Above is Wired's postulation of Mark Zuckerberg's current appearance and the Damian Collins MP letter to him at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park. Since the news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (CA), he has yet to comment. Whoever is managing facebook's reputational damage needs to step it up a notch.
The absent Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are presumably being schooled in media answers, whilst Facebook lawyers such as Paul Grewal advise staff on how to remain silent. It looks as if each organisation implicated is selecting a scapegoat to try to minimise damage. Kogan and Nix so far.
Facebook's security model goes back to something called IETF RFC 6749/OAuth 2.0, which is a multi-tier way to seek permissions and which in turn allow access to friend data.
Facebook third party developers were encouraged to use these friends permission protocols to monetise and to extend their own networks.
It means that although a subcontractor to Cambridge Analytica is having the finger pointed at the moment, there could be plenty of other examples of similar albeit less voluminous accesses from other app developers.
Of course, Cambridge Analytica took it to a further level. Their website boasts about the 5000 data points on every person. Here's today's screen shot from their site:
Although it's not quite as obvious as the teaser they inserted onto their website crowing after Trump's victory.
Check their site today and there is still a slew of PR from around the time of Trump's victory. Although, I can't help wondering if some of these stories may melt away a bit like the protonmail.com emails which can be set to self destruct after a user-specified interval. Who wouldn't have a Swiss crypto email system for those special moments?
I checked the Trump campaign payments to Cambridge Analytica by using the Federal Elections Commission records of the Trump campaign. Just shy of $6m dollars paid from Trump's people to CA, a drop in the ocean of his $348m campaign total. I also noticed around $4m of payments back to entities featuring the name Trump.
So when the currently suspended Mr Nix from Cambridge Analytica was interviewed last year by the FT about the Trump victory he commented that CA worked on 50 Republican campaigns in 2016. Then there's the Jarad Kushner commissioned work with his Trump San Antonio data science team. Nix has gone on to say that his organisation uses data to identify flippable voters and where to target voters to stay at home. Behavioural micro targeting. Just like that done by Strategic Communication Laboratories which is the parent company of CA, although their work has previously been within developing countries.
A not altogether legal aspect of this during an election is that it uses manual curation of the messaging streams, including suppression and injection. The Channel 4 television investigation illustrated that CA routinely uses third parties to insulate their actions. These seem to be both upstream (towards the data) midstream (during acting of influence strategies) and downstream (to insulate the client/candidate).
So we know about some of the upstream activity, but I wonder where CA would get the people to action the influence strategy itself? All those microtargeted adverts (often on Facebook) must have originated somewhere? Surely not the same place as the ones use in Kenya/Mexico/Italy?
Oh yes, and the same FT source mentions that the UK Brexit Leave campaign also used Cambridge Analytica. Oops.
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