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Twitter Sold Data to Cambridge Analytica-Linked Company

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:52AM   
from the who-hasn't-sold-them-data dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Twitter is the latest company to face scrutiny for how it protects user data, after disclosing this week that it sold data access to a Cambridge Analytica-linked researcher.

The news comes a month after Facebook came under fire for leaking user data to Cambridge Analytica through a third-party app. A Twitter spokesperson told Threatpost that enterprise company Global Science Research, owned by the same researcher behind Cambridge Analytica, had "one-time API access" to a "random sample of public tweets" in 2015.

"Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter," the spokesperson told Threatpost. "Unlike many other services, Twitter is public by its nature. People come to Twitter to speak publicly, and public tweets are viewable and searchable by anyone."

Source: https://threatpost.com/twitter-sold-data-to-cambridge-analytica-linked-company/131525/

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Original Submission

• cambridge analytica cambridge analytica (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @02:42PM (4 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @02:42PM (#674149)

  When things like this go down, I often wonder if the scapegoat, in this case Cambridge Analytica, was formed solely for the purpose of being a scapegoat.

  May GoogTwitFace protect us from the evil influences of Emmanuel Goldstein!

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• Re:cambridge analytica Re:cambridge analytica (Score: 3, Insightful) by schad on Tuesday May 01 2018, @06:11PM (3 children)

  by schad (2398) on Tuesday May 01 2018, @06:11PM (#674237)

  For real. Why the fixation on Cambridge Analytica? This is the entire business model of Facebook and Twitter. Do people only get upset when the data's going to benefit the Trump campaign, but not when it's being used in an attempt to dupe you into buying junk food or whatever?

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  • Re:cambridge analytica Re:cambridge analytica (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:22PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:22PM (#674273)

    wswswswswswsws provides a possible answer. Behind the Facebook data scandal: The drive to censor the Internet [wsws.org] (March 23rd, 2018):

    The harvesting of the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica raises serious privacy concerns. But the media firestorm sparked by the synchronized release of the story by the New York Times and the Guardian has far darker and more nefarious motives. Using the election data scandal as a cover, the media, working with the intelligence agencies and leading congressional Democrats, is seeking to create the climate for a crackdown on political opposition on the world’s largest social network.

    From the standpoint of bourgeois election campaigns, massive data harvesting operations are par for the course. In 2012, the Obama reelection campaign did essentially the same thing as Cambridge Analytica, prompting users to install a Facebook app that harvested the information of users’ entire contact list, netting up to 190 million profiles. At the time, the practice was not only widely reported, but praised by major news outlets as evidence of the innovative and forward-thinking nature of the campaign.

    I remember how revolutionary Obama's use of "the cyber" (as our resident potus would say) was to connect to the millennials and channel their hope for change.

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    • Re:cambridge analytica (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:26PM (#674274)

      Oh, more links from wswsws wrt election interference using the cyber. How Google, Facebook and Twitter are manipulating the Mexican presidential elections—Part 1 [wsws.org] and Part 2 [wsws.org].

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    • Re:cambridge analytica (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @04:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @04:55PM (#675145)

      MIT Technology Review [technologyreview.com] covered the story in 2012:

      Making use of social connections can lead to the ideal form of marketing: individual messages of persuasion delivered by trusted friends. You can see the president’s campaign reaching for this goal with Obama 2012, an app that his supporters can use to integrate their Facebook accounts with the campaign’s website. The app’s avowed task is to give people a quick and easy way to access the volunteering and organizing functions that worked so well for Obama in 2008. But the permission screen that comes with the app makes clear that it has another purpose as well. When I installed the app, I noticed that it said it would grab information about my friends: their birthdates, locations, and “likes.”

      Facebook’s policies require that such data be used in only the context of the app itself, but even so, the campaign should be able to create tools that prompt supporters to approach voting-age friends in swing states and craft personalized appeals based on what the campaign can infer about those friends’ interests and views. Similar tools are coming from other quarters, too. In July NGP VAN, a company in Somerville, Massachusetts, that maintains a database on all registered U.S. voters and helps Democratic candidates access the data, released a Facebook app called Social Organizing. The app lets Democratic volunteers log in with Facebook and match their friends with voters in the database. Like the Obama app, NGP VAN’s makes it possible for candidates to execute a peer-to-peer persuasion strategy using Facebook.

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