After days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the controversy over the 2014 leak of private Facebook user data to a firm that went on to do political consulting work for the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.
Cambridge Analytica got the data by paying a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to create a Facebook personality quiz that harvested data not only about its own users but also about users’ friends. Kogan amassed data from around 50 million users and turned it over to Cambridge.
Zuckerberg says that when Facebook learned about this transfer in 2015, it got Kogan and Cambridge to certify that they had deleted the data. But media reports this weekend suggested that Cambridge had lied and retained the data throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.
This whole thing should make everyone think twice about how – and if – they should keep using Facebook. I’ve personally always been incredibly careful about what data I put on Facebook and I’ve rarely – if ever – used any Facebook ‘apps’, but in the end, you don’t even need to feed Facebook any data for them to figure out who you are and what you’re interested in. It’s actually remarkably easy to extrapolate a whole lot about you from simple things like the times you’re online, or which sites with Facebook social trackers you visit, and so on.
I trust Google with such forms of data, but not Facebook. If it wasn’t for my friends, I’d delete my Facebook account in a heartbeat. My hope is that this story – which has certainly permeated beyond tech media into the mainstream media – will push more and more of the people around me to consider leaving Facebook.
How did Google earn your trust with this?
I’m also perplexed by this. They both have the same profit model, and thus exactly the same perverse incentives. What’s the difference?
One difference is that Facebook makes it alluring to share personal information, whereas Google doesn’t.
They may have the same perverse incentives, but the way they try to fulfill their incentives is different.
Edited 2018-03-23 00:16 UTC
Perhaps because Google/Alphabet have another (aka more diverse) business model than just collecting/selling their users’ data ?
Anyhow, Zuckerberg and many others have already the best answer to this kind of slight annoyance know as data leakage :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D01NHPnLrVs
PR language is such lovable these days. Even politics use it.
What defines a company is their revenue. I don’t even know what “model” means outside of that.
And the majority of it is *overwhelmingly* in advertising.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/633651/alphabet-annual-global-re…
Yeah, I don’t understand that. Both of their bread and butter is datamining/advertising. They’re only tech companies in the secondary sense.
Just part of the social engineering crap they are trying to pull off, the more they know, the more power against you.
Good luck with that.
We managed to drop Friendster and replace it overnight by using Facebook.
During the time, it was easy to urge friends and families to abandon friendster because it feels like its an easy task. This is partly the fault of friendster for failing to convince users to stay. Their childish user interface contributed to the fall of friendster in my opinion.
But now, it is difficult to abandon facebook because you can no longer demand your families and friends and use something like Google plus or dispora. Its difficult.
The only thing that will force us to abandon Facebook if it will start imposing draconian measures especially political in nature to their users.
Just amazed how every time something like this comes to light the (mainstream) media go crazy. After NSA revelations, the knowledge of what Facebook, Google, Apple … are and what can be done with available personal data such things cannot be a surprise. No way! What we are seeing is the essence of what a Leviathan state is mixed with current ideology. This is not going away. It may just sink deeper under the radar of the general public.
And no, Facebook did not elect Trump. Neither did Russians. The problem is in American electoral system (never, ever use e-voting, among other things!) but no one seems to care. My god how blind journalists can be if something doesn’t fit their weltanschauung.
The real question is what can be done. And since this is an OS site it would be nice to follow what FSF has been doing recently and inform the wider public of what can quite easily be done.
Just a thought.
Everyone needs to reconsider their use of all social media and cloud platforms including Google (who are Evil to the core these days IMHO).
Just stop and think before posting anything about yourself or commenting on something that can reveal who you are in terms of likes and dislikes. (I hate Cucumber FWIW)…
I’m one of those refusniks who never joined any SM platform so I’m lucky in that respect. Others are not and I have been gently persuading my family to basically stop feeding their data slurping dragons and delete their SM accounts. Most have drastically reduced their activities on SM but there is a long way to go.
If facebook is the only way you keep in touch then maybe they aren’t really friends.
I dropped mine after a long period of non use, The people who belong in my life are still here. All I did was lose a load of pseudo friends.
Then replace ‘friends’ with ‘acquaintance’.
There are a lot of people in our social circles we can’t interact with face to face as much as we may wish, they may be far away, the schedules may be incompatible (example: when you have babies your social time drastically decreases). In such cases an online tool helps keep in touch.
