Former Facebook-er: Cambridge Analytica-Style Data-Harvesting Was “Shockingly Routine”
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 03/20/2018
The Cambridge Analytica scandal that erupted over the weekend has snowballed into the biggest threat to CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s rule since the company’s 2012 IPO.
But, as we noted earlier, the manner in which Cambridge Analytica allegedly leveraged the data it purportedly “stole” from Facebook (or rather, refused to delete after receiving it from an intermediary who himself had improperly accessed it, according to the company) isn’t all that unusual. Case in point, Carol Davidsen, Obama’s director of integration and media analytics during his 2012 campaign, revealed that Facebook knowingly helped the Obama campaign collect as much user data as possible – even from the friends of users who may not have explicitly consented to the data collection.
When Facebook found out about the data mining for political purposes – the same thing they just banned Cambridge Analytica for doing – they “didn’t stop us,” the Obama staffer said. Representatives from Facebook even traveled to Obama campaign headquarters and candidly told campaign workers, including Davidsen, that they were allowing the Obama campaign do things they wouldn’t have allowed other developers to do.
Fast forward nearly six years and Facebook Security Chief Alex Stamos is planning to leave the company in August after clashing with executives over their refusal to prioritize policing how user data is accessed and manipulated over ever-expanding advertising profits.
And now, another former Facebook employee has come forward to reveal that, before the company started tightening its data security practices after its IPO, the type of “unauthorized” access that Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for was routinely carried out by app developers. The reason? Facebook’s advertising business can increase profits by offering more data to advertisers and developers. And the more successful games like FarmVille and Candy Crush become, the more money Facebook – which takes a piece of developers’ profits – stands to make.
Combined, these factors created a powerful incentive to look the other way.
Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied:
“Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”
The Rest…HERE
