That's going to happen. But Europe is going to really fuck them.
Facebook is facing an existential crisis ... been trying to warn kats about Facebook for a Year Now
- Thread starter fonzerrillii
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That's going to happen. But Europe is going to really fuck them.
Europe is crazy strict with these things it's crazy they do the job we supposed to do lol
I can't remember how many times Microsoft was in court for antitrust shit while our ppl were like meh
I do agree that Myspace was never going to last... but if you remember... when Facebook was just on college campuses and Myspace was the supreme Social Site.. towards the end Myspace just became unusable and was filled with Ads and Spam.
For example... Here is the typically Myspace homepage when it launched
and here is the page in 2008.
I do agree that Myspace was never going to last... but if you remember... when Facebook was just on college campuses and Myspace was the supreme Social Site.. towards the end Myspace just became unusable and was filled with Ads and Spam.
For example... Here is the typically Myspace homepage when it launched
and here is the page in 2008.
It wasn't the ad space that caused myspace a problem though. It was the fact that the app barely worked. It couldn't scale. They didn't have the technical talent to scale it anymore and the code was spaghetti.
You'll rarely hear anyone complain about ads on Facebook. Most people don't care. It just works. Myspace was falling apart at that point.
read this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify
This is the VP of Myspace
“The site was such a massive spaghetti-ball mess. You could do these tree flowcharts of your website … and we did it, and it was like the fricking seven scrolls that you could see. It just went on forever and ever and ever… We were not nimble in any way, shape or form.”
Could MySpace have been saved? Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies.
“I always thought, and I pushed this internally but we could never get buy-in, was to change the name. At that time MySpace was not cool any more,” said Percival.
“The baggage was too much. Users had too many bad experiences. They would go on there and they’d get hit with spam. There’d be all this weird stuff. The baggage was really intense.”
Facebook is not going away anytime soon as there is no competitor even close to replacing what it does.
I never had a myspace account, I was "on the internet" and typed in my http://www addresses directly.
Facebook took a lot of users such as those from AOL, etc when they got highspeed internet and didn't know what
the fuck to do with a "browser"
Facebok makes it easy for anyone to use the internet, and they never have to leave to get news, music links, videos... family and friends...
Likened to how penetrated FB is today, remember when you would watch CNN, etc. "Follow us Keyword: cnn" and similar?
As to the decrease in users, they don't do a good job, by design, of restricting a real human to one account. I know I have three FB accounts,
They use the number of accounts as an asset.
I never had a myspace account, I was "on the internet" and typed in my http://www addresses directly.
Facebook took a lot of users such as those from AOL, etc when they got highspeed internet and didn't know what
the fuck to do with a "browser"
Facebok makes it easy for anyone to use the internet, and they never have to leave to get news, music links, videos... family and friends...
Likened to how penetrated FB is today, remember when you would watch CNN, etc. "Follow us Keyword: cnn" and similar?
As to the decrease in users, they don't do a good job, by design, of restricting a real human to one account. I know I have three FB accounts,
They use the number of accounts as an asset.
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I completely agree. Facebook is about to get ass fucked with no lube.
facts
Yeah that’s what I’ve been seeing too.... Europe is going to Fuck them extra hard.
Yo. This is looking worse by the day man. Facebook execs are getting anxious because Zuckerberg isn't saying anything publicly to help deal with the crisis. I'm going to move more in your direction if they bobble this. Congress is looking for someone to blame (besides Trump). They better come out real humble very quickly before this gets to far out of control they cant contain it.
Myspace failed because Fox purchased it in 2005 and didn't put a dime into it. It was full of children and stupid ass back grounds, and its feeds were a mess. Facebook was clean and full of adults already. Facebook will die for the same reason that Myspace did. It's full of kids and it's feed is a mess. You miss a day and you will never see what your friends posted unless you spend all day looking.
Fuck facebook, I moved on to instagram, it's were comedians and artist are posting. It's clean easy to follow with very limited garbage in the feeds.
