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>My problem with this 'outing' of CA is that Facebook explicitly commercially exists to harvest user data for Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fidelity etc etc so they can profile us.

Not only conglomerates but anyone with the money and know-how. Example P&G proxy fight:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-procter-gamble-trian-inve...

Neubecker said he has seen several ads on his Facebook feed that link to Trian’s “Revitalize P&G” website and to videos of Peltz and former P&G Chief Financial Officer Clayton Daley, who is advising Trian.

The video of Peltz features him sitting in Trian’s Park Avenue, New York City headquarters, discussing P&G’s future, gripping a Trian-labeled coffee mug that reads “Sales up, expenses down.”

In response, P&G has called upon more than a century of product marketing experience with its own “Vote Blue” campaign.

One YouTube video begins with an image of P&G’s blue logo and a banner proclaiming “Every Single Vote Matters!”. A narrator and series of slick images offer step-by-step instructions, ending by asking viewers to vote for the blue proxy card and to throw Trian’s white card in the recycling bin.

Trian won this fight.



Sorry what are you talking about ?

Please provide some evidence that anyone with money and know how can harvest tens of millions of accounts from Facebook.

Your example does not address this and seems just like normal Facebook targeting to me.


Pardon my ignorance but what was Cambridge Analytica doing if not using advanced analytics for Facebook targeting?

I don't think Facebook has a section where someone can talk about what stocks they might hold. So, if the HF was able to target specific people who owned P&G stocks then I think it was an efficient targeting, maybe not as much of scale of US elections but enough to turn the voting in their favor.


What? You can scrape that kind of data with a simply Python application...


You are either lying or completely ignorant because this is not possible.

The data that this app obtained was far deeper than what Google can crawl e.g. what a person liked.




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