Quote:
Originally Posted by pip08456
Thanks Damien, for one swift moment I thought that CA may have had involvement with the alledged "collusion" with the Russians for not just the US election but Brexit and every other election in Europe.
I can take heart that Facebook is the only one to suffer.
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If CA were found to have been somehow involved with the Russian state then the question would change but that's not happening here.
The CA stuff is two-fold. One if the dodgy stuff they were offering to do in the Channel 4 story. That's bad.
But the data and Facebook stuff? It's not a big deal IMO. Targeted campaigns at different demographics online is not new at all. Political campaigns have been using Facebook data to tailor a message to different voter groups for at least 5 years now. In conjunction with information polls have given you can often get a good idea of someone's political outlook from their demographic information and interests. So you send a different advert to a 60 year old man who likes Top Gear in Blackpool than the advert you send to a 19 year old woman in London who loves Harry Potter.
That happens
a lot online and with considerably more sophistication than my crude example.
What CA did was use data that had been farmed from public profiles on Facebook by a third party and in-doing so broke many of Facebook's policies and might have broken rules on data protection. I don't know the legalities of that.
But the data use here was not unusual and in fact seems pretty crude compared to what other people did. The Obama campaign did the same the only difference being that users either consented to their data being used or were reached via legitimate Facebook advertising.
Doesn't seem a big deal to me. The way Facebook allows their users to live in a bubble reinforcing their own biases by only showing them stuff that agrees with their world view is worse IMO.