Facebook Scandal -- Cambridge Analytica

[Tintin]

Zephyr Teachout writing in today's Guardian newspaper is shining a bright light on the lack of time that senators had to quiz Mark Zuckerberg in any great depth, and his slippery decoying in responses.

It is to be expected of course from someone who has already pretty much shown their hand as a de facto employee of an alphabet agency, and really more of a 'show trial' than a meaningful exercise in transparent accountability. (Tintin Q)

• Zephyr Teachout is an American academic, political activist and former political candidate

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"...It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse."

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was an utter sham

Article linked here: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...k-hearing-sham

On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions!

Except it failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse.

Each senator was given less than five minutes for questions.

That meant that there was no room for follow-ups, no chance for big discoveries and many frustratingly half-developed ideas. Compare that to Bill Gates’ hearing on Microsoft, where he faced lawyers and staff for several days, or the Kefauver hearings, which were over a year.

By design, you can’t do a hearing of this magnitude in just a couple of hours.

The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate Facebook. I don’t care whether Zuckerberg supports Honest Ads or privacy laws or GDPR. By asking him if he would support legislation, the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal philosopher king whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t.

Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people’s data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat him as a danger to democracy and demand our senators get a real hearing.

The best senators understood this was a show, and used it as such.

“Your user agreement sucks,” said Senator John Kennedy.

“Are you a monopoly?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham. (Zuckerberg comically responded that he didn’t “feel” like it.)

Senator Richard Blumenthal said we needed laws, not promises or apologies.

Because each senator was limited to under five minutes, Zuckerberg tried to run the clock by talking about mission, philosophy or what he believed in. There were some good questions, but there was little chance for follow up. You could almost see him, well-trained to count the minutes, playing for time when things got a little hot.

Senators Mazie Hirono and Cory Booker, for instance, both pointed out the damning reporting by Julia Angwin at ProProblica, which showed that employers and landlords were using Facebook for discriminatory ads. Zuckerberg defended the company by saying they were hard to flag, and that they depend on community flagging to stop them.

The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to.

It doesn’t want to.

Hirono and Booker could have shown that, but, like the rest of the senators, they each had only a few minutes for a line of questioning. Zuckerberg replied with vague answers about how their comments were “important” or “interesting” or “an important conversation to have”.

Some of the hearing seemed designed to figure out whether Zuckerberg is a good or bad man, or whether he has a good or bad – or bizarre – political philosophy. Zuckerberg strikes me as reliably self-serving. That doesn’t make him that interesting as the CEO of a corporate monopoly; it makes him a run-of-the-mill robber baron.

Asking Zuckerberg philosophical questions, such as how he thinks we should deal with questions of hate speech, treats him as a thought leader. Accepting his failures to catch discriminatory housing ads, for instance, treats him as a good-hearted actor with limited resources, instead of someone who is making monopoly margins and billions in profits.

In my view, we need to break up Facebook from Instagram and the other potential competitors that Facebook bought up. We need to – at a minimum – move towards opt-in, we need to hold Facebook responsible for enabling discrimination, and we need to require interoperability.

But that’s not enough.

There is so much we don’t know about Facebook.

We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy. We don’t know how their algorithm treats news organizations or content producers, how Facebook uses its own information about Facebook users or how tracking across platforms works, to just give a few examples.

Now that the initial show trial is done, we need the real deal, one where no senator gets cut off after a few minutes.

The real hearing would allow for unlimited questions from each of our senators, who represent millions of people. If it takes two months of sitting in Washington DC, let it take two months. This is our democracy.

[ramus]

Cambridge Analytica files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy

By Ken MartinPublished May 18, 2018PoliticsFOXBusiness


The nameplate of political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, is seen in central London, Britain March 21, 2018. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls


https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics...r-7-bankruptcy

Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the center of Facebook privacy scandal, filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in a New York court late on Thursday.

Cambridge Analytica listed assets in the range of $100,001 to $500,000 and liabilities in the range of $1 million to $10 million, according to Reuters.

In a Chapter 7 filing, a company goes into liquidation mode, essentially going out of business. It sells property and distributes the proceeds to creditors.

Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL Elections said earlier this month that they would shut down immediately and begin bankruptcy proceedings after suffering a sharp drop in business.
ow.



Facebook disclosed in March that consultancy Cambridge Analytica had harvested data belonging to millions of users.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, affecting up to 87 million users and prompting several apologies from Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, generated calls for regulation and for users to leave the social network.

Cambridge Analytica marketed itself as a provider of consumer research, targeted advertising and other data-related services to both political and corporate clients and was hired by President Donald Trump's 2016 U.S. election campaign.

What wasn't stated is Hillary and Obama both used Cambridge in there campaigns, long before Trump. Cambridge and Facebook were both blamed for Trumps victory.