Facebook was all college kids, as previously mentioned, when it launched; you had to have an .edu email address to even join. Adults didn't hit the scene until what, 2007-08? FB was the shit until the adults got in; when your grandma is sending you friend requests and posting all day, and grandma is using it to communicate with her friends......that's what FB is now and it's driven many under 25 to Snap, Instagram, etc, because no one wants grandma commenting on their pictures and statuses all day. The 30+ crowd is FB demo; the ones who got access when they were in college in like 2004 and have stuck with it. Their kids or brothers/sisters aren't though.
I will say it again; FB is directly responsible for changing people's mental wiring. The status box is one of the most game changing, and most freighting, things we've seen in the last 10 years; why? Because people have now decided that their every thought and feeling must be "shared", even to their detriment. I know folks who've been fired, had their house broke into, gotten caught up and ended in divorce court, all because of a status update or "check-in" because they felt they need to "share" some shit they could have kept to themselves. And if it's not that, it's commenting/arguing on news stories. Hell, I'm in one group about finances where folks share with total strangers their income, how much of an inheritance they are getting, student loan debt, etc. It's mind boggling, and it's all FB's doing......because of a need to share one's "status".
But attention is a hell of a drug, as also previously mentioned, and the world seems more than happy to give up all their personal info for the simulation of getting "likes".
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I wouldn't give them my real name so they banned me from fb... Haven't missed a day of it... And this was years later .. I've been off for about two years now,no regrets... I just wonder what's next
By adults I meant college kids, sorry for the misunderstanding.
Dude.....
WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation. And he isn’t done merely with WhatsApp — in a post on Twitter today, Acton told his followers to delete Facebook.
“It is time,” Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook. Acton, who is worth $6.5 billion, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp declined to comment.
It was unclear whether Acton’s feelings about Facebook extend to his own app. But last month, Acton invested $50 million into Signal, an independent alternative to WhatsApp.
The tweet came after a bruising five-day period for Facebook that has seen regulators swarm and its stock price plunge following concerns over data privacy in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of user data.
Acton is not the first former Facebook executive to express unease about the company after leaving it. Last year, former head of growth Chamath Palihapitiya caused a firestorm after saying “we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Other former executives to express regrets include Sean Parker, Justin Rosenstein, and investor Roger McNamee.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17145200/brian-acton-delete-facebook-whatsapp
Looks like I'm not only one that noticed the growing problem with Facebook... Nobody Young is using it.
Facebook will become MySpace, says FANG-focused fund manager
A fund manager of a FANG-focused ETF thinks Facebook Inc. is destined to turn into MySpace.
“Any social media platform, in time, is going to become MySpace,” said Sabretooth Advisors chief investment officer Scott Freeze, who manages the New Tech and Media ETF FNG, +0.13% “Nobody young uses Facebook.”
Freeze said the latest debacle involving Cambridge Analytica’s access to user data “quickens the demise,” as people are going to be less inclined to use Facebook’sFB, +2.09% service in the wake of the latest controversy. He doubts that Facebook will be able to monetize its Instagram property, which has escaped much of the backlash, in the same way that the company monetizes the core Facebook platform.
“It’s a great service, a great idea, but you’ve got a lot of people letting their political views interfere,” he told MarketWatch.
A key concern for Facebook investors, according to Freeze, is the E.U.’s plan to make users opt-in to sharing certain information, rather than opt out. “Nobody” is going to actively opt in, he said, which could “really handcuff what they do advertiser-wise.” He added that he wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. government moved toward a similar policy over time as it continues to scrutinize data-privacy and other issues.
Freeze no longer considers Facebook to be behaving like he imagines a FANG stock should—he feels the same way about Google-parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +0.98%for that matter—and thinks that rapidly expanding Square Inc. SQ, -0.49% is a better bet, even with its shares up 247% in the past year. Square has “more upside potential than Facebook does,” according to Freeze.
Facebook shares are up 2.2% in Wednesday trading and 24% over the past 12 months, compared with a 16% rise for the S&P 500 SPX, +0.68% and a 20% gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/f...ace-says-fang-focused-fund-manager-2018-03-21
If the E.U. does this.... and if the US follows... Facebook is fucked.
