Carol Davidsen, former Director of Integration of Media Analytics for Obama for America:
“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. 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.” Yet, she caveated the campaign’s use of the data noting that the project “felt creepy” but that they “played by the rules.”
New York Times Magazine profile of the time offers a bit more detail how the Obama campaign’s platform worked and it is strikingly similar to the system Facebook claims was used by Cambridge Analytica. As the Times describes it, the campaign “started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information.
Haha, I just realised jusayinlike can’t bear the thought that he was a CA stooge, falling for anti-Clinton stories micro-targeted at the far left.
jusayinlike
Get a grip Nigel..
Nigel
Like CA got a grip on you? They microtargeted you with Pizzagate, didn’t they? Go on, admit it. It’s okay, acceptance is the first step.
realPolithicks
“When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information”
There’s the difference Clampers, they are asking for permission to do this. Cambridge Analytica simply gathered users and their friends data without even asking or letting them know it was happening.
To quote Listrade from earlier today on how CA did it… saves me retyping it…
“All they did was got about 250k people to take their quiz. When you do any of those scam quizzes on FB it asks for access to certain things one of which is you friends lists. If any of your friends havent set their profile to private, then it will gather all their public data (likes, shares, comments on articles etc).
So you taking the quiz (any of those quizzes!) And accepting the terms (of the time) will give that company access to your friends and all their data if public.”
Similar to the Obama approach, permissions were given to get the ball rolling…. and then friends data was also mined.
I don’t know where Listrade is getting his information but the report I listened to earlier today stated that they got 270k people to sign up on their app and then mined their facebook accounts, no permission was asked for or given. Frankly given the behavior of this company which was exposed by the Channel Four reporting I find this totally believeable.
I believe Listrade is right, Wylie says the same in this interview… you get some to sign up, then you get access to friends info… and it scales up really quickly…
So, basically, the users were giving permission to CA to use their friends information?
Donal
Yes, by not reading the fine print when they clicked ok.
But no, because it wasn’t CA asking for the permission.
Facebook argue that they allowed apps access data for research purposes, and the researcher in this case was given the requiste permissions. But he then passed on this data to CA which was a breach of the terms of service.
Whistleblower claims Facebook were made aware of this breach and made no effort to close it down. So they allowed the user data, which had been gathered in a legit fashion, to be used for a different purpose. This puts facebook in the spotlight
Listrade
Like a lot of apps, the permission is to “access” their friends list. If people on that list had any information open to the public, then they were able to get that data too. You could do this yourself by selecting a random person on facebook if they have their friends as public information and going through that list to see what information is publicly available on those pages.
To get to 50 million, you only need each of the 270,000 to have 185 friends with some information available to the public. For the profiling CA were doing, this just needed to be age, gender, marital status and what apps/pages you have liked. Anything more like news stories shared, etc was a bonus.
Listrade
@donal, the breach of T&Cs was the commercialization of the data. CA set up a subsidiary with the original researcher to use this technique as part of a marketing and campaigning system. They then ran the quiz legitimately on facebook and gained the 50m user data.
FB’s umbrage with this isn’t altruistic towards protecting their user’s data, it’s that someone else had a better and more effective means of targeting ads than they did and was making money out of it.
some old queen
@ Listrade, do you have any actual links to the profiling the were doing? What I have read so far is all very vague and a bit meh.
Listrade
The profiling is their secret sauce to some extent. What data they were gathering is the easy bit to acsertain. If you have Facebook you can see how much data you let others see. Everything that isn’t restricted in visibility could have been collected by CA if one of the people in your friends list participated in their survey.
All of my info is private, but on the apps section Amazon, Dublin Comic Con and IRFU likes were set to public. It’s a small piece of info, but with over 50m data points it’s enough to give a general profile of whether it’s worth targeting me or not.
Some people would have way more public. The friend who did the quiz could even have me tagged in pictures at certain events like that a political march (easier if that is tagged too) If I havent blocked access to pictures I’m tagged in, then they’d have that info too.
So there’s no list of what they have on people other than what’s available on an average Facebook page. Some people have their whole life open, others are a bit more private, some are totally private.
some old queen
Also @ Listrade, is it not the case that the data was harvested by Cambridge University under a research umbrella and the dataset was then sold to Analytica? The commercial use alone would have contravened the T&Cs as they stood.
Listrade
@ some old queen not quite what happened. The Cambridge University research is well known (OCEAN Scale). CA didn’t use their data as far as I’m aware. It was a similar process of using a quiz to gather data and then use this for information to scale personality.
