Mark Zuckerberg Makes Statement About Cambridge Analytica Situation

[engine]

There's no doubt that the Cambridge Analytica situation has generated a fire-storm for Facebook, and it's now under greater scrutiny than ever in how it handles the use of data.

This is a serious issue, and apparently ignored by many users at Facebook, until now.

Mark Zuckerberg knows this and has decided to make a statement over the issue.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

[facebook.com...]

Cracking Down on Platform Abuse [newsroom.fb.com]

We’re going to set a higher standard for how developers build on Facebook, what people should expect from them, and, most importantly, from us.

Video: Mark Zuckerberg speaks to CNN
[edition.cnn.com...]

Earlier Facebook Profiles Exploited: Could This Tip The User into Demanding Greater Privacy [webmasterworld.com]

[keyplyr]

Trouble is, there is little action taken in all these issues. FB makes an announcement, then weighs the ad dollars against the privacy rights of users, resulting in empty tokenism.

[RhinoFish]

They push those apps, games and messenger, on us harder than any drug dealer I've ever seen. Wonder why that is? Hahahaa!

[keyplyr]

Eat ice cream or french fries.

[EditorialGuy]

It's important to remember that the real culprits here are Cambridge Analytica, the Russian professor at Cambridge University who misled Facebook users by passing their data along to Cambridge Analytica, and the politicians who paid Cambridge Analytica for its services.

Facebook obviously needs to tighten up its security and policies, but it would be a mistake to let the hubbub over Facebook's shortcomings be a distraction from what Cambridge Analytica, its supplier, and its clients did.

[tangor]

FB made this material available early on, in fact was used for the 2012 cycle by the "other guy" and they were okay with it because they liked 'em.

So far we have a nothing burger, though MZ has recently come out saying trading free speech for safety is okay (it's not, but we know how it will be reported).

Caught screwing the pooch and trying to figure a way out since the stock market dropped six (6) points when the news broke and has not recovered since. Meanwhile, MZ sold off 55m shares just before the news broke, so saved $40m when the bottom fell out.

What's really nuts about all this CA was dropped in 2015 (before 2016) and weren't successful in anything other than snow jobs about what they could do (and routinely failed to deliver).

FB messed up from the get go. USER DATA has always been their bread and butter and they got just a little too greedy. By the time they realized it two US election cycles had gone by. Now the Chit Storm has hit the fan ... the media intended to hurt a different party but FB will end up (rightly) facing the more severe consequences of this reporting.

MZ's statements answer nothing, reveal nothing and probably mean nothing REAL gets done. How long this continues before governments get involved (already are in the EU) remains to be seen.

[Shaddows]

There are two things here. The first is that Facebook is sold to advertisers on the basis it has exactly this ability - highly targeted advertising.

The second is that an academic broke his access contract and resold data to a private company (CA), which then used other publicly-available information to enhance their data model to profile voters.

At which point, they used Facebook as-designed to target those voters.

So, while all the rule-breaking was not Facebook, all the stuff that people care about was Facebook. Namely the data collection, and the targeting. The content creation (which is what Profiling is used for) is secondary.

@tangor, look at how one single website wrote up this profiling in two different ways, depending on the candidate:

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach [theguardian.com]

Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.

<Redacted>, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election [theguardian.com]

Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.

Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central <redacted> database.

[motorhaven]

Shaddows, of the 2012 incident...

“We were actually able to download the entire social network of the U.S.,” Davidsen said during a Personal Democracy Forum speech in 2015.

Zuckerberg enabled much of this I believe. In 2010 "We’ve had this policy where you can’t store or cache data for any longer than 24 hours, and we’re going to go ahead and get rid of that policy," Zuckerberg said.

And they seemed to be okay with what went on in 2012:
“Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,” Davidsen tweeted.

“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,” she added, in a subsequent tweet.

[keyplyr]

I just joined Elon Musk by deleted our company page on FB.

Proactively, I removed phone number, photos, videos, links, maps, all app and advertising settings and as much other personal information as possible.

After discussing it with family members, I may in fact remove my personal account as well.

[tangor]

@keyplyr, you do know your stuff will live forever on FBs servers. They NEVER DELETE ANYTHING. However, by choosing not to play you can sue their buns if ANY OF YOUR STUFF ever appears again in the future, and in that is some "respect" demanded.

[keyplyr]

As I said, *I* deleted my content. I've been doing it all week. I've gone through about 6 months of posts. I've also removed all those images from my server and have blocked the FB UA that refreshes their cache.

There has to be consequences, otherwise noting will change. My company won't participate in Facebook's failure to protect the privacy concerns of its users by subjecting my clients to be used in the manipulation of political power plays.

[browndog]

They just feel bad because they've been exposed, they tried to keep this out of the news.

GMG received a legal letter from Facebook the day before the Observer reported that a company harvested as many as 50m Facebook profiles of US voters for Cambridge Analytica and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

[theguardian.com...]

I admire you keyplyr, I am still considering my options. We all know that Google likes a social media presence, and as I am trying to put some of my eggs in other baskets, I've been focusing more on social media, but I am also appalled at this latest update. And the 'apps others use' setting that was almost entirely ticked, and gave permission for apps my FRIENDS use for developers to view my profile.

[nymag.com...]

