Note on 8/2/16:
-US now confirmed Manafort passed privileged polling data to Russian intelligence
-Gates 302 already stated poll data included Cambridge Analytica
-Facebook employees were working in same office as Cambridge Analytica and Trump campaign /1 nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/…
- SEC complaint cited evidence of Facebook employees raising “red flags” about this
- co-founder who sold FB’s data to Cambridge Analytica *was working for Facebook*
- Facebook also had 6+ million fake accounts manipulating news pages (later buried by company in April 2017) /2
- only a few months ago, this massive report showed the data was used to deter voters in key states. This would mean top Facebook execs misled and Trump campaign manager lied under oath (he also had a national news meltdown hours before the TV report). /3 channel4.com/news/revealed-…
And yes, this ⬆️ would mean Facebook’s data was sold and also passed to Russian Intelligence. ps we just learned a few months ago from the UK regulator that Facebook never followed up to do this audit as promised to @SenAmyKlobuchar by its CEO. /4
More on the latest news re: Manafort’s handing over polling data to Russian spy here. Report suggests there is new intelligence beyond what we learned from bipartisan Senate report. ht @AWeissmann_ (worked on Mueller team). nbcnews.com/politics/natio…
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Pro tip: if you own an iOS device, next week is likely to bring you the most significant improvement in digital privacy in the history of the internet. And it will kneecap Facebook. 🍿
It’s why Facebook was running national ad campaigns, Facebook’s trade group was filing lawsuits, et al. Meanwhile, Google and others are faking privacy efforts on browser to keep up.
We’re about to find out what Facebook refuses to admit. It’s a 21st century version of direct mail. Without your data, no advertiser would choose to run its ads adjacent to FB’s unmanaged, unpredictable user-generated content environments. They’ll still dominate but this hurts.
Google’s scheme “FLoC” to protect its surveillance advertising biz model and the economics of horizontal data mining across the web to be blocked by actual privacy-focused browsers (Google’s Chrome is not one). /1 digiday.com/media/browser-…
It’s important to note Google’s other proposal (“Fledge”) is a bit different and doesn’t raise these same concerns. Yes, there are a lot of birds. Don’t even get me started on “Swan” which should be dead on arrival based on who is proposing it let alone the concept. /2
Any scheme which attempts to preserve functionality similar to how a 3rd party cookie could be used to track users around the web (this includes the terrible idea of hashed emails) is not solving for the future, not recognizing users’ rights many now backed up by law. /3
The internal “news group” (Google has one, too) ultimately serves to gauge where to spread $$$, love and spin to keep critics at bay and feint access to the company while it maximizes profits and waves a wrecking ball on democracy. nytimes.com/2018/04/21/tec…
And yes they also serve to use relationships to slap back when people like me are vocal. But if 4yrs later they still can’t solve the riddle of an algorithm providing velocity and reach to a conspiracy theorist over those four brands then I don’t think they’re trying hard enough.
It's unequivocal Google's dominance is partially built on surveillance outside its own properties. When are we going to talk about its engineers spreading propaganda in significant forums where the web's future is shaped? This 50-70% data point is entirely created by Google. /1
Recall it comes from Google's own study which it first released as a headline then pressed a 2 page piece of garbage then finally to a regulator but AFAIK we still don't even know the sites and it looked only at sites utilizing google's dominant adtech. /2
and it entirely ignores best study I know of using empirical ad log data from a significant number and diverse set of websites to examine how welfare will reallocate with changes to how data is shared horizontally for ad targeting (aka surveillance). /3 wsj.com/articles/behav…
important discovery of how Facebook is a surveillance ad company posing as a consumer product company leveraging monopoly. A few comments I would like to add to this thread which clearly got a lot of eyes because yet - even today - Facebook abuses its rock-bottom expectations. /1
All of this tracking is running into friction. Facebook was forced to reluctantly add a clear history tool (joke), Apple has started blocking it in Safari along w DuckDuckGo, Brave, Firefox in extensions/apps and Apple is about to kneecap Facebook’s app tracking on iOS. 🙏🏽 /2
Facebook likes to pretend that sites intentionally share the data with Facebook. I wrote about this in WSJ in 2014 and it’s a part of the antitrust reports, German Cartel Office case etc. Truth is Facebook misled publishers. I told them this. /3 blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/20…
😂 , Google, a company with more lawyers, lobbyists, communications people and money than anyone made a clerical error and leaked out sensitive information about its alleged collusion and bid rigging. /1 wsj.com/articles/googl…
This is consistent with the antitrust charges in the complaint and now appears to be confirmed by Google in its *supposed to be* redacted filing. Hard to understand how it’s not trading on inside information. There is a nice illustration why it’s problematic in the complaint. /2
WSJ also reports that Google confirmed the existence of the deal with Facebook. Signed by Sandberg and including how the two companies would act if investigated. This matching of audiences appears to be new and seems like privacy circumvention to me. /3