The thing is, none of this stuff is new. It's almost like a dam broke and every privacy doomsayer is finally being taken seriously by the media.
About time, IMHO. I think it was really easy for Facebook to brush off accusations of data collection overreach before because the media was not doing a good job of reporting on its consequences.
I think that's irrelevant, because people generally don't care. If nobody cares the media won't report on it. The difference this time is that the word "Facebook" now has a causal relationship to the effectual word "Trump".
This isn't panic about privacy. People still don't care and will continue using Facebook like nothing happened. This is about what happens with the data that people donate to Facebook. What Facebook does with it.
Now people are suddenly worried or offended about the use of the data they completely surrendered. Of course this isn't going to stop people from continuing to surrender that data. They are just sad and powerless.
This sort of behavior is called addiction, but people are very far from admitting they have a problem. It is so much more convenient to simply blame something else.
> I think that's irrelevant, because people generally don't care. If nobody cares the media won't report on it. The difference this time is that the word "Facebook" now has a causal relationship to the effectual word "Trump".
That's true to a degree, and it's also true that this might still mostly blow over.
But looking at my social circles, much of it pretty inept with computers and far from the 'nerd' stereotype, a significant part of this has been a long time coming. People do care, and many of them moved away from Facebook quite a while ago. People started using 'fake names' more and more. People at least talk about privacy and try, as naively as they do, to be better about it. I know more than one 'normal' person who looked into secure chat apps and even bothered to install Signal (or Telegram).
Of course a lot of it isn't actually helpful. Moving to Snapchat because it seems more private, moving to WhatsApp to avoid Facebook, thinking Telegram is better than WhatsApp because "at least it's not FB", all these things might not really improve the situation much. But that's because they don't know what else to do.
The mere fact that they're trying, in my opinion, is already something I didn't really expect would happen. And it provides an opportunity to educate, for those of us who have been aware of this for a while, and know much more about the technology and how to actually be mindful of privacy.
I think a good analogy, at least over here in my world, is physical health. Where once 'jogging', fitness, mindfulness, yoga, looking at food ingredient labels , and so on, were kinda weird and health-nut stuff, it's now become much more central to everyday life. It probably took a lot of "I'll drink this sugar-bomb of orange juice instead of a coke because it's healthier" before we got to any significant societal change that actually helps.
But breaking the social stigma of being a health/yoga/privacy nut is probably a very important first step!
EDIT: And let me add that for most of these people, Trump and Brexit are not something talked about all that much, at least not compared to the topic of privacy.
How about this is a very concrete example of what happens, when privacy is abused, and people are starting to realize how concerned they should be?
So, if not an event like this, how would more of the general populace begin to be concerned with privacy? If something like this isn't about privacy, is there anything that could ever happen that would change things?
Maybe, just maybe, people who aren't on HN are not all ignorant, stupid, and morally degenerate addicts. Every sentence you wrote is underpinned by those assumptions. It's very HN, but not very perspicacious.
I feel like the “Nobody cares” line was clearly wrong a while ago, and now it just smacks of desperation. Clearly people care, a lot, and while you can try to denigrate or dismiss them in a number of ways, or play games of tu quoque with “Obama did it” the cat is out of bag. Maybe it took an association with Trump to kick the media out of bed on this issue, but now it really does have a life of its own. The Boz memo, articles like the one we’re commemting on, do not thrill people. As the steady drip feed of FB scandal continues it also promotes discussion about the merits of the platform.
In my opinion though, the biggest change is that saying, “FB is spying on you, and manipulating you” no longer gets you weird looks and sighs from most people these days. The narrative of FB as a kind of tentacled monster also fits into a larger narrative of big tech run amok that has been gaining traction. Uber killing that woman, Tesla’s autopilot fatality, YouTube and Google banning what a huge portion of the internet considers reasonable content, is starting to annoy and scare people.
Dismiss their concerns and fear at your own peril. People, and societies at large always have breaking points, and there’s nothing worse than being dragged to the guillotine screaming, “But we’ve been fucking you peasants over for years, why now?!” It’s now because there is always a straw that breaks the camel’s back. Trump, CA, may just be a straw, but you have to see it in the full context of a greatly overburdened camel.
