BREAKING: Facebook announces intention to close stable door

[Hazir]

This kind of bovine excrement is why I never play those fun 'which Game of Thrones character are you' or 'How many cities can you identify' games people seem to like so much on facebook.

[GGT]

This kind of bovine excrement is why I never play those fun 'which Game of Thrones character are you' or 'How many cities can you identify' games people seem to like so much on facebook.

Doesn't seem to matter which games *you* play (or personality tests you take) but if your 'friends' do.
Good article, Steely.

[Dreadnaught]

Note: no doubt Dread & Wiggin for example will be eager to point out the apparent hypocrisy of objecting to these shenanigans when they're used to help Trump, while applauding them when they were used to help Obama. This is a common refrain and, when we know more details about the Obama campaigns' use of FB data and microtargeting, we may indeed find that they've been similarly dodgy. I have seen no evidence to suggest that those campaigns violated FB's ToS in the same way or to the same extent, or did anything that might be illegal.

Yes yes YES. Obama was lauded for his smooth, silky use of modern "digital media" to win his election. This is a function of the media. My predictable question is how much of a story would this be if this issue didn't fit into a "People were manipulated into supporting Trump by Russia/technology/racism/lasers" media narrative.

But I agree as you say there seems to be no real violation of Facebook TOS at the time. Calling this a "breach" seems spurious. Though not removing the data upon request seems to indeed be Bad.

Facebook will clearly have a reckoning with their 3rd party data access policies; after all they already restricted much of this stuff years ago, so the data relationships today are far narrower than before.