A Palantir Employee Taught Cambridge Analytica How To Harvest Facebook Data

[Lucian Armasu]

New reports revealed that Palantir, the company of Facebook board member Peter Thiel, may have helped Cambridge Analytica build its psychographic models, which it used in the U.S. elections. Palantir said that only one employee was involved.

A Palantir Employee Taught Cambridge Analytica How To Harvest Facebook Data : Read more

 

[Co BIY]

Is the scandal that everyone seems to have access to Facebook's data without paying the required fees and passed it around like credit card numbers on the dark web ?

 

[Giroro]

@Co Biy

I think the scandal is that more individuals are starting to realize that companies are buying, selling, and licensing out the rights to the users' life stories without paying royalties to the actual victims. The way that companies like Facebook operate isn't really any different than identity theft or piracy of your data. But that think they can get away with it because at some point you blindly clicked past a ToS (which had changed since you signed up, regardless).
Part of the problem is that people haven't quite realized exactly how valuable their data actually is. Facebook has become one of the biggest companies in the world primarily by selling profiles, selling ads, and tracking your activity. Google also became one of the largest and most powerful entities in all of human history by doing nearly the same thing, for that matter.

 

[Peter Buelow]

@Giroro and @Co Biy, the scandal is that psychological data was used by Republican campaigns to influence what people saw and knew about the parties campaigning without acknowledging they were doing so via facebook advertisements and posts. Cambridge Analytica took data people didn't know they had given, tried to figure out how you were likely to vote or what your election preferences were, and then targeted information at you to influence how you thought about the whole process. In the US, this is illegal. If you are working on a campaign, you MUST acknowledge this fact and state it outright. In this case, no one did, and it's clear that certain parties on the Trump side, I'm not saying Trump was involved, had access to a lot of very specific profiles that helped the Republican party cause.

 

[ubercake]

Can't we blame the Russians for this too?

 

[takeshi7]

Be careful talking bad about Palantir, Tom's Hardware. They have a known history of blackmailing journalists to achieve their goals. Palantir is a truly scum company.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/22340513034/leaked-hbgary-documents-show-plan-to-spread-wikileaks-propaganda-bofa-attack-glenn-greenwald.shtml