Facebook Just Keeps Getting Worse And WORSE

Facebook is under a ton of fire over a major data breach involving Cambridge Analytica. The Guardian provided the details:

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.

The Guardian basically suggests this data ultimately benefitted the Trump campaign, but I should note Cambridge says that’s not true. None of that matters though, because Zuckerberg thinks you’re all dumb f**ks.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comments that early users of his social network were ‘dumb f***s’ for trusting him with their data have re-emerged. Zuckerberg made the shocking remark during an instant messenger conversation with a friend at the age of 19, shortly after launching the site. First picked up on by the media in 2010, his comments have now re-surfaced in the wake of a privacy row involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Uh-huh.

The conversation, which has since been discussed widely on social media, ran as follows: Zuckerberg: Yea so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. ‘i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuckerberg: people just submitted it. i don’t know why. they “trust me”. dumb f***s.

Lovely. It gets worse. A former Obama campaign official came out and said that Facebook ALLOWED them to take data, because FB was on their side.

An article written in 2012 about a project code named tärgus https://t.co/cuwy4MhkPm

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

An example of how we used that data to append to our email lists. pic.twitter.com/VHhSukvXDY

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA. This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

BLEH. And now some are saying Facebook should be regulated like a utility.

Then add in all the algorithm change drama and the social media giant deliberately squishing conservative voices, and yeah. It’s easy to conclude that Facebook SUCKS.

In reality, everything can be summed up thusly:

This whole hullaballoo about Facebook isn’t complicated. 1. Trump wins. 2. Democrats/Left declare social media in “crisis,” threaten legislation. 3. Social media heads punish conservatives.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 20, 2018

Nailed it, Ben.