Chief of Whatsapp says we should all delete Facebook.

Has Facebook lost its integrity enough for people to leave in significant numbers or do people not really care about their data being mined and used??

Never used it, I’d end up killing someone before the day was out based upon the things Mrs Weeksy tells me.

With 2 billion global users its going to be the biggest protest in the history of the world for it to even make a dent.

I’m game.

Isn’t WhatsApp owned by Facebook?

I’ve dabbled, only use it for local surf groups messages like “coming out? it’s about 3ft clean” or “don’t bother coming over, we’re going to xxxx cos’ it’s lame here”

I’ve never posted a “global” narrative, nor posted a pic of my supper.

If my mates could muster the use of modern technology I’d be happy to use WhatsApp or even God forbid Text messages..

As it’s a commonly used platform for contacting my small group of surf mates, I’ll stay on there.

I mean, like what are they going to “mine” out of me and my profile? Mostly dull narrative with some beaches named in it, the conditions and maybe a bit of piss taking..

Yeah, thats really useful data right there.

Since its beginnings in the 00s, I’ve told everyone who asked why I didn’t join about the potential for all this, the vast majority told me I was paranoid. It is that majority, I would imagine, that continue to use it because they do not care about or consider the implications.

@bikebouy ignorance is bliss huh 🙂

So what do they Mine then..

Ok, home location and posts… theres nothing else in my profile to suggest I’m anything other than boring.

I use it because my friends are scattered all over the globe and it’s the easiest way to keep up with everyone. I am very guarded on what I post though. Some of the younger generation of my extended family really post absolutely everything about their lives which I wonder if it will come back to bite them in the future. I have a client whose brother is a rather high figure in Microsoft and he told her not to use FB or Twitter because of the nature of the way they farm the information about their users.

So what do they Mine then..

Ok, home location and posts… theres nothing else in my profile to suggest I’m anything other than boring.

They’re not interested in how interesting you are, they just want to try to place you in a particular profile. Even your geographical location and the fact you like surfing is of some value in itself. Combine that with information provided from more FB active family members/colleagues who you may be friends with and you can start to form a picture of your background, and perhaps potentially your political leanings.

It’s not about what you post in this case, It’s about the other person on your network who has answered one of those fake personality tests and that FB has allowed them to harvest your data to form a more revealing picture.

Think of it like weather forecasting. If you look out of your window and it’s raining, that doesn’t tell you much about whether it will be still raining in 24 minutes or 24 hours. However, if you aggregate that fairly limited piece of data with thousands of other windows across your county or the next county along, you can not only tell what the weather is now, but start predicting what your weather will be like in the near future.

Take surfing as an example again. I vaguely recall that people who do outdoor sports like ours are statistically more likely to be left-of-centre when it comes to politics. This may not be the case for you, but it’s still a data point that can be used to start making assumptions about you. Your postcode gives a bit more data. They know the average property value on your street, how many people are renting, who owns their own house, how that ward voted in previous elections. Again this gives them a little more insight into income and potentially voting intentions.

What Cambridge Analytica have come up with is the algorithm that ties up all these seemingly tiny bits of information and finds a way to use them to tell them more about all the people in your network.

Perhaps what you’ve provided just means they won’t bother paying FB to target Brexit-supporting ads at you because you’re a lost cause. They’ll spend the money on someone who fits the profile of a potential Brexit supporter.

They use every bit of info they can get their hands on, that’s why it’s full of ‘like & share if you were born in the 60s’ type stuff, which is designed to harvest information.

However, they’re clearly not that good at it, as nobody has noticed a 117yo man is on there, i listed my dob as 01/01/1901 when i joined, and i used a false address in a different country too.

i think people need to get away from the idea that they are anonymous online.

I have to admit, I’m either grossly misunderstanding the situation or I don’t really understand the problem. Even if they do mine the info and sell it to 3rd parties, as above what useful stuff is there really. Take for example targeted advertising; if they can see I read about bikes and I’m a member of some bike FB groups, and then they send me ads about bikes and bike holidays and other outdoorsy stuff that might interest me, what’s the issue.