With all the money that facebook is spending on purchases and technology.. They will have to find an alternative income stream.. Either premium Subscription services or Direct Ads on the home screen.
Facebook will become MySpace, says FANG-focused fund manager
A fund manager of a FANG-focused ETF thinks Facebook Inc. is destined to turn into MySpace.
“Any social media platform, in time, is going to become MySpace,” said Sabretooth Advisors chief investment officer Scott Freeze, who manages the New Tech and Media ETF FNG, +0.13% “Nobody young uses Facebook.”
Freeze said the latest debacle involving Cambridge Analytica’s access to user data “quickens the demise,” as people are going to be less inclined to use Facebook’sFB, +2.09% service in the wake of the latest controversy. He doubts that Facebook will be able to monetize its Instagram property, which has escaped much of the backlash, in the same way that the company monetizes the core Facebook platform.
“It’s a great service, a great idea, but you’ve got a lot of people letting their political views interfere,” he told MarketWatch.
A key concern for Facebook investors, according to Freeze, is the E.U.’s plan to make users opt-in to sharing certain information, rather than opt out. “Nobody” is going to actively opt in, he said, which could “really handcuff what they do advertiser-wise.” He added that he wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. government moved toward a similar policy over time as it continues to scrutinize data-privacy and other issues.
Freeze no longer considers Facebook to be behaving like he imagines a FANG stock should—he feels the same way about Google-parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +0.98%for that matter—and thinks that rapidly expanding Square Inc. SQ, -0.49% is a better bet, even with its shares up 247% in the past year. Square has “more upside potential than Facebook does,” according to Freeze.
Facebook shares are up 2.2% in Wednesday trading and 24% over the past 12 months, compared with a 16% rise for the S&P 500 SPX, +0.68% and a 20% gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/f...ace-says-fang-focused-fund-manager-2018-03-21
If the E.U. does this.... and if the US follows... Facebook is fucked.
With all the money that facebook is spending on purchases and technology.. They will have to find an alternative income stream.. Either premium Subscription services or Direct Ads on the home screen.
This article points out the other thing that I've trying to warn people about for a couple years..
This Is the Personal Data that Facebook Collects—And Sometimes Sells
The latest scandal involving Facebook—a data analytics firm that worked for President Trump’s campaign and allegedly obtained information on 50 million Facebook users—is a reminder that the social network used to share photos with friends and family also holds a treasure trove of personal data.
There’s a lot, and it doesn’t really matter if you use Facebook only occasionally.
The collecting and giving away of personal data starts when you sign up for Facebook, gains steam as you use the social network more, and it continues as users add third-party apps.
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you’re required to share:
Every third-party app is different in the kinds of data that’s collected. But the important step to remember is to stop and really read through what you’re agreeing to—even if sometimes it’s contained in a lengthy legalese agreement—before casually hitting the “continue” to log in using Facebook button. Typically, these apps want access to names, genders, and locations. But many apps dig deeper into personal preferences and friend networks.
From here, all it takes is for the third-party app to sell the data to someone else, like behavior research firm Strategic Communication Laboratories, which is affiliated with Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for Trump’s campaign. Facebook has cut down on the information it shares with third party apps. However, it has not been eliminated altogether.
A new report by Fractl found that all that personal data from Facebook and other accounts is being illegally sold on the “dark web” for little more than a few dollars. For instance, the firm found Facebook logins sold for $5.20 each while credentials to PayPal accounts went for an average of $247, reported MarketWatch.
Short of deleting a Facebook account, there are a few other steps users can take to protect themselves, starting with getting rid of all those third-party apps and turning off location data. Go to Facebook settings (nope, not privacy), then “apps,” and check how many apps are linked to Facebook.
When I took a look recently, there were 40 apps linked to my Facebook account, which is low compared to others I know who had as many as 100 third-party apps linked to their own accounts.
You can remove these apps. Or you can head over to the apps, websites, and plugins square, click on “edit,” and then turn off all third-party API access. Doing so will prevent third-party apps from linking to your Facebook account in the future.
