Tag: Facebook

In December 2015, the Guardian revealed that Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign was using psychological profiles based on data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users. Facebook attempted to dampen the impact of Wylie’s whistleblowing interviews by publishing its own mea culpa and banning Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from its platform, hours before publication but two years after the data breach was first reported. The day after Wylie’s bombshell revelations, US congressional investigators from the house intelligence committee asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Nix, to testify before Congress. On Sunday 25 March, Wylie spoke about Cambridge Analytica connections to AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm that worked with different leave campaigns in the European referendum. Play Video 1:18 Soon afterwards, US watchdogs filed a legal complaint against Cambridge Analytica with the Federal Election Commission. How academic at centre of Facebook scandal tried – and failed – to spin personal data into gold Read more Vote Leave has repeatedly denied coordination between the campaigns and said the donation was legitimate under election law. Facebook suspended AggregateIQ, a data firm with which the Vote Leave campaign spent 40% of its budget, on 6 April, following reports that it was connected to SCL. That same week, Zuckerberg faced 10 hours of questioning by members of Congress. Nix was summoned to appear before a British parliamentary committee on fake news the following week for questioning over “inconsistencies” in evidence he had given the committee in February, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data.” However, on 17 April he cancelled his appearance, citing the ICO’s ongoing investigation into his company. On 2 May, the same day that Cambridge Analytica announced it was going into liquidation, Chris Vickery of the data security firm Upguard gave evidence to the digital, culture, media and sport committee that the Trump campaign had access to psychological profiles derived from Facebook data, that AIQ and Cambridge Analytica were technologically entwined and that illegal co-ordination of data by leave campaigns was “indisputable”.

Facebook asked users if posts contain hate speech. Also, the Fox News contributor sounds off about California's plan to put illegal immigrants in office. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as…

Seth Meyers' monologue from Tuesday, May 1. » Subscribe to Late Night: http://bit.ly/LateNightSeth » Get more Late Night with Seth Meyers: http://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-seth-meyers/ » Watch Late Night with Seth Meyers Weeknights 12:35/11:35c on NBC. LATE NIGHT ON SOCIAL Follow Late Night on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LateNightSeth…

President Trump seems to be confused about what is and isn't fake news these days, so to help him out we asked a third-grader named Noah to break it down for him in a very simple way. Zlatan Ibrahimovi? on…

It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. Each senator was given less than five minutes for questions. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate Facebook. Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. Some of the hearing seemed designed to figure out whether Zuckerberg is a good or bad man, or whether he has a good or bad – or bizarre – political philosophy. That doesn’t make him that interesting as the CEO of a corporate monopoly; it makes him a run-of-the-mill robber baron. There is so much we don’t know about Facebook. Now that the initial show trial is done, we need the real deal, one where no senator gets cut off after a few minutes. The real hearing would allow for unlimited questions from each of our senators, who represent millions of people.

Today in 5 Lines Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly signed off on the FBI’s raid of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Monday. Agents reportedly targeted records about payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump. During a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Trump “certainly has the power” to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his testimony before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but said he was "not aware" if it had been issued a subpoena. Vice President Mike Pence will attend the Summit of Americas meeting in his stead. White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert resigned. David Frum argues it’s a good strategy. Michael Cohen Has a Problem: The evidence federal prosecutors have concerning President Trump’s personal lawyer is most likely extraordinarily strong. (Adam Serwer) ‘A House You Can Buy, But Never Own’: Alana Semuels describes a new predatory loan scheme targeting African Americans. The problem is they usually don’t.