Is it really any different to for example – advertisers of stairlifts and walk in baths advertising in the Saga magazine, because it’s highly likely the people who read the Saga magazine are potential customers. You don’t place ads for for muscle growth supplements and stuff in Saga for the same reason, you put it in Men’s Health. And ads for elasticated waistband slacks and memorabilia from the 3rd Reich….. clearly the Daily Mail 😉

On that point – if you buy the Daily Mail, chances are you’re a right wing / brexit / bring back flogging type and as such you read it because the editorial and columnists echo that view. Is it so different that digital media does the same but can use a single platform as the vehicle to target their ‘customers’ by using their likes and info to segment them to target them specifically.

The concern I have in the end still comes down to the lying which is no different whether the ‘info’ is on the pages of a paper, a post on your social media feed, or dare I say 3 foot high letters on the side of a bus.  But FB doesn’t do the lying, it just acts as the vehicle.

And further when it comes to the Cambridge Analytica; the admission that they go beyond data mining and analytics to target and potentially influence voters, but actually set traps to create the stories that influence them – that to me is the real biggy.

I started this campaign about 3 years ago, when i deleted my FB account cos it was **** dull.

If a political party has only X million quid to spend campaigning for whatever, they want to know which online doors to knock on to deliver that message. Every ad costs money. Precisely targeting the groups of wavering voters and then bombarding them with pro-whatever messages means their campaign will be far more effective.

It’s the same as a political candidate who door-knocks one estate but ignores the other one, because of assumptions about class and voting intentions. The more precisely you can identify which doors are worth visiting, the better use you can make of your resources.

Facebook uses your data shocker!

Really! anyone who didn’t already know that this sort of thing happened isn’t living in the real world.

Isn’t WhatsApp owned by Facebook?

Well yes.  It was one of the founders that said dump facebook, after he had sold WhatsApp of course 🙂

Really! anyone who didn’t already know that this sort of thing happened isn’t living in the real world.

Yes.  I think the real issue is that people don’t realise just how open they are to manipulation.  It doesn’t mean that everyone is but enough are to swing things.  I use facebook targeting on ads and it is a little scary just how tightly you can focus in on a group

Facebook is still useful though so you might be better just opting out of some of the tracking stuff

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-change-your-facebook-settings-opt-out-platform-api-sharing

Also be aware that Facebook (and Google) run scripts and cookies on pretty much every web page in existence. All of this information can be connected to all the other information already connected to a particular user. The more information the system has on individual habits and connections, the more able it is to create demographics and influence content, not only for an individual, but, more importantly, for demographics. This is how social media manipulation is able to leverage such influence of political/sociopolitical process. And that’s before companies like CA conspire to fabricate/construct content designed to sway voters/policy in a particular direction.

Same as this forum, the ads are in relation to the topics.

I don’t intend to delete fb either. It is quite useful for local news.

Started using it in June 2007 stopped using July 2007.

@caher

It doesn’t matter if you don’t post anything on or regularly use facebook itself,  the fact you have logged in at some point means they can track your interests via your web usage by monitoring what they serve to you.  This is done very easily using the Like and Share facebook buttons which appear on sites, even if you do not click on them.  Merely serving the ‘Like’ image to you is enough to know you viewed the page.

This is why things like Ghostery and PrivacyBadger exist. 🙂

cchris2lou

Member
Same as this forum, the ads are in relation to the topics.

No it is not the same, because STW doesn’t follow you round the web (though their ad providers may do this).

@martinhutch:

I used to work for a political party in Canada. All that stuff you’ve just mentioned we just used to do on foot by walking the streets of neighbourhoods.

I’m still having a tough time caring.

I don’t care that much. I post on FB about 5 – 10 times per year, mainly to share photos with extended family. I quite like seeing what other people are up to and I ignore anything that is shared like personality tests, names of blokes who are best husbands etc.

