from Hacker News

The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

by lingben on 1/22/17, 2:18 AM with 106 comments

• by ENTP on 1/22/17, 3:42 AM

  I'd suspected for years about such quizzes. Initially, I assumed the posts to calculate your (porn/movie/etc) name was a low grade phishing exercise as it asked you to mix personal data that are often used in security questions (eg first pet name plus mothers maiden name). This is a whole new level, but entirely unsurprising. Facebook is a data mining platform. Remembering that is nothing but a good thing.

• by mjfl on 1/22/17, 4:31 AM

  I'm not impressed. Did anyone notice that Cambridge Analytics did not work for Ted Cruz? I mean he did win Texas and the great plains states, but those were his most-winnable locations from the beginning due to his consistent conservatism and other nominees dropping out. He even lost the south, which should have been his other target, presumably due to being off-wavelength with southern voters, something the analytics data should have helped him with. Cambridge Analytics and their Facebook questionnaires don't seem to be very effective.

• by techwizrd on 1/22/17, 4:31 AM

  I've been warning friends and family about this for years. It's incredible how much information people will give about themselves to get totally inane information. This "psy-ops" stuff is shady and scary, and I guarantee you that most voters have no idea it's happening.

• by fovc on 1/22/17, 12:39 PM

  And yet for all their magic, they were just as wrong about the outcome of the election:

  You might think from a casual reading of the Cambridge Analytica press release that they predicted the outcome of the election. They did not. A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning.

  Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...

• by divbit on 1/22/17, 4:56 AM

  Seriously. Why do we allow this kind of data collection. This is ridiculous.

  Edit: the commenter who responded has pointed out that this is phrased fairly accusatory. Should the fact that there is probably a data cloud out there about me being used to manipulate me through subliminal type messaging not be upsetting? I don't think I have ever signed up for a service with the expectation that whatever information is collected will be collated in some over-arching cloud used for more things than just the service provided to me by the site. Maybe somewhere in a 30 page terms of service document, it said that, and I clicked "agree" upon skimming it. But should that really be enough?

  Edit 2: Here's an idea: charge me $3/month to use your service without ads, and with full expectation that my data will not be sold or used inappropriately (you can give it to the govt. if they need it for security reasons, I don't care). I currently pay for e-mail without ads from both outlook and mail.com and would gladly do the same for a pure facebook / gmail / google search / etc service.

• by lstroud on 1/22/17, 2:38 PM

  Has anyone been able to validate or correlate the claims in this article? It's an opinion piece without a lot of verifiable references or data. Seems like it is, to some degree, describing itself.

• by toyg on 1/22/17, 11:03 AM

  Meh, big deal. Like the Obama campaigns were't good at "weaponizing" all web tools they could find.

  Note how the examples proposed are all GOTV efforts targeted to the R base rather than anything appealing larger slices of the electorate. Despite all this black magic, R turnout wasn't that impressive and Trump lost the popular vote. Where it might have helped a little bit is in exploiting weaknesses that Dems shouldn't have had in the first place, i.e. Clinton's baggage, to reduce D turnout in key states, but again, that's more the Democrats' fault for fielding such a candidate knowing very well that she had such baggage.

• by 08-15 on 1/22/17, 9:27 PM

  > In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads...

  Really? Sending ads is suppressing the vote of certain people? Like the soviet union suppressed dissenters by sending them to the gulag?

  I don't think so. But I think the New York Times has a secret agenda of its own, I just don't know what it is. Portraying the election as somehow "unfair" could result in civil unrest, who could possibly want that?

• by wtbob on 1/22/17, 6:21 PM

  > In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “super predator” line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

  How is this suppressing the vote? It's giving potential voters accurate information about your opponent. Frankly, how is it any different from Mr. Biden shouting, 'they're gonna put y'all back in chains!' — other than the former being true and probably in good taste?

  N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

• by RichardHeart on 1/22/17, 2:54 PM

  "Mr. Zuckerberg is young, still skeptical that his radiant transparency machine could be anything but a force for good" This is naive bordering on delusional. I think Zuckerberg knows the real deal. Considering quotes like these: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks"

• by aw3c2 on 1/22/17, 9:35 AM

  Is this another rogue Cambridge Analytica ad that will get debunked later when the impact was done?

• by potatosoup on 1/22/17, 11:18 AM

  > In the immediate wake of Mr. Trump’s surprise election

  How was it a surprise? With huge crowd sizes at his rallies (that NYT didn't show, but RSBN for example did), strong populist message that worked, and the awful candidate the other side put up (while sadly destroying Bernie), I was not surprised.

• by Propen on 1/22/17, 7:16 PM

  Is it just me starting to really have enough of "secret agendas" of Facebook and other internet giants? What the hell are the legislators doing? Even if you say that the advertising-based business model is OK where do you draw the line? Do they really need to know what kind of a psychologic personality I am and what kind of porn I watch ?! (exaggerating... but who knows nowadays)

• by kome on 1/22/17, 12:45 PM

  Friendly reminder: don't use Facebook and block any advertisement and trackers online using ublock.

  It helps to keep some mental ecology.

• by sean_patel on 1/22/17, 3:28 AM

  > If Mr. Zuckerberg takes seriously his oft-stated commitments to diversity and openness, he must grapple honestly with the fact that Facebook is no longer just a social network. It’s an advertising medium that’s now dangerously easy to weaponize.

  The story is chilling. It more or less proves that Trump campaign and the Billionaire Republican donor who owns the Data Analytics site used Facebook to profile people and send targeted "fear" stories to them and swing the vote away from Clinton.

  Fear is a great motivator.

• by YYZoroaster on 1/22/17, 6:44 AM

  The Open Agenda of a New York Times article.