Facebook to suspend Cambridge Analytica

[NewJeffCT]

Tweeter is a Washington Post correspondent.

Link to tweet

DEVELOPING: Facebook is suspending Trump-affiliated political research firm Cambridge Analytica. Story to come.

Edited to add - direct link to her story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/?utm_term=.11b3d4097768

[Anon-C]

1. Banned....loll! Nt

[MelissaB]

2. K&R

[LonePirate]

3. This is quite possibly the most interesting news of the day.

[NewJeffCT]

4. agreed

even better than that Republican bigot in maine dropping out

[Bernardo de La Paz]

13. Yes, because of the Trump-Russia-Mercer connection. . . . nt

[TubbersUK]

5. Statement from Facebook

We are suspending Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), including their political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from Facebook. Given the public prominence of this organization, we want to take a moment to explain how we came to this decision and why.

We Maintain Strict Standards and Policies

Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc.


Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.


Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made. We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information.



https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/suspending-cambridge-analytica/

[NewJeffCT]

6. Thanks

good info

[mn9driver]

7. So this is perhaps how they identified Facebook users to target

With specialized fake news and political ads?

[herding cats]

9. Yes, and depending on what other data they gleaned it seems to be even worse then just that. NT

[herding cats]

8. This seems worthy of a Friday news dump.

K&R!

[NewJeffCT]

10. it's potentially huge

Cambridge Analytica is scary

[herding cats]

11. Oh, I totally agree.

This, could potentially, be the beginning of the end of them.

There was a suit raised today in the UK against Cambridge Analytica/SCL under the Data Protection Act. Let me look for a link.

[herding cats]

12. Here you go.

Backstory from December which is also updated today with his filing.

A Groundbreaking Case May Force Controversial Data Firm Cambridge Analytica to Reveal Trump Secrets
This US professor is counting on British data privacy laws to get some answers.

Before the 2016 presidential campaign, David Carroll, a media professor at New York’s Parsons School of Design, didn’t know much, if anything, about Cambridge Analytica. Despite studying data collection and privacy, he says he had probably only heard the name of the data analytics company mentioned once or twice. But that was before the election. And it was before, of course, it became clear that the firm—partially owned by Trump mega-donor Robert Mercer and the place where former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon once served as vice president—would help propel Donald Trump into the White House by cultivating vast troves of information on an untold number of American voters to craft controversial and highly targeted political messages.

But even still, it wasn’t until a few months after the election that the alarm bells started going off for Carroll. Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the co-founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that helps individuals request their data from companies like Tinder, Uber, and Facebook, Carroll says, told him he suspected that Cambridge Analytica, with offices around the world, may have processed the data of American voters in 2016 in the UK. While the company’s tactics were a complete mystery, if that were true, Carroll, an American, could request what information it had on him as allowed by British data protection laws. So in early 2017, the two set out to pull back the curtain on the data tactics of Cambridge Analytica.

“Why does some company incorporated in the United Kingdom have [our data]? What the hell is that for?”
“He was curious,” Carroll, a self-described “data nerd,” tells Mother Jones. “I was curious. It was purely academic curiosity.”

Just a few months later, Carroll would find himself in the midst of a landmark data privacy legal battle.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/a-groundbreaking-case-may-force-controversial-data-firm-cambridge-analytica-to-reveal-trump-secrets/

[errant boy]

14. Watch Out, Zuckie

Putin is gonna be pissed!

[BigmanPigman]

15. I hope the woman in this video is fired too.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029566031

In an online BBC video, Theresa Hong, the Donald Trump campaign’s Digital Content Director, has made a number of startling confessions that she seems to think were bragging points. She’s revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the company suspected of having used voter data stolen by the Russian government to plot its online marketing strategy on Trump’s behalf, ran its operations out of the same offices where the Trump campaign itself was plotting its paid Facebook ad strategy. But the truly shocking revelation is who else she admits was in the building, which Trump’s people called “Project Alamo.”
The BBC interviewer asks Hong, “What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here? Why were they here?” She responds by saying “They were helping us, you know. They were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Shen then bragged “When you’re pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these social platforms, you’re going to get white glove treatment. So they would send people, you know, representatives to the Project Alamo to ensure that all our needs were being met.” Watch the shocking BBC video below

http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/facebook-employees-trump-office/4784/

VIDEO:

MUST WATCH - This needs to go VIRAL

Propaganda War: FB, Twitter, Russia, the GOP & Trump. Watch & Read the Thread.

[orangecrush]

16. Kick and Rec

[calimary]

17. Gee whiz, nice of 'em to get around to it.

[Hassler]

18. So, Mark Zuckerberg has finally returned from his family leave?

[blogslut]

19. Aleksandr Kogan obtained his data via fraud

He told FB he was conducting a relatively innocuous social survey but, in fact, he was culling very personal information from FB participants, as well as the people on their 'Friends' lists. He then turned that data over to Cambridge Analytica.

[herding cats]

20. Yes, he did.

He farmed FB and sold what he harvested for profit to Cambridge Analytica.

That’s the crux of what we have here so far, but it’s big enough and still growing.

[dalton99a]

22. Very important point.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

21. Most CA scientists working for Cruz and Trump in 2016 were foreigners, not Americans.

Retweeted by David Fahrenthold: https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold

Most of the Cambridge Analytica data scientists working for Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump in 2016 were foreigners, not Americans. Lawyers privately raised red flags about this, but it continued.

Link to tweet

[dalton99a]

23. +1

[RandomAccess]

24. Sure, after ALL the horses are out of the barn

The rats too

[NewJeffCT]

25. True - but, it will help for 2018 and 2020

and, also remember that Facebook formed a group in 2015 that was sort of an editorial board to review news stories before they were put on Facebook to weed out Fake News. However, the RW made such a huge fuss about it that Facebook disbanded the group - I guess one person on the board was either a registered Democrat or had given money to a Democratic politician in the past, so that caused their outrage. Looking back, how much of the outrage was generated by Russian trolls and their allies?

If only that group had stayed in place and done it's job

[procon]

26. A day late and a dollar short.

Is Facebook really that inept that they allowed this kind of activity to go on unchecked, unsupervised and unquestioned? If they are that lackadaisical, what else might have Cambridge Analytica done that has yet to be revealed?

If Facebook can't safeguard user data, how many other outside agents, in addition to Cambridge Analytica, have gained access to collect private information, and what might they do with it? What traps have been set, what crippling viruses and malicious malware is laying in wait for a signal to execute their lethal programming?

Why isn't the US government working to protect critical public and private IT systems? It's unbelievable that we have no Cabinet Dept to deal with digital and cyber security when every aspect of our lives depends on those systems.