Facebook tracks users locations, but it doesn’t have to. There are actually options to deny it location access, or to only give it access when the app is being used. Users can do this with their iPhone or Android, although process is just slightly different.
In Android, go to settings, scroll down and click location. From here, users can slide location on and off. For those with iPhones, go to settings, then privacy, and then location. From here, users can find the Facebook app and pick the location access they want to give.
http://fortune.com/2018/03/21/facebook-personal-data-cambridge-analytica/
This Is the Personal Data that Facebook Collects—And Sometimes Sells
The latest scandal involving Facebook—a data analytics firm that worked for President Trump’s campaign and allegedly obtained information on 50 million Facebook users—is a reminder that the social network used to share photos with friends and family also holds a treasure trove of personal data.
There’s a lot, and it doesn’t really matter if you use Facebook only occasionally.
The collecting and giving away of personal data starts when you sign up for Facebook, gains steam as you use the social network more, and it continues as users add third-party apps.
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you’re required to share:
- name
- gender
- date of birth
- email or mobile number
- Every ad users click on
- Any additional personal information added to the profile including schools, maiden name, hometown and current city, employment, other social networks like political clubs, groups, and alumni associations (current and former)
- Every IP address that the user used when logging into the Facebook account
- Every friend in the network, including friends that have been deleted
- All of the user’s activity—ever. Facebook describes its activity log as “a list of your posts and activity, from today back to the very beginning. You’ll also see stories and photos you’ve been tagged in, as well as the connections you’ve made – like when you liked a Page or added someone as a friend.” That means every “like,” every status change, and every search of another person on Facebook.
Every third-party app is different in the kinds of data that’s collected. But the important step to remember is to stop and really read through what you’re agreeing to—even if sometimes it’s contained in a lengthy legalese agreement—before casually hitting the “continue” to log in using Facebook button. Typically, these apps want access to names, genders, and locations. But many apps dig deeper into personal preferences and friend networks.
From here, all it takes is for the third-party app to sell the data to someone else, like behavior research firm Strategic Communication Laboratories, which is affiliated with Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for Trump’s campaign. Facebook has cut down on the information it shares with third party apps. However, it has not been eliminated altogether.
A new report by Fractl found that all that personal data from Facebook and other accounts is being illegally sold on the “dark web” for little more than a few dollars. For instance, the firm found Facebook logins sold for $5.20 each while credentials to PayPal accounts went for an average of $247, reported MarketWatch.
Short of deleting a Facebook account, there are a few other steps users can take to protect themselves, starting with getting rid of all those third-party apps and turning off location data. Go to Facebook settings (nope, not privacy), then “apps,” and check how many apps are linked to Facebook.
When I took a look recently, there were 40 apps linked to my Facebook account, which is low compared to others I know who had as many as 100 third-party apps linked to their own accounts.
You can remove these apps. Or you can head over to the apps, websites, and plugins square, click on “edit,” and then turn off all third-party API access. Doing so will prevent third-party apps from linking to your Facebook account in the future.
Facebook tracks users locations, but it doesn’t have to. There are actually options to deny it location access, or to only give it access when the app is being used. Users can do this with their iPhone or Android, although process is just slightly different.
In Android, go to settings, scroll down and click location. From here, users can slide location on and off. For those with iPhones, go to settings, then privacy, and then location. From here, users can find the Facebook app and pick the location access they want to give.
http://fortune.com/2018/03/21/facebook-personal-data-cambridge-analytica/
I'm also going to post the article that I read in the Guardian a couple years that got to change my view on facebook and data mining.. See this is why I've been tripping out on this issue... and that because it's not like Cambridge hasn't done this before.
Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users
Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.
A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.
As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedge fund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers.
Documents seen by the Guardian have uncovered longstanding ethical and privacy issues about the way academics hoovered up personal data by accessing a vast set of US Facebook profiles, in order to build sophisticated models of users’ personalities without their knowledge
In the race to advance data-driven electioneering strategies pioneered by successive Obama campaigns, Cruz has turned to Cambridge Analytica for its unparalleled offering of psychological data based on a treasure trove of Facebook “likes”, allowing it to match individuals’ traits with existing voter datasets, such as who owned a gun.
Analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings shows Cruz’s campaign has paid Cambridge Analytica at least $750,000 this year. The “behavioural microtargeting” company has also received around $2.5m over the past two years from conservative Super Pacs to which Mercer or members of his family have donated.
In an interview with the Guardian last month, Cruz said his funding and outreach apparatus “is very much the Obama model – a data-driven, grassroots-driven campaign – and it is a reason why our campaign is steadily gathering strength”.
Cruz is increasingly seen as a leading Republican contender, uniting factions within the party beyond his evangelical and Tea Party base. In Iowa – the first state to vote in the presidential primary, in less than two months – the outspoken Texas senator dethroned Trump in a poll for the first time this week as the mogul became ensnared in yet more controversy.
Cambridge Analytica has also worked with the Republican candidate Ben Carson, receiving $220,000 from his campaign earlier this year. But the company is more closely involved in Cruz’s presidential bid, with a team of its data scientists currently working at Cruz campaign headquarters in Houston.
Having donated $11m to the main pro-Cruz Super Pac, Keep the Promise I, Mercer is Cruz’s top financier – and the largest individual donor to Super Pacs or outside groups during the presidential election cycle thus far, according to data compiled by the political transparency website Open Secrets.
Mercer’s connections to both the Cruz campaign and the data firm that is apparently helping to power the senator’s advantages were previously reported by Politico and Bloomberg. But political strategists and privacy advocates agreed that Mercer’s parallel funding channels, combined with concerns over the surreptitious, commodified Facebook data – reported here for the first time – represented an intensified collision of billionaire financing and digital targeting on the campaign trail.
“If people begin to be turned off by Trump, the Cruz campaign will probably have a better strategic understanding of the implications and how to capitalize upon them,” said Bud Jackson, a Democratic specialist in digital grassroots campaigning, when asked to review the relationships. “Where a candidate’s campaign may be afraid to go outside the boundaries of ethical behaviour because of a potential public backlash, an outside group may be less afraid.”
In an interview, Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said the campaign had contracted Cambridge Analytica “because they’re a market leader and best in the field” but that officials had “done our due diligence”.
“My understanding is all the information is acquired legally and ethically with the permission of the users when they sign up to Facebook,” he said, referring questions about previous research to Cambridge Analytica.
The Guardian contacted Cambridge Analytica prior to publication via email with its findings and a list of detailed questions. Repeated calls were also made to its offices in Washington and New York, as well as its parent company in London. A representative in New York refused to speak with the Guardian and hung up the phone.
After this article was published, Facebook said the company was “carefully investigating this situation” regarding the Cruz campaign.
“[M]isleading people or misusing their information is a direct violation of our policies and we will take swift action against companies that do, including banning those companies from Facebook and requiring them to destroy all improperly collected data,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement to the Guardian.
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, described the Guardian’s findings as “troubling” and highlighted shortcomings by the FEC to adequately regulate campaigns’ use of data.
“What it essentially means is there is no one regulating campaigns’ privacy data and security practices,” he said. “So it means you have a wild west, where the campaigns can do whatever they want and get away with it.”
Research that seeded data on millions
Documents seen by the Guardian show Cambridge Analytica’s parent, a London-based company called Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), was first introduced to the concept of using social media data to model human personality traits in early 2014 by Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at Cambridge University’s renowned psychology department.
Kogan established his own company in spring that year and began working with SCL to deliver a “large research project” in the US. His stated aim was to get as close to every US Facebook user into the dataset as possible.
The academic used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights.
This was achieved by recruiting MTurk users by paying them about one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. This raised the alarm among some participants, who flagged Kogan for violating MTurk’s terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” complained one user at the time.
Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ed-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data
Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users
Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.
A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.
As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedge fund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers.
