Steerpike

Interesting video. But it seems that people cannot conceive of giving up their addiction to FB; they continue to feed the monster.

jeepster

Carole Cadwalladr infers that if you think differently from her it's illegal. The Western Democracies depend on a difference of opinion. The Founders of this country believed that the dictatorship was in when everyone thought the same.
The problem today is people disrespect others who think differently. Shame on us. People aren't stupid, they know what they are voting for.
At a recent news conference Trump said that May was in very tough negotiations. Who do you think she's negotiating with? Other conservatives? Labor? No it's probably the Germans, who run the EU. Britain has been running a deficit with the EU (much like our deficit with China) and they probably want better trade agreements. If they don't get it they're threatening the nuclear option. If they get it they'll hold a second referendum and voila(!) Britain stays.

petitefrancaise

I think you missed the point of the video. Especially the bit about the FB and ads and Ebbw Vale.

Suggest you look at it again and come back.

jeepster

Facebook doesn't control the elections in Britain. People voted for Brexit regardless of Facebook. They probably voted for Brexit in Wales because they closed the coal mines.

Pulaski

Liberals are more than happy to overlook the abuses of power by the rich and the influential that fit the liberal agenda, but they get all bent out of shape whenever anything happens that upsets their liberal world-view, such as the views of the masses, the unwashed horde, getting their voices heard!

Pulaski

BBC report today.

Steerpike

Key extract: "Politico reported on Wednesday that the FTC is considering a ruling that would demand Facebook appoint a government-approved privacy official at the company, and elevate “privacy-minded” executives to the highest levels at the firm. The report also said Mr Zuckerberg would be specifically appointed as the individual responsible for applying these changes, a move designed to make him personally liable for any failings to do so."

MidAtlantic

Why would Zuckerberg be appointed to that role? He is the one who has blatantly failed or not bothered about privacy issues.

Steerpike

I think you are mis-reading the story - the FTC may insist that FB "appoint a government-approved privacy official at the company," so the person appointed would be Govt. approved, and would not be Z. They are also proposing that "Mr Zuckerberg would be specifically appointed as the individual responsible for applying these changes, a move designed to make him personally liable for any failings to do so." This is a way to assign personal responsibility to Z himself, so that if he fails to comply, he can be held personally liable and not hide behind corporate shields.

MidAtlantic

You are correct - I misread

Steerpike

Rather interesting article about the dysfunction at the FTC, which is charged with regulating FB and others:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...stoller-226930
This bit is quite disturbing:
"Facebook makes its money from behavioral targeted advertising. This means tailoring ads to each user based on what it knows about them, generating traffic through incendiary content so it can have a lot of ad slots, and then placing ads in the least expensive ad slot possible. This means the company has the incentive to collect as much personal information about each user as possible, and it has the incentive to prioritize poor quality content. Users and advertisers have nowhere else to go to an increasingly poor quality product, because Facebook has bought up its competition. Addressing a broken market structure like this one is the kind of problem the FTC was set up to address."

and ...

"The FTC is in charge of blocking anti-competitive mergers, and perhaps the most consequential failures had to do with the mergers that enabled Facebook to become a monopoly. It bought Instagram in 2011 and WhatsApp in 2014. It bought Onavo, a spyware tool that allowed the company to surveil its competitors, watch their traffic and copy their best features. The FTC blocked none of these. The Democrats had a monopoly friendly posture during the Obama-era Democrats; it was an open secret that Sheryl Sandberg was likely to be in Hillary Clinton’s Cabinet."

petitefrancaise

Anyone watched "The Hack" on Netflix?

Steerpike

Nope. Can you give us a quick overview ... ?

petitefrancaise

Lion in Winter

I watched it the other night. It stops just short of saying exactly what is/was known about people from their FB and other social media profiles. However, it does show how the use of "psychographics" allowed campaigners to isolate people and communities and work out very accurately what to say to whom to cause them to vote for Trump - and, no doubt, for Brexit. The exercise of the democratic right to vote has become just another "sale", with the analysts using everything at their disposal (which is a lot) to influence the buying decision. Not only that, the whistle-blower clearly doesn't really think that's in any way wrong. It was simply, to her, a case of "our data was better than their data". It is worth watching. It's more about people being turned into products than it is about corruption.