"'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine/Sandy Parakilas says numerous companies deployed these techniques – likely affecting hundreds of millions of users – and that Facebook looked the other way."

The Guardian reports (and this is different insider from the one I quoted earlier today).

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012... [said] “My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data” ... Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused....

“It has been painful watching,” he said. “Because I know that they could have prevented it.” 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.”

Here's the earlier post: "'Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to access the personal data of users during the 2012 campaign because they supported the Democratic candidate...'"

And here's my post from 2 days ago, criticizing Facebook for making a narrow, legalistic argument Facebook... for itself." I said: "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." And I recommended that Facebook fall back onto the argument that "It's good to use this data to facilitate communication, especially on topics of great public concern."

I'm still trying to get a grip on this story, but my orientation to it is that I'm skeptical that there was any "leak" or "breach" of security. It think Facebook did what it intended to do, but there's just some static over that choice because it became apparent that Mercer money had energized a right-wing use of the data.

ADDED: Bloomberg reports this morning that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook for possibly violating a consent decree:

Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time.

Did Facebook make changes that they didn't tell users about or did users just not "read or understand" what Facebook told them?

Millions of us took that Facebook quiz myPersonality, that scored you on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and gave access to our Facebook profiles.

"Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook 'likes' across millions of people.'... They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the [Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre] told me. 'There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked "I hate Israel" on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats. There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.' The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research... But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including [Christopher] Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the [UK] Lib Dems.... 'And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.'"

From "The Cambridge Analytica Files/‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower/For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate" (by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian).

Obviously from that title, there's a lot more to that article that the candy that jumped out at me. I invite you to think about this nefarious predation on the sweet gathering place that is Facebook.

There's also this about Wylie meeting Rebekah Mercer:

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”

I'm not sure if I ever took the myPersonality quiz, but I did once take a quiz based on those 5 personality traits that purported to tell you which U.S. President you're most like. Meade took it too. Both of us were most like Barack Obama, even though we had different results on 4 of the 5 qualities. I called bullshit on the test. But maybe things like this really are valuable and politicians could target their communications more squarely at people who would be receptive to them. Is that more frightening that the terribly crude sorting of people by political party? I've been favoring things that break up the old partisan boundaries, perhaps because I'm "above average on openness."

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

You don't need an accurate result to get people to hand over their data. In fact, the two results most likely for you to repost and ensnare others are probably the one that gives you smug satisfaction and the one you cannot believe could be true.

But only 40% of those who took the myPersonality test gave access to their Facebook profiles, so inspiring trust that this was a serious scholarly endeavor (connected to Cambridge University) was a crucial step in getting to the data. I don't think Facebook opens up the profiles routinely.

"This was the Mercers forcing his hand. It wasn’t just Bannon’s quotes to Wolff but how he mishandled the fallout."

"He took five days to issue a weak apology, which fell flat. Right up until today Steve was telling associates everything was going to be fine (but he always does that when he’s under the gun.) But his associates knew this was coming. The Mercers had turned against him months ago."

Axios, "Steve Bannon out at Breitbart."

"Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire backer of Bannon and Trump, chooses sides."

WaPo reports. Excerpt:

Long before Trump stepped onto the campaign trail, the Mercer family and Bannon were drawing up schematics for an outsider populist presidential candidate who could topple the establishment. It was a dream years in the making. And now Trump, who fulfilled their hopes, has come between Mercer and Bannon, a further escalation of the conflict ripping through the president’s base....

In 2011, the future president first met Bannon to discuss a possible presidential run. The same year, the Mercers were introduced to conservative flamethrower Andrew Breitbart and Bannon, agreeing to invest $10 million into Breitbart News, according to the New Yorker. One stipulation of the Mercers’ deal was to place Bannon on the news company’s board. Breitbart died months later, which left the news operation in Bannon’s hands....

"Steve is now unchained. Fully unchained."

"He’s going nuclear. You have no idea. This is gonna be really fucking bad."

Comments from 2 different Bannon friends, relayed by Politico.

And:

“First he’s gonna figure things out with Bob and Bekah [Mercer],” said one Bannon ally. “Breitbart’s certainly the likely landing spot.” This ally said that Bannon may also move to a Mercer-funded outside group, or even start a new one.

Another friend of Bannon’s doubted this: “Why would he help them from the outside at this point? Run the outside group and then Jared Kushner takes credit?"...

"Mega-donor urged Bannon not to resign/Trump’s strategist threatened to leave the White House after clashing with Jared Kushner."

Politico reports:

Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.

Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation....

It's good to have 5 sources, but I can't tell what happened that justifies the verb "clashed." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm suspicious that journalists antagonistic to Trump are eager to impose a chaos template. (It seems to alternate with the evil template.)

Politico observes that Kushner's power has "ballooned":

He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.

I'm familiar with the name Gary Cohn only because I just read — in a NYT interview transcript —  Trump's reaction when Gary Cohn sneezed:

TRUMP: God bless you. You O.K., Gary? That was a pretty tough one. I’ve got to make sure my man is all right.

I don't know if Trump and Cohn have a sneeze-and-response routine to break the tension. It happened right when Maggie Haberman was bearing in, looking for specifics about which U.S. airports really deserve to be called — as Trump had put it — a "horror show." But I'll assume it was a random sneeze, and Trump loves to spontaneously switch topics. It's fun. It makes him look cute and smart (or so he may think). And it makes it hard for others to keep up even as he looks as if he's not racing ahead. He's manifesting distractability, and it makes them think he's less competent. But everyone laughed, and Trump got away with never saying exactly which airports are a horror show. 

Oh, yes — do I seem distractable? — there's all that chaos around Trump. Bannon and Jared are clashing. Cohn is sneezing.

And Rebekah Mercer is... holding people together? I know who Rebekah Mercer is, because I read Jane Mayer's piece in The New Yorker, "THE RECLUSIVE HEDGE-FUND TYCOON BEHIND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY/How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency":

[Robert Mercer] poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News.... By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”

Much more about Robert and Rebekah Mercer at that New Yorker article. Back at the Politico piece, we see that Jared Kushner supposedly thinks that Rebekah and Robert Mercer "have taken too much credit" for Trump's victory and that he has "misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda."

“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.