This was published in the Guardian on Saturday. Information was already out about Cambridge Analytica - a data analytics company who were using FB profiles to influence voter choices ( https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... ata-breach ) - but this goes much further.

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters
17 March 2018
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... s-election

Today's main article on the subject:
Pressure mounts on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook over data scandal
Growing calls in US and UK for investigations to explain data breach affecting tens of millions
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... ata-breach

Don't fill in those stupid personality surveys. That's where they harvested the info from.

Although the focus has been on Cambridge Analytics and the Republicans it appears that the Obama for America campaign organization did much the same during the 2012 election campaign according to recent Tweets from Carol Davidson, former director of the organization. The rationale: Facebook was on our side. Further, she states in a Tweet that the Democrats sucked out "the entire social network of the US", kept the data and still have it: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/03/20/ ... -says.html and http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/face ... l-have-it/

Just what is Facebook up to?!!

cptrelentless wrote: ↑Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:57 am Don't fill in those stupid personality surveys. That's where they harvested the info from.

Yeah that, and all those stupid "which celebrities do you resemble" and "what would you look like as the opposite sex" crap. They give a pop-up stating that you will be authorising them access to your email, you friends etc etc, so if you were stupid enough to allow that then you're complicit in getting Trump elected and Brexit through. Well done, idiots.

Having said that, FB should never have made it possible for you to give away access to your friends' data though, that really was bullshit. At least they have stopped that now.

And don't sign in to online services using your FB account, which they make so easy to do. Once you've done that, you set yourself up for woe if you want to deactivate FB or, delete your FB account. Not to mention the fact you have just told FB more of your interests and other private data.

I'm interested in girls, motorcycles, taffeta and string. Wanna see my duckface?

Sent from my SM-G570Y using Tapatalk

Cambridge Analytica execs boast of role in getting Trump elected
Tue 20 Mar 2018 19.00 GMT
Senior executives from the firm at the heart of Facebook’s data breach boasted of playing a key role in bringing Donald Trump to power and said they used “unattributable and untrackable” advertising to support their clients in elections, according to an undercover expose.e

In secretly recorded conversations, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, claimed he had met Trump “many times”, while another senior member of staff said the firm was behind the “defeat crooked Hillary” advertising campaign.

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape,” said the executive. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

Caught on camera by an undercover team from Channel 4 News, Nix was also dismissive of Democrats on the House intelligence committee, who had questioned him over Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... mp-elected

Are we all dumb fks ?
This is a good question. And can you really delete your FB account if you want to ?
Recently a 22yo told me that she has been on FB since age 15 - she would like to delete her FB account and move on - but she can't. She tried. However, when her mum searched for her FB page, her private info was invisible, but she was still accessible on FB search with her real name and her photo. Her name was also findable on all her friends FB pages. Basically, you can never leave FB once you have signed up.
She was a minor when she signed up for FB, yet it can come back to haunt her whole life. All those stupid pics you posted at parties with drugs etc belong to FB forever.
And more seriously, FB (and many others) are using your data to attempt to influence your consumer/voter choices, and they are selling you as a commodity.
Up to you, "dumb fks".

Facebook: is it time we all deleted our accounts?
The Cambridge Analytica revelations may be the final nudge we need to turn away from the social network. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to big tech harvesting private information
Arwa Mahdawi
Tue 20 Mar 2018
Sorry to break it to you, but you are probably a “dumb fuck”. This is according to statements by a young Mark Zuckerberg anyway. Back in 2004, when a 19-year-old Zuckerberg had just started building Facebook, he sent his Harvard friends a series of instant messages in which he marvelled at the fact that 4,000 people had volunteered their personal information to his nascent social network. “People just submitted it ... I don’t know why ... They ‘trust me’ ... dumb fucks.”

Fourteen years later, the number of people who have trusted Zuckerberg with their data has grown from 4,000 to 2 billion. Zuckerberg has also grown, or so he would have you believe. In a 2010 interview with the New Yorker, the Facebook founder said he regretted those early messages. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown and learned a lot.”

When it comes to respecting and safeguarding the information people have given him, however, has Zuckerberg really learned that much? Recent events suggest not.

On Saturday, the Observer revealed how Cambridge Analytica, a company funded by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, acquired and exploited the data associated with 50m Facebook profiles. It appears that while Facebook had been aware of what the Observer described as “unprecedented data harvesting” for two years, it did not notify the affected users.

What’s more, Facebook has displayed a remarkable lack of contrition in the immediate aftermath of the Observer’s revelations. Instead of accepting responsibility, its top executives argued on Twitter that the social network had done nothing wrong. “This was unequivocally not a data breach,” Facebook vice-president Andrew Bosworth tweeted on Saturday. “People chose to share their data with third party apps and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users it is a violation. No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”

In a sense, Facebook’s defence to the Cambridge Analytica story was more damning than the story itself. Tracy Chou, a software engineer who has interned at Facebook and worked at a number of prominent Silicon Valley companies, agrees that there wasn’t a hack or breach of Facebook’s security. Rather, she explains, “this is the way that Facebook works”. The company’s business model is to collect, share and exploit as much user data as possible; all without informed consent. Cambridge Analytica may have violated Facebook’s terms of service, but Facebook had no safeguards in place to stop them.
Lots more here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... r-accounts

Anchor Moy wrote: ↑Wed Mar 21, 2018 4:17 pm Are we all dumb fks ?
This is a good question. And can you really delete your FB account if you want to ?
Recently a 22yo told me that she has been on FB since age 15 - she would like to delete her FB account and move on - but she can't. She tried. However, when her mum searched for her FB page, her private info was invisible, but she was still accessible on FB search with her real name and her photo. Her name was also findable on all her friends FB pages. Basically, you can never leave FB once you have signed up.
She was a minor when she signed up for FB, yet it can come back to haunt her whole life. All those stupid pics you posted at parties with drugs etc belong to FB forever.
And more seriously, FB (and many others) are using your data to attempt to influence your consumer/voter choices, and they are selling you as a commodity.
Up to you, "dumb fks".

I've just spent two full days deleting all my Facebook information without deleting the account in itself. It is certainly possible to delete your information from the public, but I doubt the information is deleted from Facebook in itself.

I used a Chrome plug in called Social Book Post Manager which basically just automatically clicks delete on all your posts from the activity log. All comments and posts you've posted on both your own profile and others will get deleted, but you have to run the script many times and on specific sub menus in the activity log on your Facebook profile.

Pretty surreal to see everything I liked and commented more than 10 years ago. Including all videos I've ever watched on Facebook. Massive amounts of information.

All posts, comments and photos you are tagged in was skipped by the plug in, and I had to do them manually. My Facebook profile is now completely empty (although as I said I doubt Facebook has deleted the information for their internal purposes). The only reason I haven't deleted the profile is because it's the only way I can contact my network of friends and people spread out over the world.