I struggle to care that much about data mining. Everyone is doing it, Tesco, Google, Microsoft etc etc.

All that stuff you’ve just mentioned we just used to do on foot by walking the streets of neighbourhoods.

scraping it from FB is much much cheaper.

Facebook uses your data shocker!

Really! anyone who didn’t already know that this sort of thing happened isn’t living in the real world.

Oh I think you’d be amazed at how little people realise about how their data is used.  I’m a member of a small gym that uses Facebook to advertise and promote the business.  It was a topic of discussion when some of the women said that they were a bit confused that the gym only seemed to be advertising for women to join.  They were amazed when they found out that there were targeted ads and because they are women they didn’t see the adverts targeting men.  These were just ordinary people but they simply didn’t have any idea of these things worked.

On this specific issue I’m struggling to see what they actually did that was illegal.  Scary as hell and potentially immoral but if people put this information in the public domain then they can’t complain when it’s used.  Now I will admit that it may well be the case that I don’t fully understand what has happened and there is more to it than I realise and I accept that and that perhaps privacy laws need to be tightened but I still don’t see the issue beyond advertising works and targeted advertising works better.

On a slightly different note, PIxoneye was mentioned on one of the Guardian articles.

If you’ve ever downloaded an App that has access to your photos, chances are that App could have Pixoneye incorporated into it, running in the background to scan the photos on your device to determine your interests, income, lifestyle, whether you have children etc.. then sell that information on for advertising.

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/meet-pixoneye-marketing-tech-start-up-scanning-private-smartphone-photos/1417100

I used to work for a political party in Canada. All that stuff you’ve just mentioned we just used to do on foot by walking the streets of neighbourhoods.

I’m still having a tough time caring.

How long would it take you to canvass the entire population of one town, or indeed all of Canada? How would you be sure that people were giving honest answers? How long would it take you to correlate all the information into useful statistics? You don’t care because you don’t see.

@howsyourdad plenty of friends just don’t need Facebook.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Times dropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardian and The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

The promise of Kogan’s company was that they could build psychological profiles of vast numbers of people by using Facebook data. Those profiles, in turn, might be useful to tune the political messages that Cambridge Analytica sent to potential voters. Perhaps a certain kind of message might appeal more to extroverts, or narcissists, or agreeable people.

To gather that data, the Times reports, Kogan hired workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to install a Facebook app in their accounts. The app, built by Global Science Research, requested an unusual (but not unheard-of) amount of data about users themselves and their friends. That’s how 270,000 Turkers ended up yielding 30 million profiles of American Facebook users that could be matched with other data sets.

From the current reporting, it seems that Kogan violated Facebook’s terms of service in saying he was using the data for academic research, but then selling it to Strategic Communications Laboratories. That’s what got Cambridge Analytica and Kogan in trouble. (Cambridge Analytica told The Guardian that they do not have possession of the data nor did they use any of this data in the 2016 election. An anonymous source in the Times story disputes this.)

There’s a lot about Cambridge Analytica that doesn’t quite add up. Are they data geniuses who swung the Brexit vote and got Trump elected, or pretenders bluffing their way to fat marketing contracts? Right after the election, several stories pointed to their psychological profiles of voters as a crucial piece of the Trump digital machine. As time has gone on, their role has come to be seen as less important, more in line with the tiny slice of the Trump campaign treasury that they got, roughly $6 million.

While the specifics of this particular violation are important to understand, the story reveals deeper truths about the online world that operates through and within Facebook.

First, some of Facebook’s growth has been driven by apps, which the company found extended the amount of time that people spent on the platform, as retired users of FarmVille could attest. To draw developers, Facebook had quite lax (or, as one might say, “developer-friendly”) data policies for years.

Academic researchers began publishing warnings that third-party Facebook apps represented a major possible source of privacy leakage in the early 2010s. Some noted that the privacy risks inherent in sharing data with apps were not at all clear to users. One group termed our new reality “interdependent privacy,” because your Facebook friends, in part, determine your own level of privacy.

