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Samizdata quote of the day Zuckerberg must also be contemplating a second oddity. There was no privacy outcry when Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign took advantage of the same Graph API to exfiltrate information of tens of millions of Facebook users without each voter’s knowledge and consent.
– Declan McCullagh, writing: Obama harvested data from Facebook and bragged about it. Why are we only freaking out about this now?
Of course we actually all know the reason why.
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In the end, they’re still in denial about Slithery being a completely shitty candidate for POTUS.
My immediate reaction is to take exception to the rank hypocrisy of the left. When Barack Obama did this it was clever, innovative and cool, but when Donald Trump did it, it was totally unacceptable.
My longer-term reaction is wonderment that anyone should be surprised by this. I have a Facebook account, because I feel I have to: I have relatives who effectively live there and it’s the only way I’m going to find out what they’re up to. However, I regard anything I post on Facebook as basically in the public domain – regardless of what my so-called privacy settings may be. As others have observed, Facebook does not charge user fees. Therefore the users are not the customers. They – or, rather, their data, are the product.
As always, The Onion has a good take on it.
“Why are we only freaking out about this now?”
Possibly because the comparison is largely false?
Remember that all the data on Facebook was put there by the dumb Facebook users, of their own free will. There was no coercing and no prodding and no stealing. The fu**wits willingly went there.
So, what’s the problem? No wrong was committed by nobody.
As far as I can tell, Cambridge Analytics sold bullshit to the Trump campaign for a lot of money. Again – what’s the problem? And anybody (including Hillary) could have bought the bullshit that CA sold.
The only problem is – as Thailover said – that Hillary lost the election.
Exactly – the “mainstream media” (the BBC and so on) could not care less about what Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton do, but if the Donald Trump campaign does the same thing, then the Trump campaign is EVIL.
Remember most people still get their news from the mainstream media – and there is no Fox News or Conservative talk radio in Britain.
Only a couple of days ago I was talking with an old friend – an intelligent man with several degrees and a background in the computing industry. This man in Northern Ireland (of all places) was saying the most terrible things about Ted Cruz – not even Donald Trump, Ted Cruz (one of the leading students of the Constitution of his generation – and a man of great integrity). Where had he got his opinion of Ted Cruz from? Partly from the cartoon series “Our Cartoon President” (where Senator Cruz is depicted as subhuman) and partly from leftist internet chatter – which comes from the “mainstream” media.
This is what Perry de Havilland would call the “metacontext” – and, I must stress, this man in Northern Ireland would not even consider himself a leftist.
“Paul you failed in your duty – you should have, then and there, fought back against the lies”.
I know I failed in my duty – but I get so tired, so terribly tired.
Indeed, the comparison is imperfect, but rather in the opposite direction than in the one you imply.
– Fearing the RNC might not fully cooperate after he won the nomination, the Trump campaign formed a relationship with Cambridge Analytica as a backup. Once they realised the RNC was fully cooperating and they saw by examination that the RNC data was much better than the CA data, they terminated the relationship – well before the election.
– The Obamans told their harvested users nothing and used them right up to and on election day 2012. Facebook found out during the campaign but were OK with it (and discreet) “because we’re on your side”. Years later, CA entered a well-known situation (both Facebook’s tolerance and the Obamans’ cleverness had been much boasted of after November 2012), and CA’s users at least agreed to being studied.
I have the above info about Trump, CA and the RNC from CBS among others – of course, maybe you think CBS a right-wing source determined to whitewash Trump. The Obamans boasted of their cleverness both before and on election day, e.g. in detecting if someone had voted and promptly sending social media messages urging that her friends vote, in many a post-2012-election article.
I sympathise Paul, but on the upside, remember that your Irish friend does not vote in US elections, unlike undocumented immigrants in California. (I can’t think why they call them that; the state government falls over itself in its eagerness to provide them with documents.) Not only the beeb and the grauniad but some so-called right-wing UK papers (the DT from time to time, for example) tend to report DNC press releases as US news, but the bulk of their readers vote here, not there. If your friend is reliable on Corbyn, then the relevant cup is more than half-full.