Also, a real-life relation with someone can be augmented by the use of an online tool: you may need to share some files, send a reminder and such.
Once we established an online tool has legit uses, then we can ask which one. It used to be email or IM, now a lot of people use facebook and dropped the other tools.
Now go to a circle of friends, acquaintance and/or family members, who are ‘normal’ people, not techies. Tell them them you are deleting your facebook account for privacy reasons. The result: you will get funny looks.
I once worried about missing out on all these so called benefits, until I gave up Facebook 26 months ago and realised it doesn’t make much difference.
Now when I meet up with someone I haven’t seen in a long time, we actually have something to say other than.. oh yeah, I saw you posted that on Facebook…
Edited 2018-03-23 10:42 UTC
Let me outline a few ways I use facebook effectively:
– as a freelance photographer, it is the tool I use to keep in touch with my clients. Also, is an useful tool to promote my work;
– as a passionate photographer, it is the tool I use to coordinate with photo clubs and other communities: exhibitions, photo walks, feedback
– being involved in FOSS/Free Culture communities, we use it as a channel to promote our projects, keep in touch with contributors, organize events.
Yes, one could use replacements for a good part of those, but a) for clients, you do want to make it easy for *them*, and they already use fb, b) when promoting anything you want to increase your reach and go where people are and c) for communities, a lot migrated their forums or mailing lists to fb groups.
And if you want a different example of the powere of facebook, here is: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/feb/06/romanians-create… Yes, facebook was used to put this together.
I agree with the business side of it. However I don’t agree mixing business with personal data. It is a receipe for doom. Zuckerberg still selling this as a tool for personal data…promising the stars and the moon to keep the users happy. He should adopt blockchain tehcnology to encrypt all the data in the application and let users choose what to do with that without having suspicion of someone stealing the data for business practices.Let companies pay for the blockchain if they want advertise, but keep the data out of anyone reach. Now that will be a blockbuster…end to end encryption decentralized.
You’re deluding yourself if you think people would adopt such decentralised service / that it would be a “blockbuster”.
Can you share your FB link? I’d like to see your photographs.
I use the same user ID as here
But if you want quality over quantity, better check my photos on 500px (no login needed)
Are you suggesting that anyone who doesn’t live in the same city as you isn’t a real friend? Because when you’ve got friends and family scattered across the world, Facebook is by far the most convenient means of keeping in contact with them…
No, But there are many other ways to keep in touch with people if you really want to, You don’t need Facebook for that.
You don’t have to do anything; but we tend to choose the methods that are convenient. I’m not going to teach my 70 year old mother, my sister and my nieces to use Signal just because it’s more secure, for example.
I don’t “need” a washing machine to do my laundry. I don’t “need” email because I could use snail mail. I don’t “need” to have a computer at all.
Yet I prefer not to do my laundry by hand, I prefer the convenience of email and I just like to use a computer.
Soulbender,
Those examples don’t fit because they suggest not having modern tools, but facebook is just a brand. One can get rid of facebook and still have modern tools that work just as easily as facebook. The obvious problem of course is that facebook has all the users and that corporations have done away with federated networks that allow users to choose their own providers while still being able to reach each other.
Consider the global telephone network where anyone can call anyone else regardless of their provider. Now imagine what would have occurred if ATT wasn’t broken up and had been allowed to stop competing telephone networks from establishing calls with it’s customers. It would have been the exact same scenario we find ourselves in with facebook where the majority of users are controlled by facebook and the only way to reach them is by also becoming a facebook user.
It’s dangerous to have all users and interactions under one corporate umbrella. Having other competitors would help address many of the concerns that facebook’s singular control raises, but so long as facebook is allowed to deny competing services from accessing those users, then competitors don’t have much viability regardless of their merit. This is why facebook is so problematic: it’s easy to develop alternatives, but reaching anybody through those alternatives can be futile.
Edited 2018-03-25 13:37 UTC
I do use facebook, both in a personal and professional matter, to keep in touch with friends, colleagues and clients. So I did my own weighting of benefits versus costs and the conclusions the benefits are more than costs, so I don’t intend to delete my account in the foreseeable future.
