Facebook sucks/is a cesspool, is anyone surprised?

[soleiltropiques]

Cambridge Analytica scandal: the biggest revelations so far

Since Christopher Wylie blew the whistle in the Observer, developments have been rapid. Here’s what we know about the analytics firm, Facebook and Trump’s election team

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Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' - video

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[soleiltropiques]

All that to say that I agree with you.

Another thing is that in certain settings tracking people's movements CAN be useful and more: while I'm not comfortable with shadowy firms knowing all about me, I did see a presentation (by a researcher in public health, see also (1)) not that long ago about how linking data sources could really help public health authorities get ahead of any new epidemic/pandemic.

In other words, there are even ways where this could be really, really helpful. But the way our data is being collected and used isn't it.

References:
1. De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Birrell PJ, Tomba GS, House T. Four key challenges in infectious disease modelling using data from multiple sources. Epidemics 2015; 10:83-87.

The abstract of the article:
"Public health-related decision-making on policies aimed at controlling epidemics is increasingly evidence-based, exploiting multiple sources of data. Policy makers rely on complex models that are required to be robust, realistically approximating epidemics and consistent with all relevant data. Meeting these requirements in a statistically rigorous and defendable manner poses a number of challenging problems. How to weight evidence from different datasets and handle dependence between them, efficiently estimate and critically assess complex models are key challenges that we expound in this paper, using examples from influenza modelling."

[blackjedii]

Yeah - it's a blessing and a curse. But at the very least we should KNOW how our data is being used up front. I genuinely don't mind Food Lion / Kroger "customer cards" because it's a direct value to me that they can micro-target things I buy (like getting coupons on dog food) and it's specific. Google and Facebook... are a whole different ballpark bc there is just so much data and so many ways to use it. I try really hard to not build a profile of myself specifically for that reason which means my interactions and "likes" are very limited.

The way it's going, I fully expect Google and Facebook to face a big reckoning sooner rather than later. Google was already slapped hard by the EU for monopolistic practices.

[soleiltropiques]

I agree. There should be strict laws about this around the world, and these have to be enforced.

The article I linked to above about the data brokers was quite interesting: there are actually companies we've never heard of whose business it is to find out everything about us.

It's scary.