Here’s a link to the type of scaling they would have done:
CA saw a bigger potential for this quiz than the academic interest in personality. They set up a subsidiary with one of the academics involved and developed a new quiz and gained all the data themselves.
That wasn’t a breach of T&Cs.
However, they then used the data they had gained separately to Cambridge University for commercial purposes, which was a breach of T&Cs.
GiggidyGoo
I managed to keep away from FB personally thanks be to whatever God.
Nigel
I thought this was an interesting take on how it might have? probably? worked and how they used/misused the ‘stolen?’ data.
Hard to know who ran what. They are denying any involvement in the Brexit Leave campaign yet have proven links.
Frilly Keane
tis the 5 million he gave them thats worth investigating
some old queen
Yes that story is popping up everywhere all of a sudden. Is she saying they had access to the full worldwide dataset, gifted by Facebook?
Given the Trump connections, Cambridge Analytica is increasingly looking like an Israeli state intelligence outfit, which would explain why the unusual delay in granting a warrant.
I think they would have run the same or similar ‘quizzes’ in the countries they operated in… I think it was 12* countries / elections, if memory serves me well… it’s mentioned in the Ch4 interviews with Wylie or the in the ‘sting’ recordings. So no, not the full worldwide database.
fergalfurious
“They didn’t try to mislead us because, privately, we didn’t really believe their outrageous lies. We did grass the whistleblowers out to their lying bullies though naturally.”
The Policing Authority is some sort of joke, right?
Kathleen O’Toole was Chief Inspector for 6 years and found absolutely zero wrong. You could show the woman a colander and she’d insist there were no holes in it.
GiggidyGoo
I see hero of the people, Shane Ross, has suddenly gone dumb over the Judge appointments. Amazing what a grant or two to old boys clubs can to to ones beliefs? Then again, it would be easy to forget, but Shane Ross is from the FG gene pool. As with Naughten – once a blueshirt, always a blueshirt.
b
Has the echo chamber been bumped from these pages? Thought i saw a post yesterday but can’t find it
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/03/19/why-are-we-only-now-talking-about-facebook-and-elections/#27155a2b4838
Carol Davidsen, former Director of Integration of Media Analytics for Obama for America:
“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. 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.” Yet, she caveated the campaign’s use of the data noting that the project “felt creepy” but that they “played by the rules.”
New York Times Magazine profile of the time offers a bit more detail how the Obama campaign’s platform worked and it is strikingly similar to the system Facebook claims was used by Cambridge Analytica. As the Times describes it, the campaign “started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information.
….oh..
+1 storm in a t cup
That ‘data mining’ bit is, defo.
Haha, I just realised jusayinlike can’t bear the thought that he was a CA stooge, falling for anti-Clinton stories micro-targeted at the far left.
Get a grip Nigel..
Like CA got a grip on you? They microtargeted you with Pizzagate, didn’t they? Go on, admit it. It’s okay, acceptance is the first step.
“When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information”
There’s the difference Clampers, they are asking for permission to do this. Cambridge Analytica simply gathered users and their friends data without even asking or letting them know it was happening.
To quote Listrade from earlier today on how CA did it… saves me retyping it…
“All they did was got about 250k people to take their quiz. When you do any of those scam quizzes on FB it asks for access to certain things one of which is you friends lists. If any of your friends havent set their profile to private, then it will gather all their public data (likes, shares, comments on articles etc).
So you taking the quiz (any of those quizzes!) And accepting the terms (of the time) will give that company access to your friends and all their data if public.”
Similar to the Obama approach, permissions were given to get the ball rolling…. and then friends data was also mined.
Nite nite from me :)
Nighty nite.
I don’t know where Listrade is getting his information but the report I listened to earlier today stated that they got 270k people to sign up on their app and then mined their facebook accounts, no permission was asked for or given. Frankly given the behavior of this company which was exposed by the Channel Four reporting I find this totally believeable.
I believe Listrade is right, Wylie says the same in this interview… you get some to sign up, then you get access to friends info… and it scales up really quickly…
Go to 5mins in on this Ch4 vid, it gives the details
https://youtu.be/zb6-xz-geH4
So, basically, the users were giving permission to CA to use their friends information?
Yes, by not reading the fine print when they clicked ok.
But no, because it wasn’t CA asking for the permission.
Facebook argue that they allowed apps access data for research purposes, and the researcher in this case was given the requiste permissions. But he then passed on this data to CA which was a breach of the terms of service.
