a reply to:
Boadicea
And, again, there's only one person in this discussion who was also POTUS before, during and after the misuse and abuse of such information.
And it ain't Trump.
What abuse of what information are we referring to? This is important because as I've mentioned in earlier posts, what CA did specifically back in
2014 is a separate issue from what Facebook did with the Obama campaign in 2012 or the the Trump campaign in 2016 (apparently, the Clinton campaign
declined FB embeds in 2016).
CA lied to survey participants about how their data would be used which is bad on its own but what's even worse is that they scraped data from the
friends of these participants.
And that's probably the most legitimate part of the CA/SCL operations. If you've been following the developments, Alexander Nix is on camera talking
about how they'll hire prostitutes to entrap politicians and the CA whistle blower talks about how they used an Israeli firm (Black Cube) to hack the
medical records of their client's opponent — who is now the President of Nigeria.
As for how closely Facebook worked with the Trump campaign in 2016 or the Obama campaign in 2012, that's a separate issue about how Facebook uses data
on its users. CA lied and stole data. It should be held to account in court for its malfeasance.
I don't know that there are any legal issues in terms of what Facebook has done with users data but it's definitely something that should be of great
concern to its users and more generally, how data is being collected by these private corporations and what they do with it is a major issue for
society as a whole.
In other words, I don't think that the Trump campaign's dealings with Facebook nor the Obama campaigns in 2012 are anything that any state AGs should
be subpoenaing emails about. This MO AG's actions reek of a political stunt.
Though I will say that I think Facebook should answer as to what level of access to user data it has been giving its clients. My impression is that
Facebook doesn't give raw access to data. They might help with targetting based on some set of criteria like location + likes or something (I mean,
this is something that really needs to be explored) but this would still be less of an invasion of privacy than what CA collected.
And I'm not sure what you're implying re Obama being President in 2012 — that he might have somehow used the federal government to gather
information used for microtargeting? It wouldn't be as effective as going straight to the source. In fact, both political parties have curated data
sets on tens of millions of American voters that likely already exceed what the federal government could readily compile (minus criminal records,
military records, etc) in terms of the sort of items that are being used/would be useful for things like microtargeting political advertising.
Again... no one is more powerful than the president of the United States. No one has more opportunity to misuse and abuse such information than
the president of the United States. No one except Obama was president of the United States before, during and after the 2012 election.
If you don't understand the full implications (and reality) of this, I don't know how to explain it to you.
The thing is, corporations are already harvesting more useful data than the federal government (or state governments for that matter) with certain
exceptions and it's very unlikely that a President could direct government agencies to transfers terabytes of data to 3rd parties to be used for
electioneering.
There are companies like Palantir that get contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to stitch together disparate databases under a single
interface for agencies like ICE.
I'm fairly concerned about what's going on here and even for me that's low on my list of concerns, including with the Trump administration and that's
with the Trump campaign having used CA which demonstrates a certain extra lack of ethics if nothing else.
The reality of what's happening right out more or less in the open is bad enough that it should be something we're talking about. Both the RNC and DNC
have been amassing data for years and as you can see from Parscale's interview, the presumably "liberal" Silicon Valley giants are in actuality whores
who will offer up user data to anyone with money.