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Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case

423 points · 107 comments · pseudolus

cm2012 · 1790392207 · focus · HN ↗
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
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.
1. lesuorac · 1790416361 · focus · HN ↗
  Cambridge Analytica didn’t break the TOS.
  If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.
  1. Manuel_D · 1790440299 · focus · HN ↗
    My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
    > Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
    1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
    lesuorac · 1790465116 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).

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