Document reveals how Facebook downplayed early Cambridge Analytica concerns

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/23/cambridge-analytica-facebook-response-internal-document

Document reveals how Facebook downplayed early Cambridge Analytica concerns

Julia Carrie Wong

Fri 23 Aug 2019 22.40 BST Last modified on Fri 23 Aug 2019 22.42 BST

Internal Facebook correspondence from September 2015, released as part of a US government lawsuit on Friday, reveals new details about Facebook’s early knowledge of potentially improper data collection by Cambridge Analytica.

The existence of the internal discussion was first reported by the Guardian in March 2019. That report marked Facebook’s first acknowledgement that some of its employees were aware of concerns about improper data practices by Cambridge Analytica four months before the Guardian’s 11 December 2015 article exposed them.

Facebook’s lack of candor about this earlier knowledge to both investors and the press was one of the subjects of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint that Facebook settled by paying a $100m fine in July. Facebook did not admit or deny the SEC’s allegations as part of its settlement.

But the correspondence – which the Washington DC attorney general’s office fought for months to unseal as part of its lawsuit – provides new insight into how Facebook staff reacted, or did not react, to concerns about the use of user data by political campaign consultants.

A request to clarify Facebook’s policies for how political campaigns could legitimately use Facebook data appears to have languished with little attention or “resources”, until after the Guardian reported in 2015 on Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to create “psychographic profiles” of voters for Ted Cruz’s campaign. At that point, the topic was flagged as “hi pri” [high priority].
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The correspondence was initiated on 22 September 2015, when a Facebook staff member requested clarification on Facebook’s policies for political consultancies that were scraping data to match Facebook profiles to the lists of voters that campaigns use, known as voter files.
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[Botany]

1. And in the end Facebook wound up working with the Trump Campaign and Cambridge Analytica

“Without Facebook, we wouldn’t have won,” said Theresa Hong, a member of the digital arm of Trump’s presidential campaign, in an interview with the BBC last year when giving a tour of Trump’s digital campaign headquarters, dubbed Project Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas. Alamo was the name of the dataset used by Cambridge Analytica, according to Hong, who said Cambridge Analytica shared offices with the Trump campaign’s digital efforts and confirmed Facebook and Google sent liaisons to their offices to help Trump’s campaign. Hong showed the BBC how Cambridge Analytica could identify if, say, it was targeting a working mother concerned about childcare: She probably wouldn’t be interested in “a war ridden destructive ad” popping up in her Facebook app, but might respond to something more “warm and fuzzy,” lacking Trump’s voice, Hong said. “It wasn’t uncommon to have about 35 to 45 thousand iterations of these types of ads everyday.”

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-is-what-facebook-powered-election-cheating-looks-like.html

[sharedvalues]

2. Cambridge Analytica got Trump elected with Facebook, and with stolen data

Cambridge Analytica was funded by rightwing billionaire Robert Mercer.

This is a scandal. And our Congress and DOJ are doing nothing.