Some people claim to care. There is a difference between words and actions. Privacy isn't something that can be gifted. It is only something that can be given away. If people really did care they wouldn't give it away so freely. The decisions people make determines their actual level of care.
Or they care, but don’t really understand, and now with something concrete they both care and understand. Well have to wait and see, but the weakness of your argument (restating your thesis not being much of one) strikes me as obvious.
What non-technical users minimally understand is these three steps:
1. They submit data to Facebook and identify relationships
2. Magic
3. Facebook makes lots of money
If that is the case my personal position is to happily void my privacy and submit data to Facebook if they paid me for it. I don't see any reason for me to volunteer my personal data away for free when there exists some commercial value for it. If Facebook were a non-profit organization void of advertising then I would likely think about this much differently.
This is also why I believe many users supposedly claim to care but really don't, because they are so quick to give their data away for free. There is no prerequisite understanding of technology or privacy to fully grasp this concept.
When it became clear that FB data can be weaponized against nations by determined actors with a fairly low budget it caught not just the attention of the populace but also of the ruling class. Bureaucracies and I include police, intelligence and military here are hard to get moving but they are also hard to stop. The upset may fizzle out but some people do not easily forget existential threats.
Facebook is keeping silent and will be addressing 'one threat at the time' (threat to their stock value of course - nothing else matters). If they speak up, for them to come clean they will have to blow the(-ir own lid) and expose all the dirt they have been involved (and profitted from).
I suggest people watch "The Circle" [1]. It is about a company that combines FB-Google.
If FB every decided to come clean on ALL dirt they've done, it will be something like Tom Hanks saying towards the end of The Circle: "Oh we are xxxxed!"
I'd like to think that, but a service with 2 billion users doesn't end overnight. Even if this was the beginning of the end it would take many years for everyone to move on to something else. In the meantime, Facebook would still have a lot of influence in the industry.
I wouldn’t trust FB to accurately report the time of day, never mind their user count. They have every reason to inflate a number that already peobsbly includes a vast number of duplicates, bots, and other “Not quite real,” accounts.
I think it is going to be very hard to create an alternative to Facebook that will not in the long term morph into something just as bad as Facebook is today.
Pretty sure this is a coordinated attack by media, similar to media attacking Trump.
The fact is, you're right, most of this has been known for years. It's interesting because four years ago, I actually used the same technique as CA to get access to peoples social network(s) for identifying probable interests. This was recommended to me by an app developer still in college.
I really don't understand how this can be news if it was pretty much common knowledge in the tech spheres. Or rather, how they couldn't have known about it earlier. Short answer, they had to have known. Long answer, there has to be a reason they are throwing a fit now - which personally I don't know.
If we add that up with the lack of control from governments and Facebook attempts to solve the issue, we have a ticking time bomb. The only positive, Galup says, is that services like the ones on offer from Cambridge Analytica are prohibitively expensive for most political parties in Latin America.
In this case, the only thing saving elections in the region from outside corrupting influences may be the greed of those same corrupting influences.
Jesus, that’s rough. We’ve been screwing with elections South of our border for generations, and now we’ve de facto privatized it! We have a talent for cultivating blowback, and I really hope that FB doesn’t become the new face of that story. I guess Bosworth would just shrug and point out that this is all good, and if Americans are subject to potentially lethal backlash it’s just growing pains for FB.
> We’ve been screwing with elections South of our border for generations now we’ve de facto privatized it!
I think it's very interesting to think of Facebook in that context. However, it was privatized long ago. Companies have been buying political influence for a long time, and when that hasn't worked, U.S. security forces sometimes have been deployed. I don't know about private security forces, but I'd be surprised if that didn't play some part.
Facebook effectively plays the role of the private security agency; they provide an election manipulation service that others can utilize. It's different because those private armies exist solely for that purpose, but let's not pretend that Facebook learned about all these things in the last month - they knew what was going on better than anyone.