A pro-Trump advocacy group controlled by Ms. Mercer has gone silent following strategic disputes between her and other top donors. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Mercer declined to answer questions about her role in Mr. Trump’s circle or the Facebook meeting about Cambridge Analytica. Mr. Michelsen met informally with a Facebook acquaintance who was accompanied by a Facebook lawyer, according to a person briefed on the meeting, and both Cambridge Analytica and the Mercers were discussed. Ms. Mercer declined to say whether she and Mr. Michelsen had discussed the purpose of the meeting or whether he had briefed her on it afterward. The family has also donated $4.5 million to Republican candidates and super PACs during the 2018 election cycle, putting the Mercers among the top 20 donors in the country. That grant, the Mercer foundation’s first recorded contribution to DonorsTrust, could herald a shift in the family’s philanthropic strategy. The donor records a contribution to DonorsTrust and recommends potential recipients, while grantees receive a donation from DonorsTrust charitable vehicles. Public records show that Ms. Mercer, her sister Jennifer and Mr. Nix serve as directors of Emerdata, a British data company formed in August by top executives at Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate, SCL Group, according to British corporate records. Mr. Ko, who declined to comment, is a substantial shareholder and deputy chairman in Mr. Prince’s Africa-focused logistics company, Frontier Services Group. Emerdata has a second Hong Kong-based director, Peng Cheng.

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris highlighted very different worries Tuesday when they had their chance to question Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a televised Senate hearing that ran for nearly five hours. For Feinstein, the “alarming” Russian intrusion into the 2016 presidential campaign was her top concern. She added that she had previously asked Zuckerberg “several critical questions for which you don’t have answers,” including why Facebook hadn’t alerted users that their data had fallen into the hands of the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm when the platform discovered it in 2015. “Knowing what we know now, we should have handled a lot of things here differently,” Zuckerberg said, stating what was the theme of his long afternoon under the TV lights. she asked Zuckerberg. The company didn’t even identify the problem until “around the time of the 2016 election itself,” he said. “They’re going to get better at this, and we have to get better, too.” Harris took a much sharper tone with Zuckerberg, accusing him of avoiding answers to many of the questions senators were asking. Was there a discussion in 2015 “about whether or not the users should be informed?” Harris asked. “And we did that based on false information that we thought that the case was closed and the data had been deleted.” Harris also asked how much money Facebook had made from the fake Russian campaign ads, repeating a question she had asked executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter in November.

Almost 90 million Facebook users from Los Angeles to London may have had their online information illegally collected by Cambridge Analytica as part of its work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mark Zuckerberg, the social networking giant’s chief executive, will testify to U.S. lawmakers this week over claims that the tech giant played fast and loose in its protection of people’s online privacy. Do people using such websites really understand that they are, in fact, data-gathering strategies by the country’s leading political parties? Just as Facebook, YouTube and other popular digital services offered people apparently “free” goodies in return for their personal information, lawmakers have realized that they too can use similar smartphone-friendly tactics to (legitimately) gather data on potential voters. Privacy campaigners — and, increasingly, the general public — have raised hackles about how much data many of the world’s largest tech companies now hold on all of our digital habits. But to play, people had to hand over a raft of personal information, including their cellphone numbers and addresses, as well as complete an online survey about Brexit, which was then used by Vote Leave’s data experts to hone their political targeting tactics. As part of the Trump and Vote Leave campaign apps, which functioned as quasi-social networks, people were asked to fill in personal information, including their phone numbers and, in the U.S., voter registration information. “It’s about people coming back to the app.” Neither the Trump or Vote Leave campaigns were the only ones to use such digital tactics to woo voters into handing over personal information. If anything, the recent Facebook data scandal has taught us is that nothing in the digital world is free. The same also goes for politics.

(CNN)Facebook announced late Friday that it is suspending AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm, for its alleged ties to SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. "In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received FB user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN. "Our internal review continues, and we will cooperate fully with any investigations by regulatory authorities." In a statement on its website, AggregateIQ distanced itself from Cambridge Analytica and SCL but did not deny it has done work with SCL. "AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates. It has never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity. All work AggregateIQ does for each client is kept separate from every other client." Cambridge Analytica said in a statement last week that it had "subcontracted some digital marketing and software development to Aggregate IQ in 2014 and 2015," and added, "The suggestion that Cambridge Analytica was somehow involved in any work done by Aggregate IQ in the 2016 EU referendum is entirely false." The news comes after Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, and its parent company last month over concerns about violations of the social media site's policies. Facebook has said the data was initially collected by a professor for academic purposes in line with its rules.