Facebook faces breach

Bannon at the controls of the
Cambridge Analytica voter vaporizer.

Gonna tell you a little story that'll make The Man From Uncle sound like Howdy Doody. Bear with me.

THere is a train coming down the track.One is Cambridge Analytca - which is a big data operation HQ'd in Britain. The other is the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian social media hack.

Cambridge Analytica comprises a bunch of statisticians and programmers who found some warm fuzzy US political venture money and joined forces with an impish devil.

They set up a data gathering project, “thisisyourdigitallife,” that offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” (I'd add a bit more on the brains and funding of thisisyourditigallife if I get the chance.) The test could go something like: Do you like Manfred Mann AND Joni Mitchell? You are a precious introvert. What about Ted Nugent AND Deep Purple? You are outgoing extrovert. I digress.

thisisyourditigallife paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends - activity that Facebook more or less kinda permitted at the time.

That profile helped them to figure out if you were a conspiracy buff, and that in that case you could be pitched posts that fed that inclindation, which you could have shared, and so on.

This resulted in 50 million raw profiles that were forwarded to Cambridge Analytica... A principle officer in Cambridge Analytica was Steve "The Imp of the Perverse" Bannon. (It should be noted that their VC backers originally sought to help Ted Cruz - it took a while to find the right potion or carrier.)

Here comes the second train: The Internet Research Agency aka Glavset, the Trolls from Olgino or kremlebots. It has been charged by US DoJ with criminal interfrence with the 2016 election. These trolls thrived on hacked data like such drawn from innocouous personality tests you might take online.

As far as I am aware, a link between IRA and Cambridge Analytica has not been established - I stand before you today to sibmit that it seems like a distinct possibility. (It is all dark and complicated - not like the good old days where the president had a tape recorder rolling while he plotted nefariously, and there was a fully functioning congress and opposition party also by the way.)

If you read the attached Facebook press release you get some of the gist of what is afoot in the convoluted James Bond scenario called Cambridge Analytica.

Since the first release there has been an amendment. One press account described what happened as a hack or a hijack, so Facebook responded. What Facebook asks you to do is to not think of all this as a hack of your data but to instead understand that their policies were insuficient 2-4 years ago but have been updated. Democracy in America at Facebook HQ today is about covering its hinder.

See Facebook release March 16, 2018 - Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/


Facebook spurred GDPR, in only in small part. Let's tune into a recent podcast I did on that topic.

Cybernetic Sutra

I'd had an opportunity in college days to study comparative world press under professor Lawrence Martin Bittman, who introduced BU journalism students to the world of disinformation, a discipline he'd learned first hand in the 1960s, before his defection to the West, as a head of Czech Intelligence. We got a view into the information wars within the Cold War. This gave me a more nuanced view of the news than I might otherwise have known. Here I am going to make a jump. 

I'd begun a life-long dance with the news. 

I'd also begun a life-long study of cybernetics. 

And lately the two interests have begun oddly to blend. 

It was all on the back of Really Simple Syndication -RSS- and its ability to feed humongous quantities of online content in computer-ready form-It made me a publisher, as able as Gutenberg, and my brother a publisher, and my brother-in-law a publisher, and on ...

Cybernetics was a promising field of science that seemed ultimately to fizzle. After World War II, led by M.I.T.'s Norbert Wiener and others, cybernetics arose as, in Wiener's words, "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."

It burst rather as a movement upon the mass consciousness at a time when fear of technology and the dehumanization of science were a growing concern. - As the shroud of war time secrecy dispersed, in 1948 penned Cybernetics, which was followed by a popularization.

Control, communication, feedback, regulation. It took its name for the Greek root cyber. Wiener - Brownian motion - artillery tables - development of the thermostat, autopilot, differential analyzer, radar, neural networks, back propagation.

Cybernetics flamed out in a few years, tho made an peculiar reentry in the era of the WWW. Flamed out but, somewhat oddly, continued as an operational style in the USSR for quite some time more. Control, communication, feedback, regulation played out there somewhat differently.

A proposal for a Soviet Institute of Cybernetics included "the subjects of logic, control, statistics, information theory, semiotics, machine translation, economics, game theory, biology, and computer programming."1 It came back to mate with cybernetics on the web in the combination of agitprop and social media, known as Russian meddling, that slightly tipped the scales, arguably, of American politics.

1 http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/reviews/review-control.pdf

It couldnt look bleaker unless your name is Meeker

Mary Meeker's annual report for Kleiner Perkins on the status of Internet commerce is always interesting - chock full of data and packed with gleefully greedy West Coast VC perspective.  Let's look at some highpoints out of the 150-plus Power Point Slide opus.

Do you smell the fear in the Fortune 500? Smells like they could use some baby wipes. They can get them from Amazon, actually, which trails only Huggies and Pampers for online market share. For Duracell, it is deep doodoo, as Amazon surpasses the check out counter champ entirely  - on the Web. All that marketing and technology innovation - not too mention shelf shoving -- over many years seems for little or naught. (Off beat: I worked for 6 months at a drug store on 34th St in the 1970s and among the thing I learned was: "You cannot keep Pampers on the shelf" Translation: Shit happens.)

The sound of foot prints echoes double in network television where the biggies are flat or in decline, but Netflix is on a skyrocket up.

And disruptors (the Internet advertising vehicles  that disrupted convention media) can be disrupted too, especially if they face big hungry disruptors  such as Facebook and Google. They who grow ad revenue in double digits while Everybody Else flatly contests the small pie leftovers.

Maybe Facebook and Google are as much beneficiaries of an underlying sea change in Internet usage..as of anything else. While desktop and Laptop Internet use has been steady or in slight decline over the last eight years, Internet   time on the smartphone side has been vaulting forward stridently. What is different about mobile? The message might be real real concise, the ambiance more transactional, and the market more consumerish.

--
Related
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

The evening of a playing field?

Hand Of The Buddha

As the Republican congress capitalizes on the friendly Republican White House, it is overturning a lot of rocks, and passing legislation friendly to one or another among various corporate interests - such as the cable ISP and business.

This week, the House voted to upend Obama era FTC regulations that forbade ISPs from selling individuals' browser activity data. The group was to be put somewhat on the outside on the action of what is called big data - required to get formal permission from customers in order to sell browser histories to adtech markets - the ones dominated by Facebook and Google.

What's the difference between an ISP and a Google? Google provides a free service as part of a (admittedly murky) quid pro quo. You get free browser and free search - and you tacitly give them the right to use you as a datum. With the ISP, you pay them - and not with a lot of choice either, as they are more often than not a monopoly in your neighborhood.

The stakes ISPs stuck in the Internet are deep. It can hardly be said this legislation is the evening of a playing field. Several of the companies have pledged to ask for permissions of customers before selling their (anonymized) browser history. It's likely best alled a feel good gesture on the part of the people pulling the puppet strings of government these days. You know, "Monday, geld the EPA." "Tuesday, affirm the right to kill sleeping bears in National Parks." "Wednesday, toss the ISPs a big data bone." - Jack Vaughan

RELATED
http://www.zdnet.com/article/isps-were-not-going-to-sell-your-web-browsing-data/
http://continuations.com/post/158773876945/government-just-gave-your-isp-even-more-power-you
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/03/30/fcc-privacy-rules-how-isps-will-actually-sell-your-data
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/big-cables-case-selling-data-doesnt-hold/

SOURCES
Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin
Matthew Hogan, CEO at DataCoup
ALBERT WENGER, a partner at Union Square Ventures, author "World After Capital”
Dallas Harris, a policy fellow with consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge.