PART 1 : the Cambridge Analytica harvesting of Facebook user data – some initial thoughts

18 March 2018 (Paris, France) – The revelation over the weekend that 50 million people had their Facebook profiles harvested so Cambridge Analytica could target them with political ads was a major storm blowing across social media and the cable networks and countless blogs. For a summary of what happened just click here and click here.

More amusing was how Facebook executives were wrangling on Twitter over the semantics of whether this constitutes a “breach”, the results for users being the same: personal data extracted from the platform and used for a purpose to which they did not consent. Zeynep Tufekci nailed it on her blog over the weekend:

Facebook’s defense that Cambridge Analytica harvesting of FB user data from millions is not technically a “breach” is a more profound & damning statement of what’s wrong with Facebook’s business model than a “breach”.

I have written about Zeynep a few times before, having met her after a TED Talk wherein she said “we’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads” :

Yes, I am sure Facebook have great security teams. Probably some of the best in the business, no doubt. Full of conscientious people. But they can’t mitigate the business model. As I have written before, it is about how Facebook – in its essence an advertising company – became a media company, but never lost its structured indifference to the content on its site except insofar as it helps to target and sell advertisements. A version of Gresham’s law is at work, in which fake news, which gets more clicks and is free to produce, drives out real news, which often tells people things they don’t want to hear, and is expensive to produce. In addition, Facebook uses an extensive set of tricks to increase its traffic and the revenue it makes from targeting ads, at the expense of the news-making institutions whose content it hosts. Its news feed directs traffic at you based not on your interests, but on how to make the maximum amount of advertising revenue from you.

As Facebook draws distinctions between data breaches and mere “violations”, 3rd party betrayals and its own responsibility, I draw you to an article earlier this year where Zeynep’s argued that we can’t actually “accept” data privacy agreements because the idea of informed consent is a farce. Because let’s get real: if your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used & misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, “targeted”, “engaged”, “profiled”, sold.. There is no informed consent because it’s not possible to reasonably inform or consent.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the business model if you’re Facebook. It’s only “wrong” for the rest of us. The facade of corporate moral obligation to society was always a sham but now, it’s unmasked & systematized and we see the masses don’t care.

And the bullshit that this data was “anonymised” is just that … bullshit. We now know that Facebook user data was visible to select staffers within Cambridge, with one database tagged “Kogan-import” in the system, likely referring to researcher Aleksandr Kogan.

Yes, we worry about “the Russians”. Meanwhile scores of private organizations have exploited these online resources to influence campaigns, As one example, the Koch brothers’ data firm, i360, whose funding rivals that of both parties, has spent years and millions of dollars developing detailed portraits of 250 million Americans and refining its capacities for influence operations through “message testing” to determine what kinds of advertisements will have traction with a given audience. It employs “mobile ID matching,” which can link users to all of their devices—unlike cookies, which are restricted to one device—and it has conducted extensive demographic research over social media. Google’s DoubleClick and Facebook are listed as i360’s featured partners for digital marketing. The firm gave the Trump campaign access to i360, and it aims to have developed a comprehensive strategy for influencing voters by the time of the fall 2018 elections.

Suffice it to say that this age of social manipulation did not begin with this American presidency, nor does it end at the U.S. border, but there is something fundamentally “American” about the culture of dogged, dead-eyed competition that produces it. It’s what happens when the American Dream becomes a nightmare you can’t wake from, and not just because you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in years. It’s what happens when a society clings to a defining mythos that celebrates working until you drop, puts money and business above all else, and glorifies youthful and charismatic male “visionaries” with a marled gray T-shirt and hoodie. Yet continues to call itself “free”.