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by smoking since 1879 » Sat Jul 02, 2016 2:33 pm
by cptmarginal » Wed Aug 17, 2016 12:58 pm
)Facebook Fugitive ‘Alive and Well and Living on the Air’
Bob Van Voris
August 16, 2016 — 1:21 PM EDT
Updated on August 16, 2016 — 5:35 PM EDT
Paul Ceglia, exits federal court in New York on Nov. 28, 2012.
Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg
-Paul Ceglia said in e-mail he fled because life was at risk
-Western N.Y. man ran in 2015 with wife, kids, family dog
The story sounded crazy from the start: a guy from upstate New York claimed Mark Zuckerberg owed him half of Facebook Inc., and he had the papers to prove it.
Now, it’s gotten even crazier.
More than a year after the man, Paul Ceglia, cut off an electronic ankle bracelet and fled federal charges that he faked documents to bolster his lawsuit against Zuckerberg, Ceglia says someone -- he didn’t say who -- was planning to have him killed.
In e-mails to Bloomberg that reference cult television favorites and hint at government conspiracies, Ceglia has offered new tidbits about his life as an international fugitive, along with his wife, Iasia, his two pre-teenage sons and his dog Buddy.
“I felt I had no one in government I could trust,” Ceglia wrote in one of four e-mails. “An opportunity presented itself, so I MacGyver’d some things together and started running for my life.”
Ceglia’s whereabouts are unknown; the contents of the e-mails, with the subject line "Paul from Wellsville," provide a few clues. Ceglia wrote that he is "far from U.S. soil to be sure." He also wants his family and friends to know that he’s alive and well and “living on the air in Cincinnati,” apparently a clue about his well-being rather than his whereabouts -- it’s a line from the theme song of the television comedy "WKRP in Cincinnati."
"It is truly a relief to know that Paul and his family are alive, safe and in comparably good health," said Robert Ross Fogg, one of Ceglia’s lawyers in the criminal case. "I am comforted to know that his disappearance was of his own volition" and not the result of foul play, Fogg said.
Probable Cause
Fogg said Ceglia’s case was going well when he ran. And he pointed to a New York state appeals court ruling in December that threw out Facebook’s suit against some of Ceglia’s lawyers, arguing it showed there was probable cause for his contract claim.
Fogg encouraged Ceglia to return to the U.S.
"To win this case, I need him home," he said.
Charles Salina, the U.S. Marshal for western New York, didn’t return messages seeking comment. Facebook spokeswoman Vanessa Chan declined to comment.
If nothing else, the e-mails, received between Aug. 3 and Aug. 8, put yet another twist on a tabloid-ready case that’s been featured everywhere from the Wellsville Daily Reporter to the New York Post and national TV networks.
In his e-mails, Ceglia, 43, said he was forced to flee due to a “very credible” threat that he would be arrested on new charges, jailed and killed before trial. The reason he was marked for death, he said, was fear that the trial would expose the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel, in Facebook.
For more on Ceglia’s original claim, click here.
Ceglia’s path from his small town in western New York to international fugitive started in 2003, when he hired Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard University, to do coding work on his StreetFax.com website. He claims he paid for half of Zuckerberg’s project, then called “The Face Book,” and that Zuckerberg used StreetFax’s search engine in the early version of the social network.
Facebook and Zuckerberg have said that Ceglia’s claim is bogus, that Zuckerberg’s contract with Ceglia involved only StreetFax, and that Zuckerberg didn’t conceive of the social network until later.
A federal judge in Buffalo threw out Ceglia’s civil case against Facebook and Zuckerberg in March 2013, agreeing with another judge that he had forged a contract, created fake e-mails between himself and Zuckerberg, and destroyed evidence. Ceglia was charged in 2012 with trying to defraud Facebook and Zuckerberg. He denies wrongdoing.
Ceglia says he was deprived of his right to a jury trial when the suit against Facebook and Zuckerberg in Buffalo was tossed out at the pretrial stage. And the government’s criminal case, filed 300 miles (500 kilometers) away in Manhattan while the civil suit was still pending, was also illegal because, in his view, he was prosecuted merely for filing a lawsuit.
For an update of recent court proceedings, click here.
“Some of your readers may surely think my lawsuit against Facebook was bogus, but if they consider themselves Americans, then they should defend to the death my right under the Constitution of the United States to have a jury” make that decision, Ceglia said.
Ceglia says he has applied for asylum in a country he won’t identify. His claim that he is living outside of the U.S. could not be verified. U.S. marshals say they’re still trying to find him and are offering a $5,000 reward.
Arriving at Ceglia’s Wellsville, New York, house on March 8, 2015, marshals and state police found his court-ordered ankle bracelet hanging from a homemade “motorized contraption” mounted on the ceiling. Prosecutors said the device was intended to keep the bracelet moving to make it appear that Ceglia was still in his house.
Ceglia says he has “a regular job” and hopes to start buying and selling houses soon to make more money.
