Facebook suspends Trump-affiliated data firm over privacy concerns

[DonViejo]

Source: Politico




By STEVEN OVERLY 03/16/2018 10:43 PM EDT

Facebook announced Friday night that it has suspended Cambridge Analytica — a data analysis and communications firm best known for its work for President Donald Trump's campaign — over concerns that it and other parties improperly obtained and stored users' personal information.

Facebook didn't cite any of the firm's work for Trump in its suspension announcement. But the news comes as the data mining firm is embroiled in questions from congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller over whether anyone in the U.S. colluded with Russia to undermine the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook said Friday that in 2015, it discovered that a professor at the University of Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan, had shared data he collected via a Facebook app from as many as 270,000 users with Cambridge's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, and a second firm, Eunoia Technologies.

Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, wrote in a blog post Friday that Kogan and the companies claimed to have destroyed the data. But executives recently received reports that some of the information was kept. Facebook has now suspended them all pending an investigation.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/16/facebook-cambridge-analytica-suspended-trump-campaign-468692

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Buh-bye Rebekah!

[neohippie]

2. This is big

First of all the legal and ethical questions behind fraudulently stealing private data from a social media network and weaponizing that data to affect the outcome of an election by using psychographic messaging and advertising techniques need to be investigated.

The company who originally requested to work with Facebook to obtain the data misrepresented the truth about their data collection method, how much data they would ultimately be able to collect, what purposes it would be used for, how long they would retain the data and so on.

Facebook has kept secret the true scope of this data collection we have now learned that using the malicious app not only did SCL collect data on the 270.000 users it targeted but also all of their social network friends data was able to be collected as well.


https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-50m-facebook-users-data/

Cambridge Analytica has spent years denying this exact sort of association with Kogan. In a 2016 WIRED interview, I asked Nix about a 2015 report in the Guardian, which described how Cambridge Analytica had amassed data from Kogan's app. Nix called the article "unfounded," and said, "We do not hold any data from third parties, whether it’s the person you mentioned or anybody else, and we certainly do not hold any data from third parties that hasn’t been properly licensed or purchased through channels."1

That doesn't square with what SCL's own statement on Friday, which maintained that the company commissioned Kogan for a "large scale research project in the US" in 2014, and only deleted the data after it realized it had been obtained against Facebook's terms and conditions.

Under this suspension, none of the involved companies will be permitted to buy ads or manage their clients' Facebook accounts. The Trump campaign hasn't worked with Cambridge since the 2016 election, according to a source close to the campaign.

This story also appears to show foreign influence in our election and possibly in the attempt to sway voters in UK ahead of their Brexit vote.

Here is an interview from a CA whistle blower, where he talks about how weaponizing social networks with psychographic messaging is playing with the psychology of entire countries.

Here is an example of how CA markets their psychographic tools and basically lie about their sources of data points they needed big data models and worked with Kogan, SCL to illegally obtain data

[neohippie]

3. I've posted about this in the past

Let's revisit this that, knowing what we know now... SCL misrepresented their data collection and it's intended use, to collect enough data specifically they needed a large complete data set of 30 million people to be able to build their predictive model to be able to more accurately carry forward their voter analysis to all US voters.


There is a lot more information about the people behind all of this at the DU thread below from back in February 2017, it's worth digging into more deeply.


https://www.democraticunderground.com/10028716802


Exposed how exactly social media is being used to influence elections
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media,

This is how they influence elections and even financial markets which has proven very successful



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Also

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit

Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’ experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage.

The communications director of Leave.eu, Andy Wigmore, told the Observer that the longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign because of their shared goals. Wigmore said that he introduced Farage and Leave.eu to Cambridge Analytica: “They were happy to help. Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you’. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.”

The strategy involved harvesting data from people’s Facebook and other social media profiles and then using machine learning to “spread” through their networks. Wigmore admitted the technology and the level of information it gathered from people was “creepy”. He said the campaign used this information, combined with artificial intelligence, to decide who to target with highly individualised advertisements and had built a database of more than a million people, based on advice Cambridge Analytica supplied. Two weeks ago Arron Banks, Leave.eu’s founder, stated in a series of tweets that Gerry Gunster (Leave.eu’s pollster) and Cambridge Analytica with “world class” AI had helped them gain “unprecedented levels of engagement”. “AI won it for Leave,” he said.

By law, all donations of services-in-kind worth more than £7,500 must be reported to the electoral commission. A spokesman said that no donation from the company or Mercer to Leave.eu had been filed.

http://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/07/robert-mercer-the-most-important-political-money-man-youve-never-heard-of.html

Thanks both to looser campaign finance rules and his promotion to help lead one of the largest hedge funds in the world, Mercer has quietly become a major player in politics since 2010. He donated more than $8 million this election cycle alone, putting him behind only Singer as the second-largest Republican booster. And Mercer was fourth overall regardless of party after hedge fund manager-turned environmentalist Tom Steyer and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-21/renaissance-avoided-more-than-6-billion-tax-report-says

A Renaissance Technologies LLC hedge fund’s investors probably avoided more than $6 billion in U.S. income taxes over 14 years through transactions with Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG, a Senate committee said.

The hedge fund used contracts with the banks to establish the “fiction” that it wasn’t the owner of thousands of stocks traded each day, said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The maneuver sought to transform profits from rapid trading into long-term capital gains taxed at a lower rate, he said.

“It meant enormous profit for both the banks and the hedge funds,” Levin told reporters yesterday in Washington. “Ordinary Americans had to shoulder a tax burden of billions of dollars, a burden that was shrugged off by those hedge funds.”

[neohippie]

4. Project Alamo needs to be looked at further

Facebook embedded employees into Trumps digital efforts and help them not only idenitfy specific audiences but how to quickly tailor their messages, and place more ads at the lowest possible costs, a huge advantage

Link to tweet

more about how Trumps machine was able to place these ads for pennies

Link to tweet

Now something to help explain that mysterious tweet...


https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17055666/facebook-trump-ads-parscale-pennies-clinton-digital

To place an ad on Facebook, a political campaign has to win an automated auction. At any given time, millions of advertisers are competing to place ads in front of Facebook’s 2 billion-plus daily users. Advertisers can price their ads by the number of people who see it, the number of people who click on a link, or the number of people who engage with the ad, such as by watching a video or installing an app. Facebook averages out the cost of these various ads into a figure it calls an “eCPM” — the effective cost per 1,000 impressions.

The CPM is a standard measurement in the advertising industry. But Facebook’s ads differ from traditional ads in an important way: the company offers advertisers a monetary incentive to create more engaging ads. As users begin to click, share, and engage with an ad, Facebook begins showing it to more people. That lowers the eCPM, often allowing advertisers to reach a larger audience for the same amount of money. In some cases, Facebook’s automated systems will choose to display ads that had lower bids, if it believes the content of the ad will draw more engagement from users. The monetary goal of this system is to keep users scrolling through the News Feed, maximizing the number of ads that they encounter.

[Hugin]

5. Farcebook: Slamming the barn door since 2012.

Thanks for nuttin'.

While they're feeling all socially responsible, I'd like it if they'd stop constantly bugging me to add all kinds of incredibly personal information.

Alas, I'm sure this sudden surge of conscious is purely litigation management.

[neohippie]

6. Here's more information on the CA whistle-blower

Link to tweet

A lot more in the article below

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.

“It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”

When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it’s one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. “And the cyberwarfare guy is like, ‘Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections.’”