anonnel

A source on ancient mythos not having a basis in science or facts? Or that they served political purposes in their time?

That’s really epic :)

Well I don’t know if it lost (Google) revenue (interested in understanding how if actually so? maybe missing something), but yeah it was definitely worth a lot of money to anyone who knew of it as a 0-day, and would have been lost traffic/revenue for the serps being bumped down.

This is a pretty cool exploit.

That isn’t very hard to understand.

The implication could be that democracy is in real danger. Beyond the ease of swaying public opinion and effecting traditional elections, mass "voting" on social media provides an alternative infrastructure for political "consensus" which could replace traditional voting in a worst-case situation.

Just a scenario: Say you want to galvanize an entire population into submitting to autocratic rule. It could be done like so -

1) Grab the attention of the public with a salacious controversy. Bolster widespread memes and juvenile conversation regarding that controversy on social media, engaging a large share of the population.

2) Perform some action which causes street protests (fire a well known investigator, etc.) Use social media to brigade violence on the protestors. "On the street" protesting dwindles as people would rather be safe, causing protest and attention to move online.

4) The online realm would now have high attention, split into a contrived binary contest: protest-related content versus salacious controversy-related content. At this point it is easy to start to drown out protest content by brigading salacious memes and cracking normalizing jokes.

5) As the population watches this happening, start hacking power outages in cities which have the most protest-related content, causing riots and chaos in those regions. Seeing this, hold-out regions will convert for the sake of their own safety. As hold-outs are marginalized, their scale becomes more manageable and it becomes possible to direct energy toward individuals.

6) People begin to understand that the online vote is basically a demand for loyalty at the threat of violence. Videos of Hold-out individuals being attacked begin to surface.

  ... without going further down a Black Mirror-esque rabbit hole, I just mean to point out the worst-case type danger that the apparatus of social media and internet tracking can present. The scale of social control that could be on the horizon should be quite concerning.

no, myself included.

On this forum you are sorrounded by people with backgrounds in data storage and networking. Any one of them will tell you there can be no reliable “forensic” assurance the data was not copied somewhere by any number of methods, even for a recent timeframe, let alone 5 years ago. It’s a ridiculous idea on its face.

Oh I see. That makes more sense. (Oof, that moment you realize that you are the wildebeest carcass in a metaphor)

So someone is trying to get journalisim to be branded as “traditional media” now.

The implication is “old and busted”, when in reality they have modern widely distributed websites which are as contemporary as any alternative medias being inferred ... which are what exactly? Twitter?

“Journalism media” seems to be an appropriate counter.

FB is far from being a victim of lions or a carcass.

If the metaphor you are trying to paint is a struggle is between Journalism Media and Social Media, I totally disagree with the side you’re picking.

They are well aware there is no way to assure they haven’t copied data 5 years ago. Pointing that out with rightful indigence is not “being a hater”. (which isn’t a trope that belongs in reasonable conversation)

It’s a different scale only in the timeframe of a single campaign. 3P trackers have an *ongoing central vantage over many campaigns, giving them data which they accumulate and sell to each other, causing leaked “private” data to accrete and spread in essentially a viral fashion.

The resulting dataset over even short periods (< 1 yr) time is comparable to a total datadump, including an accurate social graph. A “very specific pivacy concern” it is not.

A “forensic test” to check that they didn’t copy and hang on to some data in 2013 ... well I’m reassured.

It’s not possible for them to keep targeting data to themselves.

Targeted campaign products leak data about the user’s targeted attributes by their very nature.

If you want FB’s targeting data, simply buy targeted campaigns and associate the target attributes with the users who click once they are on your server. At scale, the targeting data is transparent.

Big ad analytics companies and ad exchanges can and do basically sit in the center of many campaigns and slurp up the targeting data which is naturally leaking from FB by virtue of their selling capaigns based on those targets.

Whether they want to or not, they are selling their data.

Edit: Care to reply instead of downvote? Is everything above not true?

Even with their data policies, FB (and any ad platform) enables massive data-mining by the third parties which host the ad exchanges and destinations.

And microtargeting can be abused (or just plain used, depending on your perspective) to infer only additional data by incorporating it into the 3P analysis once users click and start loading non-FB content. Microtargeting by its nature leaks information about the target segments ...

Figuring out the data FB uses to microtarget is simply a matter of buying enough ads, or getting in the middle of enough campaign-to-user relationships (as a central 3P ad exchange or tracking service).

Most people are buying ads for people to see. Some others, however, are using the platform as access to user’s extensive 3P data, once they click and are shuffled through multiple shady ad exchanges gathering and selling data, including the social graph.

Some others, like CA and ilk, also get easy access to user’s psychometric data, by embedding the psychometrics into A/B tested ad content.

The adage “you are the product” has only become more true as FB has advanced, whether by their intended or explicit policies or not.

2018’s 3P data and tracking tech no longer needs to violate FB policy to do what was done in 2013.

FB provides a platform for ads, sure, but it can be used for way more than just ads.

3P tracking can infer who (even specifically) is viewing ads and it knows the social graph by other means. It can also do effective mass psychometric tests. A/B testing infrastructure can be used for more than just optimizing ads ... all of the psychometric dimensions tested by Kogan’s 2013 app can be expressed as embedded imagery and messaging in ads, and the same types of tests can operate at the same scale by integrating 3P data and tracking (some of which certainly originates from policy-compliant FB apps) which already knows the social graph beyond what FB will allow a single app or ad to draw.

> The house of cards is falling.

Or, perhaps the castle is reaching the next phase of construction, where users are supposed to have an appropriate level of fear.