Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

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Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters

 

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

 

 

 

surprised no one has posted this yet

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files

[hconverse02]

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

[ItsMitch]

Hmm, lemme grab the popcorn for the upcoming comments.

[Blademaster91]

5 hours ago, hconverse02 said:

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

Exactly,and Facebook harvesting your data to hand over or sell to other companies isn't anything new.

I'm glad I don't use Facebook.

[Mooshi]

Looooool only normies still use Facebook. At a family get together a year ago, one of the family friends actually said and I quote "did you see that meme I posted on Facebook?" hahaha

[ARikozuM]

28 minutes ago, hconverse02 said:

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

Unfortunately everything and everyone is connected in some way to social media these days. Finding impartial political news is not easy and much less so now that social media is gaining a larger market share of views compared to print or electronic news outlets.

[DrMacintosh]

2 hours ago, hconverse02 said:

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

LMAO

 

Social Media is how you inform people when things are, who they are, where they are, host interviews, post informational videos, etc. 

 

While true you should not use "social media to decide your vote" as far as just talking to people are reading a post is concerned, but saying social media has no place in modern politics is just 100% out of touch with the real world. 

 

Especially since every news publication source both biased, unbiased, printed, televised, and streamed has a social media account. 

[BuckGup]

Finally Facebook will die. Next is twitter and then instagram

[asus killer]

4 hours ago, hconverse02 said:

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

i agree still that's like saying if you're gonna drive stupid you shouldn't be able to drive. But there is always people that do, millions in fact.

 

Facebook and social medias are cancer, i'm convinced at this more and more. Nothing wrong with it's design, but combined with human nature they are a highway for disaster.

[LAwLz]

Remember this when you hear someone say it doesn't matter if companies harvests data about you.

 

5 hours ago, hconverse02 said:

If you use social media to decide your vote, you aren't paying enough attention to politics to deserve a vote 

I don't think you understand how it works.

People don't "use social media to decide their vote" as in, look at some random post and then go "wow that politician is good, I want to vote for them!".

It's about manipulating what information you get exposed to. If they constantly show you bad press about someone, and good press about another, your perception will be affected regardless.

 

It's not as simple as "paying attention to politics" either, because people think they do. It's just that the information they get presented with can be curated in such a way that their views gets manipulated without them knowing.

Politics is far too complex and wide of a subject to just "pay attention to". If you truly believe you have a firm and objective view of everything happening in politics right now then you're naive, and the things you have researched might have been presented to you in a way that leads you to a certain conclusion. That is to say, the stronger opinion you have, and the more research you have done, the greater the risk that you have been manipulated. The worst thing is that the more research you make, the more data you give them which can be used to manipulate you.

 

 

Is education one of your priorities for the next election? Then chances are you will be looking up a lot of education related articles. That signals to these companies that they can present you with more articles about educational politics, which in turn means you will read more about it (thus, you "pay more attention to politics").

However, which articles you get presented with are now controlled by them rather than some unbiased source. What this means is that if they know you care about some specific detail about educational politics, they can serve you up with content steering you in one direction or the other. You won't know this is going on. To you it just seems like you are finding great articles to form an opinion based on, and you will get more and more confident that you have decided on the right people to vote on. 

(This is for sites and services in general, not necessarily Facebook specifically).

[mr moose]

Facebook has been the source of fake news since long before elections.   People just gobble that shit up because they are stupid and want to believe what they are told.

[JoostinOnline]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Facebook has been the source of fake news since long before elections.   People just gobble that shit up because they are stupid and want to believe what they are told.

There was a very big difference this time around though. Fake news websites are nothing new, but in the past they've been very easy to spot at a single glance. They all looked like they were cobbled together by a teenager in a school computer lab.  Around 2015-ish, there was a massive shift. They often looked professionally designed, either because of platforms like WordPress and [insert LMG promo for Squarespace] or because actual companies paid for their development. People are far more inclined to trust something when it's not a plaintext blog full of grammatical errors. 

[JoostinOnline]

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think you understand how it works.

People don't "use social media to decide their vote" as in, look at some random post and then go "wow that politician is good, I want to vote for them!".

It's about manipulating what information you get exposed to. If they constantly show you bad press about someone, and good press about another, your perception will be affected regardless.

This.

 

My Facebook profile says I'm a Republican (it's more complicated than that, but that's not important for this discussion), and in all of 2016 I didn't see a single pro-Democrat advertisement. All the political ones were either for Republican candidates, or trash about Hillary/Sanders. While I believe I made my vote for the right reasons, I can tell you without question that on a subconscious level my opinions were affected. Not just about the parties in general, but specific candidates and hotkey issues. 

