The allegations against Facebook are that for a period of several years they turned a blind eye to rampant Developer abuse of their API, allowing Political organizations (and others) to download massive amounts of Facebook user data.
Facebook also continuously marginalized their Chief Security Officer who routinely complained about the API loopholes, were caught informing employees of a "don't ask don't know therefore no liability" quasi-official policy towards the widespread abuse (don't rock the advertising/business boat), and eventually reduced the CSO's staff from 120 to 3 and role to what appears to be "tweeting pre-approved pro-Facebook messages".
The FTC is now investigating if Facebook has violated it's 2011 FTC privacy mandate, something which carries fines in the millions per event range I believe (i.e. trillions of USD in fines for this size of privacy mandate failure)
What I don't understand is, why would they turn a blind eye to abuse of their developer API if they offer their API for free and they sell user data -- which I assume is anonymized? -- to advertisers? Wouldn't that diminish revenue if advertisers could have just used the API to get around this?
Please correct any mistaken assumptions I might have about their business model.
1. While the data is valuable, you still need a medium for your ads. One without the other is way less valuable. If you had user data for 50M users, today, how would you monetize it? Facebook had the News Feed and Instagram giving you a stage to operate on that data.
2. Following 1.), a lot of that "stolen" data was used to buy more effective FB Ads. Cambridge Analytica didn't "steal" the user data to sell to blackhats. They used it to craft messaging on Facebook.
All in all, user data is relatively worthless to most advertisers unless its actionable. Even if facebook gave you the data, the fastest way of monetizing it was to buy more facebook ads. It's relatively more difficult to extract user data from FB and then use that data to buy Twitter ads.
That's a really good point with respect to advertisers. Even on the competitor level, I'm not sure how they would use that data.
So worst case scenario is a conflict of interests between user privacy and business revenue. I think if Facebook wants to take effective action to correct this, they'll go beyond simply restricting the API, and give users options to limit which data of theirs they want to let their friends expose to third parties, because even when the API is shut down, someone willing to violate the terms of service can do quite a bit of data harvesting using fake profiles and social engineering to get people to add those profiles if some of the data seems plausible.
Granted, this method is slower, but still possible, and I think currently being exploited based on friend requests I've received through friends. I've asked friends if they knew the person, and they said they weren't sure, but they might because the information seemed similar; this is the same concept as a phone call spam technique known as "Neighbor Spoofing".
> Please correct any mistaken assumptions I might have about their business model.
Facebook's business model is curious. They took $200 million in Russian money (Yuri Milner) and that came with an enthralled messaging from Zuckerberg, about how they (the Russian investors) had a "unique perspective" on monetizing social networks.
I'm not sure anyone outside of those circles knows what Facebook's actual business model really is.
FB's 'business model' is of primarily of journalistic, academic and legal interest. It's an anti-democratic corporate surveillance outfit. How it makes its money will be of interest to regulators and prosecutors, but is of marginal concern elsewhere.
The important questions are more like: (for personal safety) how to reduce contact with FB collaborators, and (for society's safety) how to put the organisation itself out of business.
The data is not anonymized. If you install an app that requests access to your data and the data of your friends, then it's not anonymized. How could it be? That company would have the exact links between you, under your real name, and all of the friends linked to you, under their real names.
Oh yeah, I know the data gathered through the API isn't anonymized, but I was referring to what they sell to advertisers who don't use the API and just do business directly with Facebook, unless they don't sell any data directly to advertisers and advertisers just have to put in place certain metrics for whom they would like to target.
Wow a trillion dollar fine seems almost unthinkable - there are only around 10 trillion dollars in circulation, and with that shared among apple google facebook and the rest of the entire country its hard to imagine facebook could afford to pay
"By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team"
Damn. This reeks of higher-ups knowing what was going on (or taking advice from malvolent scrupulous people) in order to maintain plausible deniability.
He wanted to leave after he was reassigned - in other words, because he was reassigned. They convinced him to stay because him quitting then would have looked bad for the company. That's what 7 sources told the NYT.
Cambridge analytica is an investment of Robert Mercer. Mercer also donates to the Trump campaign. Steve Bannon headed the CA operation to collect user data from social media for the sole purpose of "gaming" the electorate system (ALL confirmed by the Canadian CA whistleblower). Kushner hired CA to work for the Trump campaign. CA admitted (on tape) they broke election laws and actively obstruct justice by not keeping evidence (paper trail). They also admitted they ran the "entire digital campaign" for Trump Campaign. Board of CA quickly suspends CEO as of today.
Mark currently getting away as an accomplice to the murder of our democracy.
I've posted a quote from this article below that details how Obama's 2012 campaign did practically the same thing Cambridge Analytica is being accused of. [1]
So data mining Facebook has being going on for a while, except that the MSM and Silicon Valley supported it because it favored Obama.
The use of analytics does not make it practically the same thing. The same couple articles about the Obama campaign keep getting posted on all the CA post that hit the front page even after they're shown to be different.