Whistleblower claims Facebook were made aware of this breach and made no effort to close it down. So they allowed the user data, which had been gathered in a legit fashion, to be used for a different purpose. This puts facebook in the spotlight
Like a lot of apps, the permission is to “access” their friends list. If people on that list had any information open to the public, then they were able to get that data too. You could do this yourself by selecting a random person on facebook if they have their friends as public information and going through that list to see what information is publicly available on those pages.
To get to 50 million, you only need each of the 270,000 to have 185 friends with some information available to the public. For the profiling CA were doing, this just needed to be age, gender, marital status and what apps/pages you have liked. Anything more like news stories shared, etc was a bonus.
@donal, the breach of T&Cs was the commercialization of the data. CA set up a subsidiary with the original researcher to use this technique as part of a marketing and campaigning system. They then ran the quiz legitimately on facebook and gained the 50m user data.
FB’s umbrage with this isn’t altruistic towards protecting their user’s data, it’s that someone else had a better and more effective means of targeting ads than they did and was making money out of it.
@ Listrade, do you have any actual links to the profiling the were doing? What I have read so far is all very vague and a bit meh.
The profiling is their secret sauce to some extent. What data they were gathering is the easy bit to acsertain. If you have Facebook you can see how much data you let others see. Everything that isn’t restricted in visibility could have been collected by CA if one of the people in your friends list participated in their survey.
All of my info is private, but on the apps section Amazon, Dublin Comic Con and IRFU likes were set to public. It’s a small piece of info, but with over 50m data points it’s enough to give a general profile of whether it’s worth targeting me or not.
Some people would have way more public. The friend who did the quiz could even have me tagged in pictures at certain events like that a political march (easier if that is tagged too) If I havent blocked access to pictures I’m tagged in, then they’d have that info too.
So there’s no list of what they have on people other than what’s available on an average Facebook page. Some people have their whole life open, others are a bit more private, some are totally private.
Also @ Listrade, is it not the case that the data was harvested by Cambridge University under a research umbrella and the dataset was then sold to Analytica? The commercial use alone would have contravened the T&Cs as they stood.
@ some old queen not quite what happened. The Cambridge University research is well known (OCEAN Scale). CA didn’t use their data as far as I’m aware. It was a similar process of using a quiz to gather data and then use this for information to scale personality.
Here’s a link to the type of scaling they would have done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
CA saw a bigger potential for this quiz than the academic interest in personality. They set up a subsidiary with one of the academics involved and developed a new quiz and gained all the data themselves.
That wasn’t a breach of T&Cs.
However, they then used the data they had gained separately to Cambridge University for commercial purposes, which was a breach of T&Cs.
I managed to keep away from FB personally thanks be to whatever God.
I thought this was an interesting take on how it might have? probably? worked and how they used/misused the ‘stolen?’ data.
https://twitter.com/saradannerdukic/status/976125179049988097
Please note, since it’s Twitter, not Facebook, it won’t scrape your data it’ll SCRAPE YOUR VERY SOUL
Great link. Very interesting thread. Cheers Nidgey.
so suddenly the mainstream media is to be believed.
that’s very … interesting …
*eyeroll*
They also ran Ted Cruz’s campaign. All that data mining didn’t help make him likeable.
badumtish! ;)
Hard to know who ran what. They are denying any involvement in the Brexit Leave campaign yet have proven links.
tis the 5 million he gave them thats worth investigating
Yes that story is popping up everywhere all of a sudden. Is she saying they had access to the full worldwide dataset, gifted by Facebook?
Given the Trump connections, Cambridge Analytica is increasingly looking like an Israeli state intelligence outfit, which would explain why the unusual delay in granting a warrant.
I think they would have run the same or similar ‘quizzes’ in the countries they operated in… I think it was 12* countries / elections, if memory serves me well… it’s mentioned in the Ch4 interviews with Wylie or the in the ‘sting’ recordings. So no, not the full worldwide database.
“They didn’t try to mislead us because, privately, we didn’t really believe their outrageous lies. We did grass the whistleblowers out to their lying bullies though naturally.”
The Policing Authority is some sort of joke, right?
Kathleen O’Toole was Chief Inspector for 6 years and found absolutely zero wrong. You could show the woman a colander and she’d insist there were no holes in it.
I see hero of the people, Shane Ross, has suddenly gone dumb over the Judge appointments. Amazing what a grant or two to old boys clubs can to to ones beliefs? Then again, it would be easy to forget, but Shane Ross is from the FG gene pool. As with Naughten – once a blueshirt, always a blueshirt.
Has the echo chamber been bumped from these pages? Thought i saw a post yesterday but can’t find it
Not complaining, but curious