
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg conspicuously absent as data scandal grows - napoleond
http://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newsletter-maduro-petro-bedawi-zuckerberg-1.4583832
======
Firebrand
So I think Zuck's presidential campaign is officially toast at this point.

Now what?

~~~
delecti
I think it was unlikely he'd have gone Republican, and Democrats would have
been wary about going with a billionaire in 45's wake. He was probably a non-
starter already.

~~~
protomyth
> Democrats would have been wary about going with a billionaire in 45's wake

The draft Oprah people would disagree with that statement.

~~~
api
We need a constitutional amendment banning anyone with a TV show from being
president.

~~~
liberte82
What about YouTube channels?

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protomyth
I would suppose with a video like
[https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/status/976087974109736960](https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/status/976087974109736960)
floating around, it does make for some uncomfortable questions.

You cannot keep saying you are neutral when you clearly get outraged when one
side does something you let the other side do. Particularly when you shouldn't
of let anybody do it in the first place.

~~~
dglass
Yeah, the lid was blown wide open and if Facebook has to answer to why it
turned a blind eye to this Cambridge Analytica scandal they should also have
to answer to how their platform was used by the Democrats in 2008 and 2012.

It's well known that the Obama campaign used big data to gain an advantage in
those elections. It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with
Facebook's data too.

~~~
wavefunction
>It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with Facebook's data
too

Crafting lies into propaganda? No, I don't see them doing the same thing at
all.

~~~
basedecode
Obama did the same thing in 2012.

"The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it
used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him
at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They
started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the
campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met
with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook
friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt,
the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25
percent declined, St. Clair said.

Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and
faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential
donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to
get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They
found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s
ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters
who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the
top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who
were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook
acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now
wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really
we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really
great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said."
[1]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-
campaig...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-
digital-masterminds-cash-in.html)

~~~
hedora
What you describe is fundamentally different than building psychological
profiles of the entire electorate using stolen data, then finding mentally
unstable swing voters, and serving them self-deleting, libelous advertisements
designed to exploit their mental illness to get them to vote your way.

That is the service that Cambridge Analytica sells. It was used to swing the
brexit vote and by the Trump campaign.

CA was replicating this strategy on multiple continents until Facebook
(hopefully) pulled the plug.

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sigi45
If Zuckerberg would ever has the balls to do right with facebook...

He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having
any special character or much of experience.

~~~
jrs235
>He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having
any special character or much of experience.

I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

~~~
newsat13
What does it conclude?

~~~
jrs235
Most people considered successful today, are successful due to [some] luck,
not just hard work yada yada yada. It made me finally realize and understand
what some people call privilege.

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bitmapbrother
Zuck isn't absent. He's just following the tried and true method of letting
enough time pass by so that the public loses interest and moves on to the next
big thing. Three months from now this will all be forgotten and it's back to
business as usual.

~~~
hedora
What? Trump will be out of office, and brexit cancelled in three months?

(I actually agree with your point, but think it is wishful thinking on FB’s
part)

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RugnirViking
Could somebody give me a breakdown of the allegations? What exactly have they
done with the data.

~~~
criley2
The allegations against Facebook are that for a period of several years they
turned a blind eye to rampant Developer abuse of their API, allowing Political
organizations (and others) to download massive amounts of Facebook user data.

Facebook also continuously marginalized their Chief Security Officer who
routinely complained about the API loopholes, were caught informing employees
of a "don't ask don't know therefore no liability" quasi-official policy
towards the widespread abuse (don't rock the advertising/business boat), and
eventually reduced the CSO's staff from 120 to 3 and role to what appears to
be "tweeting pre-approved pro-Facebook messages".

The FTC is now investigating if Facebook has violated it's 2011 FTC privacy
mandate, something which carries fines in the millions per event range I
believe (i.e. trillions of USD in fines for this size of privacy mandate
failure)

~~~
RandomInteger4
What I don't understand is, why would they turn a blind eye to abuse of their
developer API if they offer their API for free and they sell user data --
which I assume is anonymized? -- to advertisers? Wouldn't that diminish
revenue if advertisers could have just used the API to get around this?

Please correct any mistaken assumptions I might have about their business
model.

~~~
nemothekid
This is all speculation:

1\. While the data is valuable, you still need a medium for your ads. One
without the other is way less valuable. If you had user data for 50M users,
today, how would you monetize it? Facebook had the News Feed and Instagram
giving you a stage to operate on that data.

2\. Following 1.), a lot of that "stolen" data was used to buy more effective
FB Ads. Cambridge Analytica didn't "steal" the user data to sell to blackhats.
They used it to craft messaging on Facebook.

All in all, user data is relatively worthless to most advertisers unless its
actionable. Even if facebook gave you the data, the fastest way of monetizing
it was to buy more facebook ads. It's relatively more difficult to extract
user data from FB and then use that data to buy Twitter ads.

~~~
RandomInteger4
That's a really good point with respect to advertisers. Even on the competitor
level, I'm not sure how they would use that data.

So worst case scenario is a conflict of interests between user privacy and
business revenue. I think if Facebook wants to take effective action to
correct this, they'll go beyond simply restricting the API, and give users
options to limit which data of theirs they want to let their friends expose to
third parties, because even when the API is shut down, someone willing to
violate the terms of service can do quite a bit of data harvesting using fake
profiles and social engineering to get people to add those profiles if some of
the data seems plausible.

Granted, this method is slower, but still possible, and I think currently
being exploited based on friend requests I've received through friends. I've
asked friends if they knew the person, and they said they weren't sure, but
they might because the information seemed similar; this is the same concept as
a phone call spam technique known as "Neighbor Spoofing".

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frgtpsswrdlame
Companies give the silent treatment all the time but add on how terrible
Zuckerberg is at public relations and even I really have trouble blaming
Facebook for keeping him stashed away right now.

------
ilamont
He's finally learning that you can't duck, spin, and charm your way out of
everything.

~~~
badcede
Charm?

~~~
ilamont
_On Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg is expected to meet Thursday with Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid, Senate Republican leaders, Senate Commerce panel Chairman
Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and other committee members, and the top four House
Republican leaders. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is also hosting a
meeting with Zuckerberg Thursday focused on immigration, according to a
Democratic aide. Democratic Reps. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, Jim Clyburn of
South Carolina, Xavier Becerra and Zoe Lofgren of California, Joe Crowley and
Steve Israel of New York, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and John Yarmuth of
Kentucky have been invited to the gathering. A House Republican aide said that
while immigration may come up with Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans,
it is not the sole purpose of their session._
[https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mark-zuckerberg-
dc-09...](https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mark-zuckerberg-dc-096933)

And in other countries too:

Facebook's Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-facebook-
idUSKCN0WL...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-facebook-
idUSKCN0WL0KB)

Facebook's German Charm Offensive:
[https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/facebooks-
german-c...](https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/facebooks-german-charm-
offensive-453984)

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product50
Personally, I think he is doing the right thing. The more fb communicates the
more the press is going after them. At this pt, fb should just stop
communicating as that will give media less fodder to go after since they tend
to dig into smaller details anyways to get more views.

A good counter example is Twitter which had equal if not more exposure on
Russian ads but they have kept mum. And no one is going after them.

~~~
9889095r3jh
> Personally, I think he is doing the right thing.

Right for who?

> fb should just stop communicating as that will give media less fodder

Oh I see. Right for Facebook's public image. Wrong for their customers which
have a right to know what the hell Facebook has been doing with their data.

~~~
odorousrex
I think you mean "Users" instead of "Customers".

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

~~~
9889095r3jh
You're correct, and I should have made that clear. Unfortunately it's too late
to edit my comment.

