Cambridge Analytica and the following #deletefacebook movement

[Alex]

What do you guys think about Facebook selling your user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica? Are you motivated to delete your account?

It kinda worries me, and while I think my data may have flown under the radar when it comes to Cambridge Analytica's endeavours, I don't particularly want to test how long I can fly under that radar. I'm motivated to delete my Facebook account, it's just so useful for keeping in touch with people. Tough spot to be in. :\

 

[Nah]

Don't a lot of companies and organizations sell your info to others, or am I thinking of something else?

 

[Guest123_x1]

The overload of crap that Facebook has been pulling and continues to pull on its users over the years, including this news, is one reason why I deleted my Facebook account four years ago.

What really irks me is that these tech giants like Facebook, Google/YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft, and Twitter loudly complain about ISPs selling customer details, yet these aforementioned companies sell user info themselves and somehow it's perfectly okay for them to do so. They also loudly complain about how ISPs are allowed to throttle and block lawful content without Soros-backed "Net Neutrality" classification of ISPs as landline telephone "common carriers" (like the old Ma Bell from decades ago), yet these web platforms (especially Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter) themselves censor lawful content that they deem to be "fake news" (e.g. anything that isn't pro-Obama, pro-Hillary, pro-gun control, pro-globalization, anti-Caucasian, and whatever else is the 'in' thing), even going so far as to terminate accounts that they don't like for "TOS/community guidelines violations".

My wish is for Facebook's stock to crash to zero in a flash. IMHO, those a-holes totally deserve it.

 

[Gabri]

I don't know what makes people so surprised about this case. None of this is new. Facebook has been selling user information since the dawn of time. Of course there would be someone using it nefariously.

 

[5qwerty]

dunno what y'all should do

also interesting: search mark zuckerberg on wikiquotes and look at '04

 

[Alexander Nicholi]

Don't a lot of companies and organizations sell your info to others, or am I thinking of something else?

I don't know what makes people so surprised about this case. None of this is new. Facebook has been selling user information since the dawn of time. Of course there would be someone using it nefariously.

To be fair, most people aren't surprised. But given the circumstances surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, it may seem like a big deal because a bunch of former Facebook executives are leading a moral crusade about it all.

To quote Eli Schiff:

The "technology isn't neutral—ETHICS!" crowd isn't against the panopticon, the social credit system, social media witch hunts, platform censorship, targeted advertising via data science etc. They are 100% for all of these things. They just want to have a monopoly on their usage.

In 2018, some former Facebook executives are suddenly having a big moral crisis about the reality of Facebook's fundamental disrespect to people's privacy, despite profiting massively off of it not even half a decade before. Nothing says conflict of interest like a sudden bout of hypocritical PR, right?

It's pretty difficult to say what exactly is going on here, but if you were scratching your head as to why this suddenly matters to some rich folks all of a sudden, you know that something doesn't add up here. And while it's unknown what the real reason for all of this is (because we're not political hustlers or facebook execs), it is pretty clear that it is not because they suddenly care about the public's privacy. There's too much wrong with the circumstances for that to be sensible.

 

[strangerhypno]

I don't get it, facebook sucks plain and simple, I realized this years ago. Why is it still around?

 

[Esper]

I'm curious to see how things go in Europe with GDPR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation

I know at least one person who works in a non-social-media tech company that says all their business is going to follow the guidelines that Europe is demanding so that they can stay in business over there while not having the headache of following different policies here in America. Feels like I should give thanks to our friends across the Atlantic. I wish we could have something like that here.

 

[thunderlight]

I don't think Facebook is selling our data. CA has used some kind of program that can crawl everything we posted on Facebook, and analyse that data to predict the social behaviour and desire, in a way that benefits 1 party of the election.