"The information that Facebook holds on its users (at least 98 data points per user) is deeply revealing – including of their tastes, preferences, habits, sexuality, politics, hopes and fears."

"For political campaigners, this is the purest gold dust, because it enables messages to be precisely calibrated, and for this to be done at a scale that was unimaginable in the pre-internet era. In a breathtaking piece of corporate casuistry, Facebook claims that this data harvest was not really a data breach at all, because the researcher who opened the floodgates did so 'in a legitimate way and through the proper channels.' The problem, they say, was that the individual in question didn’t abide by the company’s rules because he passed the information on to third parties. A senior Facebook executive told MPs that while the non-breach might have garnered lots of data, 'it is not data that we have provided.'"

What a narrow, legalistic argument Facebook is making for itself! That's not going to work. We didn't give it to X. We gave it to Y who gave it to X. It's a laundering argument.

Facebook must have a substantive argument that they're choosing to hold in reserve: It's good to use this data to facilitate communication, especially on topics of great public concern.

The quote is from "The Observer view on how Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy/Our revelations about the harvesting of users’ data show that Mark Zuckerberg’s all-powerful company has little sense of responsibility," an editorial in The Guardian that follows on a long piece of investigative journalism linked in the previous post. The editors express fear of the monsters of Silicon Valley, "where the mantra of 'creative destruction' has the status of religious dogma."

[Mark Zuckerberg] has been obliged to follow in the footsteps of the hero of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein – gradually forced to come to terms with the implications of the monster that he and his employees have created....

Shortly after Facebook became a public company, its founder famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. It was, of course, a hacker’s trope and, as such, touchingly innocent. What perhaps never occurred to Zuckerberg is that liberal democracy might be one of the things they break.

Can anyone explain why there is so much fear of targeted political advertising? If it's as dangerous as they act like they think then people are so weak-minded that democracy should be broken and we might as well let the machines take over.