Kudos to The Guardian's outstanding investigative journalists for pursuing the story of how Facebook did everything NOT to see how the private information of millions of its users was being harvested, sold, exploited and generally abused in ways the users could not begin to imagine.
This is a big story that is not going to go away.
In Paul Lewis' report from San Francisco, we learn more details about what was happening behind the scenes at Facebook.
- warnings from Facebook's own employees were ignored
- covert data harvesting was routine
- failure to use enforcement mecanisms to control use of data by outside developpers
- deliberate looking the other way and pressure not to investigate (“Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”)
- enabling the secret harvesting of information of friends' data through Facebook apps in exchange for a "30% cut of payments made through apps", ("but in return enabled their creators to have access to Facebook user data.")
- blind eye to rogue developpers
For the full Guardian article, go to "'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine" in Facebook
The Cambridge Analytica Files
For more info, see:
@NPR Facebook: Firm Working With Trump Campaign Stole 50 Million Users' Data
@Scout: The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine This remarkable analysis was written last year.
WIRED - which it should be mentioned did NOT break this story - is doing a good job playing catch up, with interesting insights and explanations.
"Facebook has burned its fingers on issues of data privacy frequently in its 14 year history. But this time it was different. The data leakage hadn’t helped Unilever sell mayonnaise. It appeared to have helped Donald Trump sell a political vision of division and antipathy. The news made it look as if Facebook’s data controls were lax and that its executives were indifferent." - WIRED
...
"The story of how Kogan ended up with data on 50 million American Facebook users sounds like it should involve secret handshakes and black hats. But Kogan actually got his Facebook data by just walking in Facebook’s front door and asking for it." - WIRED
...
"Kogan had created the most anodyne of tools for electoral manipulation: an app based on personality quizzes. Users signed up and answered a series of questions. Then the app would take those answers, mush them together with that person’s Facebook likes and declared interests, and spit out a profile that was supposed to know the test-taker better than he knew himself. About 270,000 Americans participated. However what they didn’t know was that by agreeing to take the quiz and giving Facebook access to their data, they also granted access to many of their Facebook friends’ likes and interests as well." - WIRED
