I sincerely doubt that Cambridge Analytica is really shutting down. Rather, I expect the same principals will continue doing the same things for the same customers under a new name within a year. That's just a name change.
Of course that's a thing. Corporate corruption is way too rampant. CEOs should serve time when breaking laws and be barred from serving as a top level exec in any capacity unless they're the founder and even then they should have stipulations like a parole officer who's an accountant/auditor and checks their books every few months.
Because I'm still a believer in rehabilitation, just as I feel felons who want to go straight should get another chance... I'm also very supportive of any new startup as long as it's on the up and up it contributes to the overall economy..I just don't think they should come out of jail and get a golden parachute deal or a job from day one.. Finding the next gig should be as hard for them as it is for Lenny the homeless guy who is in jail for stealing booze or loitering.
They're still American, but I have more pity for the Lennie's than the Bernie Madoffs of the world.
If it didn't have that exception, then you're essentially saying "this group of people is barred from starting their own business", which is a pretty broad thing to do in a society that prides itself on free enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Same thought here. What assets are this kind of firm really made of, if not knowledge workers? Are there a lot of databases that will be shut down, rather than sold to some other entity? Or just pirated? Apart from that, what is it? Office furniture?
I would suspect the workers will regroup, some of them having had their internal political status changed by the scandal, others holding the external relationships, and the business will go on in some shape.
My uncle is CIO of a law firm. We were discussing my company's inventory management system (we're an electronics manufacturer), and he made a point that's stuck with me: "90% of my inventory value walks out the door at the end of the day."
That was exactly the scenario I first thought of when I saw this headline.
From what I remember, the researcher who started collecting Facebook data has already tried to scrub his connections with Cambridge Analytica and it's UK parent company from his CV and research history.
In business, it’s often possible to change the name and get the plausible deniability you need to continue.
In politics, any future venture by these people is going to have a difficult time. No candidate wants to be called out for employing anyone from CA’s core team now.
What’s also going to be really hard to shake is th litany of articles pointing out that CA actually failed pretty badly at achieving its promises. Just consider the “honey trap” offers they were making: if you actually own the secret sauce to influence elections with big data and machine learning and psycho ops... why go for the oldest, most shady trick in the book?
Maybe not actually. They were a subsidiary of SCL Group, which according to Wikipedia shut down yesterday as well. Something awful will exist in its place, like Palantir Technologies.
HN truncated the link to say "Ac..." and I thought it was a link to the page for Accenture, which changed its name from Andersen Consulting to get away from the bad reputation associated with the Andersen name.
This is just damage control. It should be easy enough to monitor the Linkedin profiles of everybody that claims they work there today to see where they end up. Two can play at that.
Tech people are terrified of CA because CA shows them how deeply flawed their beloved liberal democracy is. They already suspected that but they swept it under the carpet, but now that they are forced to watch it because of this Facebook thing, it's time to shut everything down and shoot the messenger instead of shutting down the flawed system.
You don't think this is more of a function of human greed and ambition rather than a consequence of liberal democracy? I seriously doubt that the use of personal data for political gain would be particularly less common under literally any other configuration of government.
People are easily manipulable. This was the case since forever, but tech has amplified it, and tech has given us the data to back up how easy it is to manipulate people.
No, this is not a consequence of "liberal democracy", this happens a lot more in non democratic governments.
If you want to put it this way, which I think it's wrong, this would be a consequence of libertarian conservatism, where private companies would spy on groups of people and try to manipulate them, instead of the government.
These 2 things are related. Google punishes sites behind paywalls which is why doing a google search for an article is normally a good way to get by the pay-wall. WSJ has decided they'd rather take the punishment, so their site is lower.
See also: Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi