Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
cm2012 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
cm2012 · · focus · HN ↗
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154
JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
jrflowers · · focus · HN ↗