This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook: Data misuse is a feature, not a bug—and it’s plaguing our entire culture.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: April 2, 2018 at 5:48:30 PM EDT
> To: "E-mail Pamphleteer Dave Farber's Interesting People list" <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook: Data misuse is a feature, not a bug—and it’s plaguing our entire 
> culture.
>
> This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook
> Data misuse is a feature, not a bug—and it’s plaguing our entire culture.
> By ETHAN ZUCKERMAN
> Mar 23 2018
> <https://www-theatlantic-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/556310/>
>
> After five days of silence, Mark Zuckerberg finally acknowledged the massive data compromise that allowed Cambridge 
> Analytica to obtain extensive psychographic information about 50 million Facebook users. His statement, which 
> acknowledged that Facebook had made mistakes in responding to the situation, wasn’t much of an apology—Zuckerberg and 
> Facebook have repeatedly demonstrated they seem to have a hard time saying they’re sorry.
>
> For me, Zuckerberg’s statement fell short in a very specific way: He’s treating the Cambridge Analytica breach as a 
> bad-actor problem when it’s actually a known bug.
>
> In the 17-months-long conversation Americans have been having about social media’s effects on democracy, two distinct 
> sets of problems have emerged. The ones getting the most attention are bad-actor problems—where someone breaks the 
> rules and manipulates a social-media system for their own nefarious ends. Macedonian teenagers create sensational and 
> false content to profit from online ad sales. Disinformation experts plan rallies and counterrallies, calling 
> Americans into the streets to scream at each other. Botnets amplify posts and hashtags, building the appearance of 
> momentum behind online campaigns like #releasethememo. Such problems are the charismatic megafauna of social-media 
> dysfunction. They’re fascinating to watch and fun to study—who wouldn’t be intrigued by the team of Russians in St. 
> Petersburg who pretended to be Black Lives Matter activists and anti-Clinton fanatics in order to add chaos to the 
> presidential election in the United States? Charismatic m!
>  egafauna may be the things that attract all the attention—when really there are smaller organisms, some invisible to 
> the naked eye, that can dramatically shift the health of an entire ecosystem.
>
> Known bugs are the set of problems with social media that aren’t the result of Russian agents, enterprising 
> Macedonians, or even Steve Bannon, but seem to simply come with the territory of building a social network. People 
> are mean online, and bullying, harassment, and mob behavior make online spaces unusable for many people. People tend 
> to get stuck in cocoons of unchallenging, ideologically compatible information online, whether these are “filter 
> bubbles" created by algorithms, or simply echo chambers built through homophily and people’s friendships with “birds 
> of a feather.” Conspiracy theories thrive online, and searching for information can quickly lead to extreme and 
> disturbing content.
>
> The Cambridge Analytica breach is a known bug in two senses. Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher who 
> built a quiz to collect data on tens of millions of people, didn’t break into Facebook’s servers and steal data. He 
> used the Facebook Graph API, which until April 2015 allowed people to build apps that harvested data both from people 
> who chose to use the app, and from their Facebook friends. As the media scholar Jonathan Albright put it, “The 
> ability to obtain unusually rich info about users’ friends—is due to the design and functionality of Facebook’s Graph 
> API. Importantly, the vast majority of problems that have arisen as a result of this integration were meant to be 
> ‘features, not bugs.’”
>
> In his non-apology, Zuckerberg claimed Facebook had already taken the most “important steps a few years ago in 2014 
> to prevent bad actors from accessing people’s information.” But changing the API Kogan used to collect this data is 
> only a small part of a much bigger story.
>
> To be clear, I believe Kogan acted unethically in allegedly collecting this data in the first place, and that giving 
> this data to Cambridge Analytica was an unforgivable breach of research ethics. But Kogan was able to do this because 
> Facebook made it possible, not just for him, but for anyone building apps using the Graph API. When Kogan claims he’s 
> being made a scapegoat by both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, he has a strong case: Selling data to Cambridge 
> Analytica is wrong, sure, but Facebook knew that people like Kogan could access the data of millions of users. That’s 
> precisely the functionality Facebook advertised to app developers.
>
> Speaking with Laurie Segall on CNN this week, Zuckerberg emphasized that Facebook would investigate other app makers 
> to see if anyone else was selling psychographic data they’ve collected through the Graph API. But Zuck didn’t mention 
> that Facebook’s business model is based on collecting this demographic and psychographic information and selling the 
> ability to target ads to people using this data about them.
>
> [snip]
>
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>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  
>
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