culturedgoat

culturedgoat t1_je7on9n wrote

I thought it was sus when they mentioned he ordered “a bunch of expensive sushi rolls that neither of us could pronounce”. Sushi rolls are a western modification of sushi (they’re referred to as “California rolls” in Japan). They don’t have difficult names. Even if they refer to the ingredients by their Japanese names (“ikura”, “maguro”, etc.), nothing is hard to pronounce.

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culturedgoat t1_j1gwda3 wrote

You’re talking like Facebook (now Meta) somehow benefited from Cambridge Analytica’s skullduggery. This was all done on the sly, through deception and misuse of public APIs, and the company didn’t even know what was going on until it was too late (which was a key aspect of the scandal). So I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say they would “do it again”…

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culturedgoat t1_j1e3ecb wrote

You could pull a user’s friends list, yeah. You couldn’t actually get much more data on the friends themselves (unless they too went on to authorise the app…), other than the person’s name, and the user ID - which turned out to be enough for CA to be able to construct a shadow replica of the FB friend connections graph…

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culturedgoat t1_j1dbpv2 wrote

The developer platform (which is what CA used to build an app to harvest data) is open though, so you can literally verify first-hand what user data is available to third-party apps. It wouldn’t be possible now to perform data-collection on the scale that Cambridge Analytica did. You can test this directly.

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culturedgoat t1_j1d7dig wrote

They were also fined $5B by the FTC and have independent auditors installed to police data security on the third-party app platform. The kind of data that CA was requesting via their app literally can’t be accessed now. Large swathes of the API functionality was shut down.

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culturedgoat t1_j1d76b2 wrote

Eh, sort of… Each user consented to the CA app having access to some of their personal data, when accessing the app for the first time. The kicker is that the app was masquerading as a benign personality test, when in fact the data was being used for something else entirely. So I don’t think it’s right to blame the users for handing over their data in this case…

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culturedgoat t1_itakr74 wrote

I don’t mean to laugh at your predicament, but the sheer Benny Hill levels of chaos upon chaos in the events described in this post was just something else. If it’s any consolation, you made a stranger sitting in a fancy San Francisco restaurant crease up for about ten minutes straight. This post is glorious. Hope you’re ok tho

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