[mr moose]

33 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

There was a very big difference this time around though. Fake news websites are nothing new, but in the past they've been very easy to spot at a single glance. They all looked like they were cobbled together by a teenager in a school computer lab.  Around 2015-ish, there was a massive shift. They often looked professionally designed, either because of platforms like WordPress and [insert LMG promo for Squarespace] or because actual companies paid for their development. People are far more inclined to trust something when it's not a plaintext blog full of grammatical errors. 

Nah, fake news has been a thing for a lot longer. Naturalnews has been spouting BS for along time (easily since 2011 as it's own website) sucking in people left right and centre.  It just gained media coverage with the election.   Inforwars was founded in 1999, globalresearch founded in 2001, greenmedinfo founded in 2008 and there are so many more. 

These are very professional looking websites with massive followers all believing some of the most ridiculous fake news ever printed.

 

EDIT:, I forgot mercola, his website also had millions of visitors and facebook page promotions 2010.

 

They are definitely  professional websites and had nothing to do with wordpress/squarespace or even godaddy/myspace.   These guys are making serious bank out of fake news and have been doing it since the the turn of the century.

[Bouzoo]

3 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Finally Facebook will die. Next is twitter and then instagram

Don't get your hopes up, fb is not going anywhere. 

[JoostinOnline]

30 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Nah, fake news has been a thing for a lot longer. 

My second sentence was that fake news sites weren't new.  How well did you actually read my post?

 

As for the rest of yours, obviously there were exceptions. I'm not talking about the big ones though. Most fake news comes from single people willing to pay $4 a month for a website, except this time the sites weren't so easy to spot based on appearance. You don't need to know a single thing about HTML or Javascript to make a professional looking website. Hosts even automate setting up the majority of it now. 

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

My second sentence was that fake news sites weren't new.  How well did you actually read my post?

 

As for the rest of yours, obviously there were exceptions. I'm not talking about the big ones though. Most fake news comes from single people willing to pay $4 a month for a website, except this time the sites weren't so easy to spot based on appearance. You don't need to know a single thing about HTML or Javascript to make a professional looking website. Hosts even automate setting up the majority of it now. 

I read it thoroughly you said:

58 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

There was a very big difference this time around though. Fake news websites are nothing new, but in the past they've been very easy to spot at a single glance. They all looked like they were cobbled together by a teenager in a school computer lab.

and:

58 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

 

 Around 2015-ish, there was a massive shift. They often looked professionally designed, either because of platforms like WordPress and [insert LMG promo for Squarespace] or because actual companies paid for their development. People are far more inclined to trust something when it's not a plaintext blog full of grammatical errors. 

 

The fact of the matter is in the past they were not easy to spot and many people were fooled easily,  The sites I listed are not exceptions (they are just a small list of many), it has been a problem in the science and medicine community since 1996*.  I have been part of many discussion regarding fake news and the effects on society since 2012.  There has been no observable shift due to ease of access to website creation tools.    In fact there have been so many in the past that we don't even know if the number of fake news sites is growing or shrinking.  The only thing that has changed is with the election fake news sites got into the mainstream media.  

 

 

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackwatch   Whilst not restricted to fake news sites,  since 2003 much of their work is in response to fake news claims.

[hconverse02]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

wow that politician is good, I want to vote for them!

Lmao you'd be surprised

[suicidalfranco]

how is it a data breach when users are the one granting third parties access to their data?

[Maticks]

If you hand over your data can you still call it a data breach?

[BuckGup]

3 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

Don't get your hopes up, fb is not going anywhere. 

Yeah for older people. But there is already mass movements of younger people deleting their accounts

[BluJay614]

9 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Exactly,and Facebook harvesting your data to hand over or sell to other companies isn't anything new.

I'm glad I don't use Facebook.

Only reason I still have it is because I have friends and family that I couldn't keep in contact with otherwise. Only reason I have Twitter is to enter giveaways.

[asus killer]

2 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

how is it a data breach when users are the one granting third parties access to their data?

usually when you agree is for certain uses that are detailed. I doubt anyone would be crazy to make this one of those cases in a disclaimer, terms of use,...

Like that English reporter found out they were using the data to instigate your fears, so pretty weird shit.

 

 

[Blademaster91]

12 minutes ago, BluJay614 said:

Only reason I still have it is because I have friends and family that I couldn't keep in contact with otherwise. Only reason I have Twitter is to enter giveaways.

Well yeah I think alot of people still use Facebook for just friends & family stuff,i'm correcting myself that I do log into Facebook for family or friends otherwise I'd rather not use Facebook. I do the same with Twitter except I follow some tech youtubers and Twitch streamers.

[Bouzoo]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

Yeah for older people. But there is already mass movements of younger people deleting their accounts

I saw that. It is dependant on the region though. Here for instance nobody is deleting it. On the other hand, nobody is using twitter, everyone is on fb. And yeah, I saw the hashtag and the whole movement on twitter for deleting fb accounts. It is irony at its finest, considering that twitter openly states it is collecting data. It is definitely not going anywhere for young people as well. You can bet it.