A solution to mitigate the issue is to disable the ‘platform’, which will limit 3rd parties to access your data. I weighted that to, it was a close call, but my conclusion was that using facebook to login to a number of other sites is valuable enough.
A friend of mine tried to convince me that this was due to people suggesting my phone number was attached to a name…
I don’t use my real name on facebook. If a friend asks to talk to me through it, I will give them the alias. But one day a coworker and I were discussing callerID, and he said he used thos wonderful app called TrueCaller. He had me call his phone and my Facebook account name showed up! Now the only way that could happen from what I can see is 1) if he already had the contact set to that on his phone because I was on his facebook friend’s list (which I am not, and they are NOT supposed to be exposing that anyhow) 2) Facebook was allowing the app to read from their ‘for password recovery only’ numbers.
I promptly removed my number from my account, to which it had asked me many times if I was sure… I don’t think I tried calling him again since then, but I think he manually fixed it anyhow. So I would never put any real info in there. Though I ended up fixing my birthday (different year, same day). Why? Because I got tired of all these people telling me happy birthday on the completely wrong day. Now they just say “you look great for being 80!”
Never had a Facebook account, or Google, or Twitter, or any social media rubbish for just this reason. You could see all this was going to happen even back in the 90’s!
Maybe it’s just because I’m old fashioned, but there is these things that still exist called “telephones” and “email” that are fantastic for contacting family and friends.
Far better than trusting Google the evil entity!
Same here…Social media is only for egotistic antisocial people !
Google is not evil ! Users are stupid..plain and simple.
Just an OSNews account? Thom would be blushing right now.
No, quiet a few here and there actually, just not social media. You’ll have to troll better than that!
I stopped using Instant Messenger programs for the same reasons at the end of the 90’s, they are where it really started in my opinion, especially with ICQ and MSN, and the reason you could tell where things were heading. I never fell for the SM scam!
Damn kids, get off my lawn.
I dumped Facebook at the beginning of this year. And relations with friends and family have improved. Between Actual phone calls and face to face interaction I don’t muss Facebook at all. And there is this added side effect of feeling closer to your friends and other mental health benefits like feeling less depressed.
I am currently in the process of De-Googleing my intention is to by the end of the year fall off the different analytics and tracking systems by the end of the year as possible.
Edited 2018-03-22 14:25 UTC
Facebook is dataminer. What kind of BS is that from Zuckerberg ?
They gave access to their systems to the data they collected (stored, mined whatever you want to call it) and have done a breach of trust … to whom ?
Edited 2018-03-22 18:59 UTC
The root cause isn’t with Facebook itself, it’s their “App” platform built upon it. I see dozens of my facebook friends using shifty-looking facebook apps like “find out who you’ll marry” and other various phone-style games. These apps ask their users for permission to access certain information, which like EULA’s, most users will just click through. This isn’t the fault of Facebook, as they provide many opportunities to tighten access to your personal details from apps like these. No, the real issue is users not understanding the gravity and weight these permissions carry. If end users were more knowledgeable about what data they allow third parties to access from Facebook, this “data leak” would never have happened
It’s only a “breach of trust” to Zuckerberg because he didn’t think of it first and his preferred side lost. Had Facebook been the ones who did it, or had his preferred candidate been elected, you’d not hear a word out of him.
Obama leveraged many of the same things. So Zuck’s side did win once. This is just Sour Grapes that anyone can do it.
One of the Obama’s former campaign managers said as much:
https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760
When facebook found out what they were doing, they didn’t stop them.
“They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
8:02 PM – 18 Mar 2018”
Edited 2018-03-23 21:32 UTC
I distrust FB as much as the next guy, but they only provided the platform, Trumps Campaign and Cambridge Analytica are the ones who harvested the data, and FB’s users are the ones that granted the quiz permission, and who took the quiz.
Seems to me that everyone dropped the ball here, the users on FB have to take accountability for what they are granting permission too, and to who. Read the EULA. Read the permission dialog when it appears.
I feel that FB is not the real villain of this story.
Considering that the Obama 2012 campaign was lauded for its then unprecedented harvesting of Facebook social graph information en route to his landslide electoral win over Mitt Romney, this current uproar is less to do with what Facebook did, or did not do, than about Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election.
Edited 2018-03-26 15:25 UTC