It was the Russians!

[Suff]

Am I bothered? Not particularly. Am I bothered that millions of people take these things on board without question? I most certainly am!

At a minimum, 50M people who have been harvested. They are now on multiple datasets and they will never get themselves off them again because they have no clue where that information is. Worst of all is that they gave implied consent to their private data to be harvested because they didn't bother to read the terms and conditions of their use of the site and didn't ever even look at the security capabilities to protect that information.

So they have been harvested and tracked. Everything they have said, tweeted, liked, responded to. Every Time they have logged into another site using Facebook credentials.

Then advanced analytics has been used to profile these Facebook users to group and categorise them and the people with whom they interact online.

The whole exercise used in the Trump campaign to ensure that they "sell" the "right" story to the "right" group of people. Not the truth, mind you, but a spin on the truth tailor made for the beliefs and aspirations of the people it was targeted at.

What CA did may not be illegal in US election laws, but it is flying incredibly close to (or potentially breaching), EU DP laws. Certainly GDPR will bring a whole new scrutiny to that and may force CA to dump the data. Or seek permission to use it further from every single user.

All because people didn't even look at the Facebook settings and work out that letting someone they had "Friended", have ALL of their personal data, including likes and login history to other sites, was not quite what they wanted.

Everyone has things they don't want to be totally public. In the terms of an integrated social media world, there is no such thing as "You have nothing to hide". Because, in the realms of a social media connected world, that is the same as saying "I don't want any privacy".

I must admit I was rather amused at the rather lame attempts of some people to get rid of their Facebook. Being surprised to find that there was no obvious way to _Delete_ your facebook but only to Deactivate it; leaving the entire presence there. Sorry guys, you have to try just a little bit harder than that.

Expect the next "Outrage" to be when they find out that they can have their photo's back but FB can't be made to delete it. That'll be fun. It has been in the terms and conditions for an age and a half..

It was interesting to read the comments of people who wanted to get out of Facebook when they received advertising from companies trying to sell them jigsaws of the photo's of their dead parents. Photo's they were able to mine at the back end of Facebook, not the people's sites. Because FB has an even bigger archive of user data, using the same analytics, which it sells to companies who want to push goods to FB users.

Talking to my father tonight, he was highly amused. Talking as a person in his 80's, who has never had a Facebook account, he said: "We could see that one coming a Mile away".

[Workingman]

I do have a FB account, rarely used, but I need it to keep in touch with my daughter who is now in Dubai.

However, I am a bit of a sod when it comes to up-thumbing or down-thumbing things... especially when a site winds me up, so it's 'up' for something I hate and 'down' for something I like... then off I go to another site and do exactly the opposite.

[cromwell]

I guess that to answer that question Cromers, you would have to go back to Obama winning the Democrat nomination and the fact that social media was a key tool in that campaign.

It was also key in him winning two presidential elections.

Is it any surprise that social media was then "weaponised" to help Trump?

Is it only wrong if you get the "wrong" candidate??

That's it in a nutshell.

All this harrumphing and huffing and puffing - what crime has been committed?

To repeat myself, there is no proof that anybody was influenced to vote in a different way by anything on Facebook, Google, YouTube or Twitter. There can't be, it's all subjective.

But this won't stop the narrative being pushed. "Something" was done.

[Suff]

To repeat myself, there is no proof that anybody was influenced to vote in a different way by anything on Facebook, Google, YouTube or Twitter. There can't be, it's all subjective.

But this won't stop the narrative being pushed. "Something" was done.

All true, however it may not be a crime to tell a different version of the "truth" to different people depending no how your analytics says they will be received; but it is something the politicians don't want becoming common public property.

This year the GDPR audits will begin. I expect, over time, that the legislation will be used to shut down this kind of data mining for elections. After all, the EU has just learned that their EU elections are no longer "safe".

Something we have never acknowledged in this country, because we don't have PR, is that it has been virtually impossible to sway enough people with a message that will tear them away from their day to day media. Once social media becomes their day to day media, it becomes possible to sway Everyone on a basis of groups down in the lower thousands. Something, as WM says, the media barons would give private parts to control.

The mining of social media and the "Engaging" of the masses on a virtual 1:1 basis, will be demonised and stopped. After all, it's not really "democracy" is it? Well not as it is used in the EU it is not..

[Suff]

However, I am a bit of a sod when it comes to up-thumbing or down-thumbing things... especially when a site winds me up, so it's 'up' for something I hate and 'down' for something I like... then off I go to another site and do exactly the opposite.

You, me, Mrs S, we're all the same. If polled on the street, for an election, Mrs S will tell them exactly the opposite of what she believes....

Me, I tell sites, touting for my opinion, anything I feel like at the time. They are not entitled to my thoughts or opinions and I won't give them.... Unless, that is, you see me on the Climate sites, or where we talk here. Where you will get exactly what I think. The Climate sites because I fully believe that this is vital to my children and grandchildren, here; because we're fairly invisible. Well until we got right into the whole Brexit thing and we suddenly started to draw a lot of views, prior to the referendum. Now we're back to normal.

Although it was a bit of a shock, back in 2012, when I found that Obama's speech writers had ripped off a full paragraph of my post, on Climate Progress; defending him.....