Documents seen by the Guardian have uncovered longstanding ethical and privacy issues about the way academics hoovered up personal data by accessing a vast set of US Facebook profiles, in order to build sophisticated models of users’ personalities without their knowledge
In the race to advance data-driven electioneering strategies pioneered by successive Obama campaigns, Cruz has turned to Cambridge Analytica for its unparalleled offering of psychological data based on a treasure trove of Facebook “likes”, allowing it to match individuals’ traits with existing voter datasets, such as who owned a gun.
Analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings shows Cruz’s campaign has paid Cambridge Analytica at least $750,000 this year. The “behavioural microtargeting” company has also received around $2.5m over the past two years from conservative Super Pacs to which Mercer or members of his family have donated.
In an interview with the Guardian last month, Cruz said his funding and outreach apparatus “is very much the Obama model – a data-driven, grassroots-driven campaign – and it is a reason why our campaign is steadily gathering strength”.
Cruz is increasingly seen as a leading Republican contender, uniting factions within the party beyond his evangelical and Tea Party base. In Iowa – the first state to vote in the presidential primary, in less than two months – the outspoken Texas senator dethroned Trump in a poll for the first time this week as the mogul became ensnared in yet more controversy.
Cambridge Analytica has also worked with the Republican candidate Ben Carson, receiving $220,000 from his campaign earlier this year. But the company is more closely involved in Cruz’s presidential bid, with a team of its data scientists currently working at Cruz campaign headquarters in Houston.
Having donated $11m to the main pro-Cruz Super Pac, Keep the Promise I, Mercer is Cruz’s top financier – and the largest individual donor to Super Pacs or outside groups during the presidential election cycle thus far, according to data compiled by the political transparency website Open Secrets.
Mercer’s connections to both the Cruz campaign and the data firm that is apparently helping to power the senator’s advantages were previously reported by Politico and Bloomberg. But political strategists and privacy advocates agreed that Mercer’s parallel funding channels, combined with concerns over the surreptitious, commodified Facebook data – reported here for the first time – represented an intensified collision of billionaire financing and digital targeting on the campaign trail.
“If people begin to be turned off by Trump, the Cruz campaign will probably have a better strategic understanding of the implications and how to capitalize upon them,” said Bud Jackson, a Democratic specialist in digital grassroots campaigning, when asked to review the relationships. “Where a candidate’s campaign may be afraid to go outside the boundaries of ethical behaviour because of a potential public backlash, an outside group may be less afraid.”
In an interview, Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said the campaign had contracted Cambridge Analytica “because they’re a market leader and best in the field” but that officials had “done our due diligence”.
“My understanding is all the information is acquired legally and ethically with the permission of the users when they sign up to Facebook,” he said, referring questions about previous research to Cambridge Analytica.
The Guardian contacted Cambridge Analytica prior to publication via email with its findings and a list of detailed questions. Repeated calls were also made to its offices in Washington and New York, as well as its parent company in London. A representative in New York refused to speak with the Guardian and hung up the phone.
After this article was published, Facebook said the company was “carefully investigating this situation” regarding the Cruz campaign.
“[M]isleading people or misusing their information is a direct violation of our policies and we will take swift action against companies that do, including banning those companies from Facebook and requiring them to destroy all improperly collected data,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement to the Guardian.
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, described the Guardian’s findings as “troubling” and highlighted shortcomings by the FEC to adequately regulate campaigns’ use of data.
“What it essentially means is there is no one regulating campaigns’ privacy data and security practices,” he said. “So it means you have a wild west, where the campaigns can do whatever they want and get away with it.”
Research that seeded data on millions
Documents seen by the Guardian show Cambridge Analytica’s parent, a London-based company called Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), was first introduced to the concept of using social media data to model human personality traits in early 2014 by Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at Cambridge University’s renowned psychology department.
Kogan established his own company in spring that year and began working with SCL to deliver a “large research project” in the US. His stated aim was to get as close to every US Facebook user into the dataset as possible.
The academic used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights.
This was achieved by recruiting MTurk users by paying them about one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. This raised the alarm among some participants, who flagged Kogan for violating MTurk’s terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” complained one user at the time.
Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ed-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data
it's been a data mining thing from jump tho its funny how people are trying to act brand new about it
the problem is young people don't like it. it's becoming super niche.
if you're not in specific facebook groups- groups aren't your thing, then you're not using facebook for anything else really. everywhere else has everything it has and better and without collecting everything from you.
the problem is young people don't like it. it's becoming super niche.
if you're not in specific facebook groups- groups aren't your thing, then you're not using facebook for anything else really. everywhere else has everything it has and better and without collecting everything from you.
Also true... That's what I was talking about on the first page. Facebook is no longer cool. It is no longer Slick and Quick.
If I had the money...... I'd create a social platform now that basically jacks Facebook's original idea and take it back to the initial College exclusivity. Have different networks within the platform... High School, College, Adult... and have it where Neither group has the ability to talk to or see the other. Take it back to the basics and simplify the experience...
its still going to take a mass exodus for it to not be the thing. the sheer user volume. the amount of money it makes promising advertisers impressions. it's going to take people actually deleting accounts in droves for it to take a hit. if it handles this European thing wrong and becomes the patsy then its possible but for now not really because the user amount is just too massive and the tide hasn't fully turned on it. the power is in the impressions whether people use it or not. and as long as they can say if you spend this we can get your ad to 100m people who are specifically interested in your product for the right price it's not going anywhere.
Game of cards had an episode that was just like this FB situation using data analytics......this shit is crazy.
No. Myspace was already dead at that point. Fox had nothing to do with it.
Facebook owns Instagram. You didn't really leave facebook. You're still on one of their properties.
You're making my point. You will hardly find a person who isn't at least on IG, FB, or Whatsapp. As long as you're in their ecosystem, they're monetizing you.
I hope they're fined an insane amount for this.
FB needs to be made an example out of but the masses still don't seem to be aware of what is going on.
FB needs to be made an example out of but the masses still don't seem to be aware of what is going on.
I completely agree with you... facebook isn’t going anywhere for awhile but this is first crack that doesn’t seem to be going away.
But would the impressions alone be able to support Facebook data sales are regulated and the price of facebooks stock drops.
Facebook owns Instagram. You didn't really leave facebook. You're still on one of their properties.
You're making my point. You will hardly find a person who isn't at least on IG, FB, or Whatsapp. As long as you're in their ecosystem, they're monetizing you.
Again I agree...
I am curious to see if the former founders of WhatsApp will find a way to take advantage of this situation.
Man them shits is just numbers at this point to be honest.
Just the massive amount of users they have they'll be alright
Stock doesn't really mean shit for nothing but the shareholders lol. The company itself is killing with Ads and selling your data
and i bet majority of the angel investor's who were issued stock already cashed out at the peak.
That's what they do. Angel invest, push the tech to get an IPO get the highest valuation and then immediately cash in.
joe smoe needs to be worried lol
Here is the problem with Mark’s horseshit reply.... Cambridge did the exact same thing for Ted Cruz in 2015 and the guardian wrote a story on it.
You can’t try to put on puppy dog eyes this time
I think it’s bigger than this. Facebook wasn’t careless with the data, they sold it to a company like they always do.
The issue is that the company that legitimately bought the data, then sold it to Cambridge Analytica. That was a violation of Facebooks terms of use. Facebook has no control over what a company does with data once it’s sold.
Favebook’s Entire business model is the free ability to sell user data. If you restrict that you fundamentally change the company’s business model. I’m not sure that Facebook could exist, if it couldn’t sell user data, and that’s exactly what regulators will ask them to do.
The puppy dog eyes hide the lies when The Book of Faces' business is to monetize. Attention-whoring is a drug fueled by society's highs, though the lows of shady social media led to Zuck's rise. It's all bullshit for real, and we should all cut ties ... and check out tubesites instead for many open thighs. Ass and titties last forever, as T&A never dies ... pussy makes the world go 'round which explains creampies.
Facebook didn't sell the data in question. That's not what happened.
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