Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Why all the fuss about Facebook data being mined by a third party for political purposes? Facebook has been selling personal data to advertisers (and I think to anyone else that paid the price) from the very beginning. Its business is collecting and selling data about you. That’s the service for which they get paid. You don’t pay them to provide the means of keeping in touch with your friends.

So why the shock when it’s revealed that some people want to sell you political beliefs instead of shoes? When it comes to “free” media like TV and Facebook, you are the product.

I think the only surprise is that someone had a pang of conscience and revealed Cambridge Analytica’s shenanigans. You can be quite sure that Facebook data is being mined by anyone that wants to do so. Heck, you can do it yourself on your own machine. Just snip and save whatever you want, and look it over at your leisure. I’m pretty sure there are programs out there that will do this for you automatically. Look for “archiving software”.

Facebook was designed to be easy and convenient to use, and that is what makes it open to anyone who wants to mine data. It links files together so that many people can, if they wish, read the same file: A note about your meal, a picture, a link to a website, a video, whatever. And each of these items is labelled with your name. It has to be. Else it couldn’t be seen by you on your Facebook page.

But that means that Facebook has that labelled stuff on its servers. If there’s enough labelled stuff about you, it’s easy to figure out what kind of person you are. That’s what makes that data valuable for advertisers. It’s how Facebook figures out what ads to show you. It’s how Amazon decides to show you what “People who bought this also bought...” Etc. IOW, Facebook etc merely do what we all do: A “person we know" is really the collection of everything we know about them, plus what we think it all means.

What isn’t clear is how Cambridge Analytica got hold of all that data. There’s a good deal of fudging around this question. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said almost nothing. It seems CA hacked into Facebook’s servers to get the data,. That’s bad. But if Facebook sold them the data, I think that’s worse.