Not sure if you all watched any of it but after talking with my father for a few days I was able to calm down my Trump related anxiety and I was somehow able to watch the entire hearing. It's funny to watch Senators like Cruz and Tillis, who actually used CA in their campaigns, talk to this man who claims he was the research director for CA. Wylie made a statement about segmenting a portion of the population out from the public square where they wouldn't ever see mainstream media. That statement really stuck with me regarding how CA has weaponized Fox News and the Media Research Center's work on a digital level.

"Traditional marketing doesn't misappropriate tens of millions of people's data, and it is not or should not be targeted at people's mental state like neuroticism and paranoia, or racial biases," urged Wylie.
"Wylie also noted the connections between Cambridge Analytica's research and projects to Russian entities were cause of great concern to him. He pointed to connections with Moscow-based Lukoil, testifying that Cambridge Analytica made presentations and sent documents to Lukoil on its experience in disinformation and rumor campaigns."

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/senate-cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-live-stream-updates-today-2018-05-16/

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-leveraged-facebook-user-data-fight-rivals-help-friends-n994706

A PRIVACY MYTH
One of the most striking threads to emerge from the documents is the way that Facebook user data was horse-traded to squeeze money or shared data from app developers.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in early 2018 and rising awareness of the Six4Three case, Facebook has attempted to frame changes it made to its platform in 2014 and 2015 as being driven by concerns over user privacy. In statements to media organizations, Facebook has said it locked down its platform to protect users from companies that mishandled user data, such as Cambridge Analytica, as well as apps that spammed users’ news feeds or were creepy, such as Six4Three’s bikini-spotting app Pikinis.

Related

TECH
Mark Zuckerberg to shift Facebook toward a 'privacy-focused' platform
However, among the documents leaked, there’s very little evidence that privacy was a major concern of Facebook’s, and the issue was rarely discussed in the thousands of pages of emails and meeting summaries. Where privacy is mentioned, it is often in the context of how Facebook can use it as a public relations strategy to soften the blow of the sweeping changes to developers’ access to user data. The documents include several examples suggesting that these changes were designed to cement Facebook’s power in the marketplace, not to protect users.

In Six4Three’s case, for example, Facebook’s head of policy Allison Hendrix acknowledged in a June 2017 deposition obtained by NBC News that the social network never received any complaints about the Pikinis app, nor did Facebook send Six4Three any policy or privacy violation notices. Six4Three, Hendrix confirmed, was playing within the rules Facebook had set for developers.

Despite this, Six4Three’s access to data, specifically access to a user’s friends’ photos, was cut off in April 2015 as part of sweeping changes to Facebook’s platform announced a year earlier, which affected as many as 40,000 apps. Six4Three shut down the app soon afterward.

Image: Ted Kramer, founder of Six4ThreeTed Kramer, founder of Six4Three.Peter DaSilva / for NBC News
“Our case is about Zuckerberg’s decision to weaponize the reliance of companies on his purportedly neutral platform and to weaponize the private and sensitive data of billions of people,” said Six4Three founder Ted Kramer.

A TURNING POINT FOR FACEBOOK
Facebook recognized early on that working with third-party app developers could help make the social network more interesting and drive the platform’s expansion. Beginning in early 2010, Facebook created tools that allowed the makers of games (remember Farmville?) and other apps to connect with its audience in return for ensuring those users spent more time on Facebook.

Facebook achieved this through its “Graph API” (Application Programming Interface), a common means to allow software programs to interact with each other. In Facebook’s case, this meant that third-party apps such as games could post updates on people’s profiles, which would be seen by players’ friends and potentially encourage them to play, too. Beyond that, it allowed the makers of those games to access a slew of data from Facebook users, including their connections to friends, likes, locations, updates, photos and more.

The Graph API — and particularly the way it let third parties promote their products to and extract data from a user’s social connections — was a key feature of Facebook that Six4Three and thousands of other companies relied upon for viral marketing and user growth.

However, after a few years, Facebook decided the app developers were getting more value from the user data they extracted from Facebook than Facebook was getting out of the app developers, the documents show.


After Facebook went public in May 2012, its stock price plummeted, which Zuckerberg later characterized as “disappointing.” The company was in a desperate position, documents show, with users sharing fewer photos and posts on the platform as they spent more time on their cellphones. An internal Facebook presentation looking back at this period used the phrase “terminal decline” to describe the fall in engagement.

Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg and Sandberg, spent months brainstorming ways to turn the company around. An idea that they kept returning to: make money from the app partners, by charging them for access to Facebook’s users and their data.

‘SELL DATA FOR $”
Several proposals for charging developers for access to Facebook’s platform and data were put forward in a presentation to the company’s board of directors, according to emails and draft slides from late August 2012.

Among the suggestions: a fixed annual fee for developers for reviewing their apps; an access fee for apps that requested user data; and a charge for “premium” access to data, such as a user trust score or a ranking of the strongest relationships between users and their friends.

“Today the fundamental trade is ‘data for distribution’ whereas we want to change it to either ‘data for $’ and/or ‘$ for distribution,’” Chris Daniels, a Facebook business development director, wrote in an August 2012 email to other top leaders in the company discussing the upcoming presentation.

Discussions continued through October, when Zuckerberg explained to close friend Sam Lessin the importance of controlling third-party apps’ ability to access Facebook’s data and reach people’s friends on the platform. Without that leverage, “I don’t think we have any way to get developers to pay us at all,” Zuckerberg wrote in an email to Lessin.

In the same week, Zuckerberg floated the idea of pursuing 100 deals with developers “as a path to figuring out the real market value” of Facebook user data and then “setting a public rate” for developers.

“The goal here wouldn’t be the deals themselves, but that through the process of negotiating with them we’d learn what developers would actually pay (which might be different from what they’d say if we just asked them about the value), and then we’d be better informed on our path to set a public rate,” Zuckerberg wrote in a chat.

Facebook told NBC News that it was exploring ways to build a sustainable business, but ultimately decided not to go forward with these plans.

"I just can’t think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”

Zuckerberg was unfazed by the potential privacy risks associated with Facebook’s data-sharing arrangements.

“I’m generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as you think,” he wrote in the email to Lessin. “I think we leak info to developers but I just can’t think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”

Facebook told NBC News that this was an example of a cherry-picked email designed to bolster Six4Three’s case.

Zuckerberg didn’t know it at the time, but a privacy bug affecting an unnamed third-party app would create precisely this kind of strategic risk the following year, according to a panicked chatlog between Michael Vernal, who was director of engineering, and other senior employees.

It’s not clear exactly what happened or which app was involved, but it appears that Zuckerberg’s private communications could have leaked from Facebook to the external app in an unexpected way.

Vernal said that it “could have been near-fatal for Facebook platform” if “Mark had accidentally disclosed earnings ahead of time because a platform app violated his privacy.”

“Holy crap,” replied Avichal Garg, then director of product management.

“DO NOT REPEAT THIS STORY OFF OF THIS THREAD,” added Vernal. “I can’t tell you how terrible this would have been for all of us had this not been caught quickly.”

Vernal and Garg did not respond to requests for comment.
America has imported more warlord theocracy from Afghanistan than it has exported democracy.