Facebook Under Fire On How Its Data Is Being Used

New /York Times: Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off Storms on Two Continents

WASHINGTON — Facebook on Sunday faced a backlash about how it protects user data, as American and British lawmakers demanded that it explain how a political data firm with links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to press for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to appear before the panel to explain what the social network knew about the misuse of its data “to target political advertising and manipulate voters.”

The calls for greater scrutiny followed reports on Saturday in The New York Times and The Observer of London that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned the effectiveness of its techniques.

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Update: Here's why the the Cambridge Analytica controversy is such a big deal (Mashable)

WNU Editor: Anti-Facebook sentiment has gone viral .... No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more (Ellie Mae O'Hagan, The Guardian). As for the scientist whose app started this entire controversy .... he does not understand what the controversy is all about since he told the users of his app on what he was going to use it for (albeit later on) .... Exclusive: Scientist at center of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica controversy speaks (CNN). But what I find interesting about this story (and the outrage from the media and the political class), is that 4 years ago President Obama's campaign team were praised for using data mining and social media platforms like Facebook to win the election ....

Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election (The Guardian)
How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters (Technology Review)
How Obama's data crunchers helped him win (CNN)
Data You Can Believe In: The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In -- New York Times
How Obama Won the Social Media Battle in the 2012 Presidential Campaign (MPR Center)

So it was good then .... bad now (because the tools that are being used today are more sophisticated?). Go figure.