For as long as apps have existed, they have asked for a lot of data and people have been prone to give it to them. Back in 2010, Penn State researchers systematically recorded what data the top 1,800 apps on Facebook were asking for. They presented their results in 2011 with the paper “Third-Party Apps on Facebook: Privacy and the Illusion of Control.” The table below shows that 148 apps were asking for permission to access friends’ information.

But that’s not the only way that friends leak their friends’ data. Take the example of letting an app see your photos. As the Penn State researchers show, all kinds of data can be harvested: who’s tagged in photos, who liked any of the pictures, who commented on them, and what they said.

If one were to systematically crawl through all the data that could be gleaned from just a user’s basic information, one could build a decent picture of that person’s social world, including a substantial amount of information about their friends.

Facebook has tightened up some of its policies in recent years, especially around apps accessing friends’ data. But TheGuardian’s reporting suggests that the company’s efforts to restuff Pandora’s box have been lax. Wylie, the whistleblower, received a letter from Facebook asking him to delete any Facebook data nearly two years after the existence of the data was first reported. “That to me was the most astonishing thing,” Wylie told The Guardian. “They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data was deleted. All they asked me to do was tick a box on a form and post it back.”

But even if Facebook were maximally aggressive about policing this kind of situation, what’s done is done. It’s not just that the data escaped, but that Cambridge Analytica almost certainly learned everything they could from it. As stated in The Guardian, the contract between GSR and Strategic Communications Laboratories states, specifically, “The ultimate product of the training set is creating a ‘gold standard’ of understanding personality from Facebook profile information.”

It’s important to dwell on this. It’s not that this research was supposed to identify every U.S. voter just from this data, but rather to develop a method for sorting people based on Facebook’s profiles. Wylie believes that the data was crucial in building Cambridge Analytica’s models. It certainly seems possible that once the “training set” had been used to learn how to psychologically profile people, this specific data itself was no longer necessary. But the truth is that no one knows if the Kogan data had much use out in the real world of political campaigning. Psychological profiling sounds nefarious, but the way that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica first attempted to do it may well have proven, as the company maintains, “fruitless.”

It’s possible that these new stories will cause Facebook to restrict the use of its data by people outside the company, including legitimate researchers. But that kind of self-imposed or external regulation would not strike at what’s actually scary about these efforts.

If Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising works, people worry they could be manipulated with information—or even thoughts—that they did not consent to giving anyone. And societally, a democracy running on micro-targeted political advertisements tuned specifically for ever tinier slices of the population is in trouble, as scholars like Zeynep Tufekci warned in 2012 (and in 2014).

Those two concerns extend far beyond Cambridge Analytica. In fact, the best system for micro-targeting ads, political or otherwise, to particularly persuadable segments of the population is Facebook itself. This is why Facebook’s market value is half a trillion dollars.

In Facebook’s ad system, there are no restrictions on sending ads to people based on any “targetable” attribute, like older men who are interested in the “Confederate States of America” and the National Rifle Association and who are “likely to engage with political content (conservative).”

That’s to say nothing of the ability to create databases of people from other sources—electoral rolls, data on purchasing habits or group affiliations, or anything gleaned by the hundreds of online data companies—then letting Facebook itself match those people up to their Facebook accounts. Facebook might never reveal the names in an audience to advertisers or political campaigns, but the effects are the same.

Facebook’s laxity and the researcher’s malfeasance are newsworthy. But is the problem with privacy-obviating social networks, psychological profiling, and political micro-targeting that some researcher violated Facebook’s terms of service? Or is it that this controversy estranges the whole enterprise, providing a route to approach the almost unthinkable changes that have come to democratic processes in the Facebook era?

Source

On this specific issue I’m struggling to see what they actually did that was illegal

A large amount of data was captured by Dr Kogan, and then handed on to a third party (Analytica) for other uses. That sounds like a straightforward breach of data protection. The data controller (Kogan) is allowed to capture data with user permission, but it’s a big no-no to pass it to anyone else. Your bank, for example, is not allowed to flog your personal details and account transactions to a retailer.

