> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
> "Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state," Torrez said Friday. "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."
This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.
The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
This was 10 years ago. Pretty crazy that this is finally seeing the justice system.
Reminds me of that FOIA request a guy filed when he had his kid and did not receive reply/confirmation until his kid was in college...
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154
> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
Aren't they defunct [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#:~:text=De...
Yes but the founders and related people are still very happy not to disabuse the notion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
> it did not affect the 2016 election.
This is false.
> all of his Meta advertising
You don't appear to have any understanding of how Cambridge Analytica affected the election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Nothing in that Wikipedia link disagrees with me at all.
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
> "Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state," Torrez said Friday. "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."
This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.
Great, we don’t want companies that break the law here in NM
Sounds like it's working exactly as intended.
Promise?
Cyberpunk 2077 in all states except New Mexico.
Is that a problem?
Since these articles tend to actually bury the data that was scraped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...This information was limited to what was publicly accessible on the site rather than some private data as many outlets tend to claim.
The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
Is that not parsed as,
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
I am not sure that this is the case.
The app had access to data about the friends of its participants.
AFAIR that included attributes that were set “friends-only”.