[ramus]

IT JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE :


Facebook made deals with 60 device makers that gave them access to users’ data

Published: June 4, 2018 3:29 p.m. ET

By
Ciara
Linnane
Corporate news editor

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fa...ata-2018-06-04

Facebook Inc. made agreements with at least 60 makers of phones and other devices that gave them access to the personal information of users’ friends without their consent, the New York Times reported Monday, citing company officials.

The companies involved include Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.87% BlackBerry Ltd. BB, +2.32% Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.86% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.35% the paper reported. The agreements allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers features, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.

The scope of the partnerships has not been reported before and raises concerns about the company’s privacy protections, as well as compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.

Most of the agreements are still in place, though Facebook FB, -0.30% began to wind them down in April, after coming under scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators over data used by Cambridge Analytica, which has declared bankruptcy.

Read now: The sad truth about how much your Facebook data is worth on the dark web

Facebook has said that the access granted to Cambrdige Analytica, a political consultancy, in 2014 was cut off by 2015, when the company explicitly banned developers from collecting data on users’ friend. But it did not disclose that the makers of phones and tablets were excluded from the ban.


Read now: Facebook reveals the 87 million accounts affected by privacy violation — what to do if you’re one of them

Related: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s quitting Facebook: ‘You are the product’

Facebook said Monday in a blog post that it “controlled [APIs] tightly from the get-go” and that the device makers it partnered with “signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.”

Facebook also said that its team had to approve these new “experiences” and that device partners like Apple Iand Amazon could not “integrate the user’s Facebook features with their devices without the user’s permission.”

See: What Facebook and other tech leaders must do now to win back our trust
Mark Zuckerberg’s Face-Off With European Parliament: The Highlights

Facebook said that the private APIs in question were “very different from the public APIs used by third-party developers, like Aleksandr Kogan” of Cambridge Analytica.

The New York Times said that one of its reporters, Michael LaForgia, used the Hub app on a blackberry Z10 to log into Facebook and found the app was able to retrieve detailed data on 556 of his friends. The data included relationship status, religious and political leanings and events they planned to attend.

Twitter was predictably unhappy about the news.

Shares of Facebook were down 1% in early trade, but are up 26% over the past 12 months, while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.44% has gained 12% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.74% has added 17%.

[ramus]

Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends


Special deals gave a small number of companies access to data after shutting off access for other developers

https://www.wsj.com/articles/faceboo...d=breakingnews

By Deepa Seetharaman and
Kirsten Grind
June 8, 2018 4:40 p.m. ET
13 COMMENTS

Facebook Inc. FB 0.49% struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social-media giant has said it cut off all developers from that information, according to court documents, company officials and people familiar with the matter.

The unreported agreements, known internally as “whitelists,” also allowed certain companies to access additional information about a user’s Facebook friends, the people familiar with the matter said. That included information like phone numbers and a metric called “friend link” that measured the degree of closeness between users and others in their network, the people said.

Many of these customized deals were separate from Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers, which it disclosed this week. Several lawmakers and regulators have subsequently said those device-maker arrangements merit further investigation.

The whitelist deals, with companies including RBC Capital Markets and Nissan Motor Co. , were struck with advertisers or Facebook partners that were valuable for other reasons, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. They show that Facebook gave special data access to a broader universe of companies than was previously known. They also raise further questions about who has access to the data of billions of Facebook users and why they had access, at a time when Congress is demanding the company be held accountable for the flow of that data.

Data-Security Concerns Threaten Trust in Tech Companies
Tech-company executives at The Wall Street Journal's D.Live conference in Hong Kong responded to concerns over data security in the wake of Facebook's privacy scandal.

Facebook officials said the company struck a small number of deals with developers largely to improve the user experience, test new features and allow certain partners to wind down previously existing data-sharing projects. The company said it allowed a “small number” of partners to access data about a user’s friends after the data was shut off to developers in 2015. Many of the extensions lasted weeks and months, Facebook said. It isn’t clear when all of the deals ultimately expired or how many companies got extensions.

The vast majority of developers who plugged into Facebook’s platform weren’t aware that the company offered this preferred access or extensions to certain partners, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Privacy experts said Facebook users also likely didn’t know how their data was being shared. “I don’t think anyone would have a reasonable understanding of how widespread this was,” said David Vladeck, director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau from 2009 until 2013 and now a professor at Georgetown Law.

Mr. Vladeck said any deals made after 2012 could draw scrutiny about whether Facebook was in violation of its settlement that year with the FTC, under which the firm is required to give the social network’s users clear and prominent notice and obtaining their express consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. Facebook said Friday it hasn’t violated the settlement.

The revelations come as Facebook is dealing with the fallout in March related to the use of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a political analytics firm that aided President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and purchased data on 87 million users from another developer. The crisis sparked questions about Facebook’s lax oversight of its platform, an FTC investigation into whether the company violated the 2012 settlement and two congressional appearances by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in April.

More to come