This is not an arcane point of law. It’s one of the basic points of data security that will be covered in the sort of mandatory training that hundreds of thousands of people do at work all the time. I’m struggling to believe that a data scientist like Kogan didn’t know that what he was doing was very dodgy.

It’s not the mining necessarily, it’s the power to to target many, many small groups with hot-button ads specifically tuned to grab them emotionally, and the fact that voters are denied sight of all the other ads specifically tuned for people nothing like them.

Person in group A sees his ads and thinks “Hey, he’s really talking my language! He gets me! He’s my guy!”.

If he could see what was being promised to groups B-Z, he might wonder whether “his guy” was in fact a two-faced bastard prepared to say anything to anyone for votes, and be a little bit more circumspect about how likely it was that said bastard really had his interests at heart.

alright, aspects of the mining and passing on are the illegal bits, but it’s only such a big issue because of what has been done with the data.

And the cat’s out of the bag to some extent, the data’s been analysed, and they’ve done the work in whittling down how little information you need to predict someone’s personality and leanings enough to target ads.  It’s not very much, apparently.

nedrapier

It’s not the mining necessarily, it’s the power to to target many, many small groups with hot-button ads specifically tuned to grab them emotionally, and the fact that voters are denied sight of all the other ads specifically tuned for people nothing like them.

Person in group A sees his ads and thinks “Hey, he’s really talking my language! He gets me! He’s got my vote!”.

If he could see what was being promised to groups B-Z, hie might wonder whether “his guy” was in fact a two-faced bastard prepared to say anything to anyone for votes, and be a little bit more circumspect about how likely it was that said bastard really had his interests at heart.

It’s not just that…..the ads can be and are linked to external websites, the veracity of which is anyone’s guess and Facebook doesn’t check them and won’t reveal what they are. So you can say anything you want about your political opponent because you’re not saying it, you’re campaign managers are paying a 3rd party to attract voters to a website built by a 4th party which carries a slanderous message about your opponent and it’s targeted at the specific demographic you’ve identified as being disinterested or undecided in your opponent’s message.

Franksinatra

I struggle to care that much about data mining. Everyone is doing it, Tesco, Google, Microsoft etc etc.

Do you care about politics? Would you care if someone used lies to win an election? Tesco might mine your data in order to make you fat. Facebook mined people’s data, sold that data and many people believe it altered the outcome of the US election.

Think this thread has proved the mash has its finger on the pulse….

Self-righteous Facebook refusers feeling even more pleased with themselves than usual

Im not deleting it as i’m not influential enough or use it enough to make an impact. Your data is mined by every site as soon as you log  onto your computer so if facebook aren’t doing it another website will.

A large amount of data was captured by Dr Kogan, and then handed on to a third party (Analytica) for other uses. That sounds like a straightforward breach of data protection. The data controller (Kogan) is allowed to capture data with user permission, but it’s a big no-no to pass it to anyone else. Your bank, for example, is not allowed to flog your personal details and account transactions to a retailer.

I’m not sure I agree with your analogy.  Back details aren’t public information, or at least mine aren’t, so passing those details along without permission would be illegal I get that (lets ignore the open banking thing that govt. seem keen on) but as far as I can tell, and again I admit I may be wrong in this regard, the information that was mined/gleaned was already public as the owners of that information had put it online.  Now it certainly seems to be a breech of facebook T&Cs but that doesn’t necessarily make it illegal.

All this said, if it comes to pass that we tighten up on electoral law to bring it up to date with the rise of social media then that will certainly be a good thing.

I run the following addons in my browser:
FB Purity – tidies up Facebook’s layout and blocks out all the ads. They may serve me ads but I never see them.
AdBlock – General advert and tracking cookie blocker

Ghostery – more in depth cross-site tracking blocker

I might add in that PrivacyBadger though.

Still, it’s on my phone though….