
Facebook emails show internal concerns being raised about Cambridge Analytica - innovateee
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/23/facebook-really-doesnt-want-you-to-read-these-emails/
======
SpicyLemonZest
I don't really like the tone of this article. The linked document doesn't show
anything evil; they're not saying "haha look at this terrible secret we're
keeping" or "word came from above, let's not fix this problem" or anything
like that. It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might
be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months
because they couldn't figure out how to get more details.

They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to
be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the
issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the
company.

~~~
ggggtez
Maybe you haven't worked in a big company: someone raises a thread that one of
your users is crawling and stealing all of your data and you don't resolve it
for 3 months?

At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't
raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by _someone_
more quickly than that.

FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3
months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where
Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But
_multiple_ people knew, and there were _multiple_ email threads about it.

FB can't claim ignorance here.

~~~
smsm42
Some of the employees had concerns about what CA is doing. Which btw didn't do
much different from what many others were previously doing with FB data. That
doesn't mean it immediately rose to CEO level and everybody in top brass knew
everything about it. Of course, if whoever handled it knew then what they know
now - that it'd be such a public issue - they'd escalate faster, but they
didn't. As such, "Facebook knew" is a bit meaningless statement - "Facebook"
is not one person, it's very many persons, and knowledge propagated through
this number of persons over some time. They details how it happened may be
curious, but there's no additional proof of anything or refutation of the
statement that FB top brass didn't know about it - it very well may be that
some people knew, but didn't report (yet) it to FB top brass, because they did
not realize what exactly is happening and how important it is about to become.

~~~
soraminazuki
It doesn’t really matter how the chain of responsibility works within FB, or
how many people “knew” about the incident. FB handles an amount of extremely
personal data never seen before in human history. It’s their responsibility to
act as quickly as possible to protect such data.

------
tempsy
My issue with the whole CA debacle is that I’ve seen no proof that the
services they offered were actually effective in persuading anyone.

They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness
like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value
and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more
than some suspect personality data and your likes.

~~~
RandomTisk
And Obama or PAC's used the exact same tactics in 2012 it has been shown, but
nobody cared then because the home team was doing the doping and nobody knew
about them yet.

~~~
acgh213
This is an interesting claim and any information about this you could provide
would be helpful

~~~
colordrops
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-
digital-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-
machine-facebook-election)

------
wpietri
Naively I would think that at some point Facebook would say, "Hey, maybe we
should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here."

It really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter
can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation
while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will
obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has
become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.

~~~
smt88
It's easy to tell yourself you're not evil when you're one small person in an
organization comprising thousands (or millions) of people. It would be
happening with or without you, right? You didn't decide to do these evil
things, and not _everything_ the organization does is evil.

Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands
of people telling themselves this same thing.

I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to
get into politics. I just want to work on cool code."

He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain
from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act
of choosing the side that's winning.

~~~
hos234
Guilt tripping and shaming your friend isn't productive. He is just going to
get defensive or feel bad. People when pushed into that state of mind don't
exactly effect change or are open to change.

~~~
daveFNbuck
If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. If you think
it's bad to work at Facebook, you want people who work at Facebook to feel bad
about working there. This will tend to make them more interested in leaving
the company.

If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work
at where people won't force politics on you for working there.

~~~
hos234
Guilt and shame are stone age tools to get people to be obedient and fit into
domination based hierarchies. Lot of cavemen still use them. But this is not
the stone age and there are better ways of getting things done. The Outcomes
speak for themselves when you use guilt/shame/fear/duty/obligation and when
you dont.

Marshall Rosenberg on the subject - "We all pay dearly when people respond to
our values and needs, not out of their own desire, but out of fear, guilt, or
shame. Sooner or later, we will experience the consequences of diminished
goodwill on the part of those who comply with our values out of a sense of
either external or internal coercion. They, too, pay emotionally, for they are
likely to feel resentment and decreased self-esteem when they respond to us
out of fear, guilt, or shame. Furthermore, each time others associate us in
their minds with any of those feelings, we decrease the likelihood of their
responding compassionately to our needs and values in the future."

The more productive way to do things is to just focus the conversation on your
needs and values. And leave it at that. Don't bring
judgement/blame/demands/guilt/shaming etc into the picture and then watch the
difference in how people respond to your political positions.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I appreciate the irony that we're talking about personal strategies of
emotional manipulation in a thread about a company that weaponised strategies
of emotional manipulation on an industrial scale.

Maybe if we want people to stop working for Facebook we should run a Facebook
ad campaign micro-targeted at Facebook employees using the personal
information they shared with Facebook.

------
aazaa
This is a very poorly-written story... From the first paragraph of back-slappy
happy talk and inside innuendo to the lack of any coherent introduction or
even narrative.

If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at
stake?

This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that
Facebook is responsible for the election of the president.

For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.

~~~
ec109685
The filter bubble that Facebook created where all sorts of misinformation was
shared back and forth ad nauseam (I couldn't believe some of the stuff that
was shared during the run up between my family members), was far worse than
what Cambridge did to the election.

------
thinkcomp
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I made Mark aware of this general
type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the
FTC Act. Learning about Cambridge Analytica ten years later would have been at
least the second time he heard about a friend-of-friend data breach.
[https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-
origins-t...](https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-
timeline/)

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing.
> With a warning about violating the FTC Act.

That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame
something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it
communicated?

~~~
karlding
Quote from the linked website:

 _> Thursday, April 7, 2005

> 4:12:44 PM EDT

> Mark Zuckerberg starts a conversation with Aaron Greenspan on AIM

>

> [...]

> ThinkComp: i don't care who wrote it

> ThinkComp: or where they are

> ThinkComp: it's your responsibility to get it done

> zberg02: yea but it's also my responsibility to get other stuff done as well

> zberg02: you know how it is to run a business

> ThinkComp: believe me, i totally understand that :-)

> ThinkComp: i'm drowning in taxes

> ThinkComp: and have 20 other projects going on

> zberg02: yea

> ThinkComp: but those projects affect maybe 30 people collectively

> ThinkComp: and there's no danger element

> zberg02: and i really do get that you care about people's security

> ThinkComp: you could have opened yourself up to another lawsuit had you left
> it open longer

> zberg02: not quite

> ThinkComp: oh yes

> ThinkComp: very much so

> ThinkComp: FTC code section 5

> [...]_

------
ianhawes
Some context around the FB staff trying to identify app IDs: Cambridge
Analytica themselves never had an app on the FB platform. Instead, they bought
the data from Kogan, who had built the app "thisisyourdigitallife" which was a
personality quiz.

------
earenndil
Suggestion to change the URL to the original facebook report at
[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-
pote...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/document-holds-the-potential-
for-confusion/), or the email chain (linked from there) at
[https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-d...](https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/exhibit-1-document.pdf).

------
readme3
With all due respect to FB's engineering , how can a company be so vile in
blatantly not monitoring data that was used for obviously not so ethical
means. I deleted my FB account and that to me has been the most amazing
decision personally i have made.

But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in
India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB
([https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-
of-user-profile-with-aadhaar-sc-agrees-to-hear-facebooks-plea-for-transfer-of-
cases/articleshow/70750965.cms)). This is even more scary!. FB is a shady
organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other _free_ biggies as
well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.

------
remotecool
I've always been curious why nobody cared when Obama misused Facebook data in
2012 to win the election.

I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about
how this would be the new way to campaign.

Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for
other politicians.

This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians.

The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did
it.

It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If
Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know
about election interference.

~~~
dunstad
You seem really relaxed about foreign powers interfering with our elections.

~~~
BeetleB
>You seem really relaxed about foreign powers interfering with our elections.

The reality is that Americans have historically been quite relaxed about the
US interfering in others' elections - they do it more than any other
country.[1] At least they're consistent if they're relaxed when it happens the
other way round.

[1]: [https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-
his...](https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-history-of-u-
s-meddling-in-foreign-elections)

~~~
dunstad
And in order to change that we would need to vote in the people that foreign
powers are hindering the campaigns of.

------
dragonsh
When they approved for access to personal data feeds of information, they
might not have imagined the use-case or might not have know about the usage in
details. "Cambridge Analytica" came out due to political implications, there
might be many others people don't now.

Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This
is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think
otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting
personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people
are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or
like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become
influencers.

I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook
and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not
part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook
use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids.

I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he
gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can
pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize
his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.

~~~
bcherny
Small, but really important clarification: Facebook and Google do not “sell
personal information”. They sell advertising.

There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal
information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens
don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the
advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.

~~~
gibolt
Why is this at the bottom? It is amazing that people (even on this site) still
don't get how targeting works.

Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match
the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is
a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.

~~~
dragonsh
Facebook hire armies of people to discredit it's criticism. So this is normal
any critical comments will be at bottom.

In case of"Cambridge Analytica" it's not advertising or targeting but personal
datafeeds access provided by Facebook. It's the same feed they offer to large
MNC's.

It's not an anonymous system but a system based on personal and private
information of individuals including their address or contact books and their
communication history.

~~~
cameronbrown
I hate Facebook yet can understand the difference. Just because some of us
want fair representation of a situation doesn't make us shills.

~~~
dragonsh
I didn't get the difference part.

I do not think Facebook provides advertising and datafeeda from anonymous
data. I believe there system is based on intimate personal data they collect
not the anonymous data respecting user's privacy.

~~~
cameronbrown
I didn't explain myself properly. You're right they do share extremely
targeted data to big companies/advertisers and that's deplorable, but they
also have less invasive methods of advertising. What we need is a discussion
on where the line lies, rather than 'facebook bad'.