No Paul,
Your friend failed in his ‘duty’ not to be a guillible prick, and do his own research, and ask why anyone is portrayed in any particular way. That is his crime, it is also his punishment.
‘Liberals’ and ‘progressives’ can’t cope with the internet.
So they want to regulate and control it.
In case you did not notice neither I nor the OP mentioned Trump, the issue is the ‘whataboutery’ and suggestion of media double standards by the OP in regards to the Obama campaign and Cambridge analytica, when in actual fact the way that the Obama campaign and CA accessed fb user data were completely different.
The word ‘Trump” indeed does not appear in
or in
and you are also completely correct that the OP’s final sentence
does not contain the word Trump.
However I’m not sure how well your statement that the OP never “mentioned Trump” can survive pondering the meaning of that last sentence. 🙂
As per that Snopes article, the difference seems to be the following:
I don’t find it all that significant.
Pete, Leftists want to control everything, not just things they can’t cope with. They equate power with control, and they equate control with “getting” happiness from their environment. It’s the lowest form of psychological state, just barely above sentience.
They’re schemers, schemers trying to control their little worlds, ever trying to expand their sphere of influence.
If this Guardian article is correct that the change was for show, and Facebook actively discouraged the least hint of meaning it (until it suddenly appeared that the wrong people had benefitted – or at least, could be accused), then I would regard it as even less significant; just another example of those rules that never apply to PCers but can be dropped on whoever annoys them.
That said, it would be interesting to know whether the Hillary campaign attempted to reuse some Obaman techniques or, in deference to rules unmonitored by Facebook, sternly resisted all such temptation. As this Cambridge Analytica theme is new, I would expect, by precedent, some time to elapse before we know anything about what Hillary was or was not doing in this area.
Under UK law, if person A gives X permission to use his ‘personal data’, say from Facebook, that is fine (provided the consent is not obtained by fraud etc.). However, gathering A’s contacts B, C to Z etc. can involve gathering B, C to Z’s own personal data without their respective consents (or other lawful basis). The Snopes article hennesli posts states:
This is not on point, be it a deliberate misrepresentation or ignorance, as whilst Facebook user A could have given Obama 2012 all his personal data for the campaign to do whatever with it, that permission could not extend, if it related to a UK-based data subject of course, that is all I am referring to, to user A’s friends’ personal data. Facebook’s policy is irrelevant.
Is there any evidence or even mere indication that:
1. Cambridge Analytica work or data did in any way influence the election? In my opinion it didn’t.
2. Was anyone hurt in any way? (eg. Facebook users)?
This all thing is much fuss about nothing.
From the “Oh my God, it can’t be that Hillary was a terrible candidate – there must be some other reason” files. According to Ben Shapiro, the Trump campaign used Cambridge Analytica during the primaries, and then ended the contract for the general election because they decided the RNC had better data. If that’s true, it’s difficult to see how it affected the election.
Personally, I don’t see how this is more than a small embarrassment for Facebook. What did people think was going to happen when they took a free quiz on the Facebook and sent it to all their friends? Why would anyone truthfully answer personal questions when they had no idea who was collecting the data? There are layers of stupid here.
Alisa, I’d take any ‘fact checking’ from Snopes.com with the same bucket full of salt that I’d take referencing Wikipedia.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#7ad843ac227f
Jacob, As Ben Shapiro phrases it, that facebook sells metadata is “already baked in the cake”, that is, it’s a known quantity, no surprises there, like the fact that Trump likes to bang big boob blondes in a predictably vanila way. Even his tastes in women isn’t that interesting. The story would have more legs if Stormy were a brazilian tranny.
That anyone can use facebook or twitter and not know that THEY are the product, is beyond belief. Ergo fake outrage, just like the fake outrage that Trump probably banged a big boob blonde freaking 11yrs ago.