[HN Gopher] Meta to pay $725M to settle Cambridge Analytica lawsuit
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Meta to pay $725M to settle Cambridge Analytica lawsuit
Author : doppp
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-12-23 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ergocoder wrote:
| How do we punish the Cambridge analytica's founders and
| employees?
|
| Since this seems like a big deal that FB is fined 725M
| fanso99 wrote:
| The main perpetrator in this case - Alexandr Kogan (now
| Spectre) - is now a tech entrepreneur leading a company with an
| investment from a US-based accelerator 43 North. That's how we
| punish them.
| crawsome wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| baeaz wrote:
| Let's remember that this is because Facebook had an open API that
| a 3rd party developer abused with the consent of the users.
|
| In case you wonder why nobody bothers to have open APIs for
| anything anymore. (cf. Twitter 10 years ago and today)
| fanso99 wrote:
| I might be remembering the details wrong, but wasn't the main
| issue that users half-knowingly allowed spying on their friends
| without any consent required from those friends? Open API isn't
| the reason this abuse happened IMO - Facebook failed to prevent
| massive data collection on users who did not give any consent.
| [deleted]
| baeaz wrote:
| Sure - if you give a 3rd party application API access using
| your account, they can see whatever your friends have made
| available to you.
|
| This is as if my friends sued Facebook because I gave you my
| password and you used it to snoop on them.
| fanso99 wrote:
| I am not buying this. It's borderline victim-blaming. An
| informed consent must be required. Giving access to an app
| is not the same as sharing your password with them and
| explicitly allowing them to do anything they want. Saying
| that, even if you do share your password, the app should
| not be able to collect data on your friends without their
| consent.
|
| There is a huge difference between you stalking someone
| else's friends and a company collecting billions of data
| points to use for political manipulation. The purpose, the
| scale, the incentives are different. We need to stop
| assuming that the rules should be the same for an
| individual and a business just because they use the same
| loophole.
| baeaz wrote:
| >An informed consent must be required.
|
| While I don't know what the prompt exactly said, I bet it
| was specific enough. The fact that people just click
| Accept without reading it shouldn't make it less binding,
| that would be infantilising users.
|
| >There is a huge difference between you stalking someone
| else's friends and a company collecting billions of data
| points to use for political manipulation.
|
| I agree. And that company is not Meta. So I don't
| understand why Meta is paying. In any case all I said was
| that this is one of the reasons APIs are closed and
| everything is a silo.
| fanso99 wrote:
| > While I don't know what the prompt exactly said, I bet
| it was specific enough.
|
| An informed consent from users who's information is going
| to be collected. In this case it was the friends of the
| person signing up. Again, that's the only reason
| Cambridge Analytica was successful. They didn't have that
| many users, they collected a ton of data on the users'
| friends.
|
| > I agree. And that company is not Meta.
|
| Meta had an obligation to protect its users' data. It
| failed at that.
| baeaz wrote:
| >An informed consent from users who's information is
| going to be collected.
|
| That consent was granted the day they accepted/sent the
| friend request. Once the friendship was established, the
| other user had access to the profile information. They
| can do with that information as they please, which
| includes giving it to a 3rd party. If it's illegal to do
| so, the parties at fault are the user who accepted the
| API access request and perhaps the 3rd party, but
| definitely not the medium.
|
| >Meta had an obligation to protect their user's data. It
| failed at that.
|
| If I go to your profile and take a screenshot, has Meta
| failed at protecting your data? What if a friend gives me
| their password or remote desktop access to their computer
| and I look at your profile? Should we fine Facebook?
| fanso99 wrote:
| > That consent was granted the day they accepted/sent the
| friend request. [...] They can do with that information
| as they please, which includes giving it to a 3rd party.
|
| Hm - no. If I accept a friend request I allow that user
| to read my profile but I do not authorize any 3rd parties
| to access it. If you show me any mention of 3rd party
| access in a friend request - I might change my view.
|
| > What if a friend gives me their password or remote
| desktop access to their computer and I look at your
| profile?
|
| You don't seem to make any distinction between a
| first/second party (me and my friend) and a 3rd party (CA
| accessing data through an API). In fact there is a
| difference that's very clearly defined in contract law,
| user agreements, etc.
| ratg13 wrote:
| Your comment glosses over that the API that allowed users to
| share other user's private data.
| CharlesW wrote:
| For anyone who's curious, the wildly leaky API feature that
| gave broad access to friend data was called "friends
| permission", and was killed in 2014.
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-
| data-c...
| CharlesW wrote:
| The Facebook API used by the app was never open. Additionally,
| "Facebook required app developers to sign agreements promising
| to abide by privacy restrictions attached to user data they
| received through Facebook APIs"1. The problem is that Facebook
| never did an adequate job of auditing or enforcing that.
|
| Also, even if you somehow believe that users knowingly
| consented to share the amount of data that they did, they
| _definitely_ did not consent to data traitor Aleksandr Kogan
| selling their personal knowledge graphs to Cambridge Analytica.
|
| 1 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/facebooks-
| cambri...
| baeaz wrote:
| That's false. The api was called friends permission and was
| public. There are references to it everywhere in the web. For
| example here you have a rando asking about it in SO:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6392338/what-is-the-
| diff...
| sigmonsays wrote:
| that's it?
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Obviously. We can't actually punish bad actors, because it
| would set a president that the pursuit of profit at the expense
| of individual freedom is actually dangerous. Much better to
| give out ritualistic slaps on the wrist to run on headlines and
| reinstill trust in our endlessly crumbling system.
|
| Be on the lookout at Meta's campaign contributions in the next
| few years, I'm sure none of the regulatory bodies of US
| communications will be on it :)
| strangelove026 wrote:
| I just got my equifax payout. A whopping $5.21 USD.
|
| It looks like they were charged $700MM? I think those in charge
| should really actually throw the book at these corporations for a
| change... Not very likely though.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Me too, just 3 days ago! Speaking of things I never thought
| would actually happen, since it's 3 years later.
|
| A far cry from the $125 promised, but it's kind of like having
| a little piece of history, a tiny sign there's _some_
| accountability occasionally.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Accountability is these companies not existing. We live in a
| "you'll fucking buy it anyways" economy now. All a fake
| variation on a problem that was solved 100 years ago. The
| people at the top are scraping as much from us as possible to
| fund their fear Mansions in New Zealand. It is a small club
| at the top and they all share a sandbox. You're not allowed
| in. It's over. The cancer has metastasized and the rich have
| won.
| somethoughts wrote:
| As a user - how does one even attempt to get their portion of the
| payout?
|
| Instead of the settlement paying off lawyers and the remaining
| scraps being distributed as 1 cent to each consumer - the
| settlements should go to fund some sort of oversight board - sort
| of like the SEC/CFTC but for social media. That oversight board
| can then sprout and grow and then look for future funding by
| taxing social media companies.
|
| Or fund some sort of healthy social media consumption education
| organization - kind of like what we already did/do with the
| cigarette settlements/taxes.
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