I have always prided myself on my locked down FB profile, I don't sign into any other sites with my FB account, all you can see on my FB is my cover photo and profile photo, even friends can't see who I'm friends with (unless we have shared ones), or what groups I follow, yet that 'apps others use' was something I had no idea existed until yesterday.

Maybe I should focus my social media on Twitter, if I can figure out how it actually works.

[keyplyr]

I admire you keyplyr, I am still considering my options. We all know that Google likes a social media presence

Yeah Google likes it so much, in some searches my company FB page ranked higher than my actual company page. But I still have plenty of SM presence; just not FB for my company any longer.

So my files are nowhere to be found at FB now but I had to "delete" some of them several times, delete session cookie, reload page and do it again... whew!

Still, FB doesn't want to let go...

[My Company] is scheduled to be deleted in 14 days.
Cancel Deletion.

[browndog]

If you don't mind me asking, what other social media do you use? I need to get on board a bit more with social media (for my site). Do you post on one social media outlet and it shows up on all of them?

Of course they don't want you to go. I once deactivated (I'd said I needed some time out or something), and if you do that, it re-activates your account for you after 7 days. So now when I deactivate (I like to do it for a break), I select 'other' and then just put a ... in the reason why. That's just deactivating, I can imagine they'd put lots of walls in the way of a full delete.

I don't mind Facebook and I understand they need to make money on ads. I am fine with them displaying ads to me, what I am not fine with having to dig around to find out your friends answering quizzes gives people access to MY account. I am still fuming over that.

[keyplyr]

I have accounts at most all... about 35 or 40 SM sites and keep active almost daily. Usually post similar content across all of them, just tweaked a bit for relevance.

I've also created custom content and graphics for a dozen apps so my linked comments and articles can propagate as far as possible.

I believe my Twitter account is accessible from my profile if you want to check that out. You'll see the custom OG images that link directly to my site articles.

[browndog]

Thanks keyplyr, I'll have a look.

[tangor]

So my files are nowhere to be found at FB now but I had to "delete" some of them several times, delete session cookie, reload page and do it again... whew!

Still, FB doesn't want to let go...

Ha! The forward facing is "deleted", but your profile, your content, and everything else is still there, just marked "don't show".

Bold move on your part, and kudos for doing so, just don't delude yourself you and your company are "gone" ... FB and its "cookies" and "links" is everywhere. No one destroys data, but they can hide it if necessary.

(a cache unrefreshed is still a cache, just not updated ... or so they say)

[keyplyr]

I've read through their legal pages and see no indication they won't abide their own terms.

[tangor]

Ha, ha, ha! From an accounting point of view your stuff still LIVES on their servers. YOU WILL BE GONE from the front end but by having played once, your footprint remains, and your presence, and your contacts, and all the rest. G does the same, just hasn't been caught yet.

No conspiracy comments, just reality that ANY DATA OBTAINED YOU DO NOT DELETE, you hide it, keep it from forward facing, but from an advertising point of view THIS IS GOLD and you mine it from the top, bottom, side, front and behind and sell it off. READ THEIR DOCS. THEIR SYSTEM, THEIR RULES.

the keyply page disappears front facing. keyply does not disappear as far as FB is concerned.

Then again, if you play the game expect to be burned. After all, what do you expect for FREE?

TANSTAAFL

[keyplyr]

You have experience with closing accounts at Facebook do you Tangor?

You have seen this first hand or can you post documentation where this has happened?

Otherwise your comments are irrelevant.

[browndog]

What do I expect for free?

Maybe I am naive, I have a good idea that FB knows my age, gender, likes, dislikes, and they show me ads which are relevant to me (although sometimes they get it spectacularly wrong). I accept that because I am using their service for free, just like my site visitors use my site for free, but I make money on advertising (I don't sell their info to anybody...even if I knew how to).

What I don't expect is to have my FB account locked down, but find there is a back door to my profile via apps. That is what I am upset about.

I do think it will be a storm in a teacup, in a couple of months we will have forgotten about it (although hopefully a little wiser for it). FB will recover, although hopefully there will be greater regulation.

This article is in our paper today...

[smh.com.au...]

You know what always irked me, I often check my profile (weekly) to see what it looks like to the public, and I see lots of links encouraging me to share more information about myself. Add a temporary bio, featured photos, other links, pages I manage, answer a question. They try to squeeze every drop of information out of you. I would love to think they have learned a lesson in this, but I guarantee they haven't, they just got busted. That's the only reason MZ is in damage control.

[tangor]

Proving a negative is tough, but reading the FB TOS where they have rights to your content is not so difficult.

One can make their front disappear, but all their content activity and "friends" remain FB. Prove it doesn't and I will be convinced. (READ THE DANG TOS)

Even we webmasters click all to quick o n those "I Accept" thingamabobs.

OR YOU WOULD NOT BE ON FB.

That simple.

If you do play the game give nothing away, KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and try to leverage it. Hard to do when you have no skin in the game. Their ball park, their sandbox, pail and shovel, too.

Like g, give it away, make it essential, then milk it for all it is worth.

Two opposing thoughts. BOTH ARE CORRECT and both are probably somewhere in between. FB is not going to lose the data collected (hence "you" are not gone even if deleting an acount... heck, they don't even delete dead people .... look to "remembering")

The kudo is for making the effort to terminate a relationship with FB for errors o n their part but don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining when declaring victory in deleting your account, your presence and all FB has accumulated. Nothing personal, I just don't believe it.