook did add some opt-outs at that much more modest uproar, versus all the loud thundering noise Cambridge Analytica got).

It may have influenced the result of the 2016 US presidential election.

IIRC, the Trump used that data set to send targeted ads to ~90M independent and republican voters. Independents got ads attacking Clinton and emphasizing prominent Trump supporters. Republicans got turnout-oriented ads.

Provided he won by less than 100k votes (and lost the popular vote), the cost to the median US citizen was likely quite large.

I didn’t know the same demographic markers had been baked into the platform. This is very concerning.

Cambridge Analytica had no way to buy Facebook ads, which were the primary platform of these micro-targeted ads during the campaign, specific to people in the gathered data they had without Facebook platform support. Facebook ads never had an API that you could just give it user IDs or emails and target them specifically (and one would hope that Facebook would eye any such ad campaign with suspicion even before scandals like Cambridge Analytica). Cambridge Analytica had to encourage Facebook to add most of its same demographic markers into the platform to pull that off. That's definitely one of those "it takes two to Tango" sort of things where if it wasn't in Facebook's platform, how did they target those ads in 2016?

Certainly they cross-compiled that data with other ad systems and phone lists and who knows what else, but given the scandal with respect to that specific campaign was primarily about their micro-targeted Facebook ad buys, Facebook is still left culpable as the platform owner at the end of the day.

But I'm of the belief that micro-targeted ads should be illegal in general, and all of the micro-targeting enabling ad platforms seriously questioned for what they've enabled in the last decade or so. The fact that they are generally acceptable and multi-billion dollar revenue generators is its own reminder of what this thread is about that the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.

I didn't know FB had been actively involved in the process, I thought they had just been criminally negligent regarding the amount of data third parties were allowed to gather.

> the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.

I know, anecdotally, I became half a pariah in my family for refusing to register and share pics of my kids on WhatsApp. That was after the FB purchase, but before they changed the terms of service. I didn't trust FB, and was ultimately proven right.

Semi-related to that, when Facebook did finally roll out it's opt out from certain ad demographics tools in I want to say 2018-ish they included a view of your own demographics (if you could find your way through Facebook's maze of Privacy Settings with many corridors all alike), a Slack I was in at the time and I went through all of our personal demographics and one lasting result of that conversation was renaming one of the channels to #friendsofexpats because "Friend of Expats" was the creepiest, almost threatening sounding demographic tag that we all seemed to share (among other creepy, almost threatening demographic tags that don't actually sound useful to non-evil advertising). Because that was memorialized in a channel name that one has stuck with me since.

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