>It would also be interesting to see why you're so motivated to find excuses for Facebook and to whitewash the damning facts. Facebook employee? Family financial interests in the ad industry? Concerned citizen? Bored?
None of the above. It’s because the hypocrisy of this whole thing is wrong and represents everything that’s wrong with the press today. There was a Facebook data abuse scandal where elections were involved, it just didn’t occur in 2016. It was committed by the Obama campaign in both 2008 and 2012. But the articles portraying that were downright celebratory. Now the “wrong” guy wins and all of a sudden it’s a big problem? There’s a word for that. It’s hypocrisy.
>this scandal (without scare quotes) is an issue because many people have finally realised that Facebook has a ton of information about them and they can't be trusted to handle that information properly.
I agree with you that Facebook gave away too much data pre-2014, but this isn’t the incident that proved they couldn’t be trusted with people’s data. It was the Obama campaign incidents, which involved 4x as many records, that proved it. Most of the holes have been closed today.
>it's not just about ad targeting, it's about all the possible ways information can be misused too: stalking, blackmail, fraud, trolling, circumventing various constitutional protections, identity theft etc, etc.
Are you saying that you believe that Donald Trump is using this data to stalk you? Because this “scandal” cannot be executed again. These capabilities were removed in 2014.
>your assertion that it's impossible to to influence specific outcomes because of the impossibility to accurately target is... wrong. There were many account included in the CA data set, there were and are other data sets and even if they can't target those people with ads, they can probably send them an e-mail, give them a call or send someone to their house.
While it’s true that there are other bands of communication available, the articles surrounding this subject have mostly focused on Facebook advertising, where this is no longer possible and hasn’t been for several years. Read my comment.
>people do have responsibility for what they post, but when their information is stored forever and combined with massive quantities of other collected and bought information the entity doing the above has a lot of power and a lot of responsibility too.
This is a ridiculous statement. If you voluntarily post things publicly, you should expect that they will be stored and crawled. That’s like saying ”I walked down the street naked, and now I can’t believe that my neighbors won’t delete their pictures of it!” If you don’t want it out, don’t put it out in public.
Advertising doesn't require stalking people 24/7 though many seem to have convinced themselves this creepy behavior is a normal state of affairs.
First it was just contextual information like text and location. Now its morphed into something incredibly sinister and toxic.
Hundreds of thousands of people are devoted to building detailed historical profiles and models to give advertisers the ability to micro target people based on sexual preferences, moods, race, religion, political inclinations and other intimate personal information that should not be available COLLATED to anyone. All accompanied by apologism, hand waving, muddying the waters, deception and denial.
It's ironic our societies depend on those who are hungry and deprived to be ethical and not succumb to theft and loot while those who have can behave without ethical constraints and discuss it in a detached intellectual manner.
