Thread: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

Facebook Leaves Its Users’ Privacy Vulnerable

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDMARCH 19, 2018



Credit Tim Peacock

Facebook is once again struggling with revelations that manipulative characters exploited the vulnerabilities of its platform during the 2016 election to put Donald Trump in the White House. The company said last week that it was suspending the accounts of Cambridge Analytica, a company that worked for the Trump campaign, and a professor, Aleksandr Kogan, who is said to have deceptively amassed information from more than 50 million people without their consent. That may sound like decisive action, but it came more than two years after Facebook learned of the problem.

Starting in 2014, Mr. Kogan got the data, using a quiz app, under the guise of academic research. He handed the information to Cambridge Analytica, which used it to build profiles of voters’ personalities, according to reports in The New York Times and The Observer of London on Saturday.

What is particularly disturbing about this case is that Facebook has not yet identified and alerted users whose profile information was vacuumed up by the app, most of whom had never used it but were friends with somebody else who had. Further, Facebook did not verify that Cambridge Analytica and Mr. Kogan deleted the data after the social media company told them to in 2015. The Times reported that Cambridge still had most or all of the data.

Facebook’s response so far is reminiscent of its slow, defensive reaction to the spread of pro-Trump fake news on its platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. Days after the election, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said it was a “pretty crazy idea” to suggest that fake news had influenced the outcome. It took months for him to admit that he was wrong to so cavalierly dismiss the importance of hoaxes spread on Facebook, many of them by people working on behalf of the Russian government.

It is hard to know just how useful the profile information from Facebook was in Cambridge’s effort to help elect Mr. Trump. The company has offered contradictory statements about its use of what’s called “psychographic data” for the campaign, which included targeting political messages to voters receptive to them. The trove contained enough details about roughly 30 million people, including where they lived, that the company was able to build detailed profiles by linking the data to other sources of information.

Officials in the United States and the European Union are investigating Cambridge Analytica, and others say they might, including members of Congress and the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey. In Britain, regulators and lawmakers are looking at whether the company tried to illegally influence the “Brexit” referendum of 2016.

More investigations may be on the way. On Monday, Channel 4 News in Britain released hidden-camera tapes in which Cambridge executives said that their company used bribes and prostitutes to entrap politicians. The company denies engaging in corruption and extortion. Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who is a big supporter of Mr. Trump, owns a controlling stake in Cambridge, and Stephen Bannon, the former chief strategist for the president, is a former company board member.

Lawmakers and regulators also ought to investigate Facebook’s response. For starters, they need to take a close look at whether the company is in violation of a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused it of deceiving users by telling them their information would be kept private and then allowing it to be shared and made public. They also need to force the company to quickly identify and alert the tens of millions of people whose information might have been disclosed to Cambridge.

In the longer term, Congress clearly needs to strengthen privacy laws to give people more control over private information and prevent businesses and political campaigns from harvesting personal data under false pretenses. President Barack Obama proposed a privacy bill of rights in 2012, but the idea died in Congress after technology and advertising companies claimed it would be an unfair burden.

Facebook says it takes this case seriously. But it is clear that lawmakers cannot rely on the company to police itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/o...pgtype=article

Facebook says asking users about 'sexual pictures' from children was a mistake

By Ali Breland - 03/05/18 02:52 PM EST 65

© Getty

Facebook says that it made a mistake after it asked users in a poll if it should allow child predators to ask children for sexual photos on its platform.

The odd admission comes after Facebook prompted some of its users with a survey asking about acceptable behaviors on its platform.

One survey question asked how a user would "handle" a man asking for inappropriate pictures of a young girl if that user was in charge of setting Facebook's policies.
“There are a wide range of topics and behaviors that appear on Facebook,” one question read, according to screenshots posted by The Guardian. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

Users were then given a standard set of answers to pick from ranging from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it.”
A follow-up question in the survey asked users who should be in charge of deciding policies around “an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures,” and gave the option for letting “Facebook users decide the rules by voting.”

Facebook’s vice president of product, Guy Rosen, tweeted that the company had made an error and that these kinds of actions would always be "completely unacceptable" on the social media platform.

“We run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies. But this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on FB,” he explained. “We regularly work with authorities if identified. It shouldn't have been part of this survey. That was a mistake.”

Facebook said in a statement that it has since stopped the survey and says that this behavior already violates its policies.

“We sometimes ask for feedback from people about our community standards and the types of content they would find most concerning on Facebook," a company spokesperson said.

"We understand this survey refers to offensive content that is already prohibited on Facebook and that we have no intention of allowing so have stopped the survey. We have prohibited child grooming on Facebook since our earliest days; we have no intention of changing this and we regularly work with the police to ensure that anyone found acting in such a way is brought to justice."

http://thehill.com/policy/technology...request-sexual

Facebook lost control of our data. Now it's paying a record $5 billion fine