“Everyone including our dog is happy and in good health,” Ceglia wrote. “It has been a difficult and scary year for Iasia and I but faith in God has seen us through and a determination to get justice has inspired me to keep going.”
by Nordic » Sat Aug 20, 2016 4:26 am
by PufPuf93 » Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:01 am
by Nordic » Sun Aug 28, 2016 1:08 am
by 82_28 » Sun Aug 28, 2016 1:27 am
by Nordic » Sun Aug 28, 2016 1:32 am
82_28 » Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:27 am wrote:I was banned and just created a new fake account which jibes with my fake gmail account. I think I wrote of that earlier. You cats from here know who I am but I friend absolutely no one. I don't delve into old flames or want to see their kids. I use it to communicate with basically you yokels on IM mostly.
by 82_28 » Sun Aug 28, 2016 1:40 am
by slomo » Fri Nov 11, 2016 6:12 pm
Marketers placing housing, employment or credit advertisements on Facebook will no longer be able to use tools that target people by ethnicity, reflecting concern that the company was violating anti-discrimination laws.
“There are many nondiscriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a blog post on Friday.
An article by ProPublica published last month reported that advertisers could use Facebook targeting to exclude certain races, or what the company calls “ethnic affinities,” from housing and employment ads, potentially putting the social network in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The article prompted scrutiny from civil rights groups and policy makers, including the American Civil Liberties Union and four members of Congress, and a class-action lawsuit.
The decision casts a perhaps unwelcome spotlight onto what Facebook calls its “ethnic affinity marketing solution,” which is still available for use outside the areas of housing, employment and credit advertising.
One of Facebook’s main draws for marketers is how narrowly they can target messages to its users. Ads can be sent to people based not only on standard demographics like age, gender and location, but also on a bevy of other factors, like whether they have an anniversary coming, their interest in horseback riding, whether they use Gmail or Hotmail, and the languages they speak. Users can also be excluded from seeing ads based on this data.
While much of this information is provided voluntarily by users, ethnic affinity is one demographic offered to marketers that users cannot choose, but it is instead assigned based on their interests and activities on Facebook. That includes page likes, group memberships and friendships, the company said. You can list your religious views and languages on your Facebook profile, but you can’t self-identify as, say, Asian-American.
On Facebook’s ad-buying website, however, advertisers can choose to include or exclude certain demographic “affinities” from ads in the United States. For instance, they can exclude African-American, Asian-American and four “types” of Hispanic — bilingual, English-dominant, Spanish-dominant or all of the above. Facebook lists the number of people who match those affinities within its ads tool.
For example, if an advertiser wants to reach all Americans ages 18 and up on Facebook, hovering over “African-American (U.S.)” shows that there are 26 million people with that “ethnic affinity.” The company confirmed that because the assignment is based on activity, a white person could be targeted as an African-American and vice versa.
Facebook users can visit their Ad Preferences and see what, if any, ethnic affinity is assigned to them under their “lifestyle and culture” interests, and remove it if they want, the company said. A reporter who is Indian-American did not have “Asian-American” listed under her interests in that section. A colleague, who is Hispanic and speaks primarily English, had “Ethnic affinity: African-American (U.S.)” listed under descriptions like “away from family” and “books.”
In her blog post, Ms. Egan wrote that this type of targeting “gives brands a way to reach multicultural audiences with more relevant advertising.” In addition to tools that will disable ethnic affinity marketing for housing, employment or credit ads, Facebook will “require advertisers to affirm that they will not engage in discriminatory advertising” on the site and offer them information so they “understand their obligations with respect to housing, employment and credit.”
This is hardly the first time Facebook has dealt with intense scrutiny over its ad-targeting practices. In 2013, Facebook paid $20 million to settle a class-action lawsuit against the company for sharing data with advertisers about users’ “likes” without asking permission. The same year, a lawsuit accused the company of scanning users’ private messages on the network and using the information for advertising purposes. In September of this year, a federal judge in California ruled against a bid to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit.
The changes to Facebook’s “ethnic affinity marketing solution” will very likely deal a difficult blow to the company’s longstanding boasts about its superior ad-targeting capabilities, especially in the face of competitors like Google, Twitter and Snapchat. Shares of Facebook closed down 1.5 percent on Friday.
by MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 30, 2017 10:56 am
Trita Parsi Verified Account
@tparsi
I want to repeat: Green card holders were handcuffed, their social media was reviewed, and they were asked their views on Trump
https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/825405243567513600
by elfismiles » Mon Jan 30, 2017 11:19 am
MacCruiskeen » 30 Jan 2017 14:56 wrote:Trita Parsi Verified Account
@tparsi
I want to repeat: Green card holders were handcuffed, their social media was reviewed, and they were asked their views on Trump
https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/825405243567513600
by identity » Sun Feb 12, 2017 8:13 pm
Yesterday I got news of a relative's death via email (gmail). A few hours later I saw a "sponsored post" in fb for a church in a nearby town, and that posting mentioned grief counseling. Coincidence or not?
Further possibly relevant info:
- I log into gmail and fb via the same browser and they are both open pretty much all the time
- I have adblock plus and ghostery activate in that browser
- I have gmail monitoring and ad targeting as locked down as I could find a couple of years ago, but I haven't revisited this recently.
- The email notification was from person A to person B, who then forwarded it to me. Both emails were short and used people's names. There were no relationship words like mother, uncle, cousin, husband. The death was described as person C having "passed away."
- I sent a short email reply to person B and then contacted person A by iMessage.
- I did not post about this death on fb
- I did not do any google searches related to this death or grief or any similar terms, including googling the name of the person who died.
- I did speak about this (verbally) with someone in the room with me, but neither of us have fb or fb messenger apps on our phones, and I do not generally get ads based on discussions that my computer or phone might have overheard.
- I do not have any religious affiliation indicated on fb and I do not generally see ads for churches or any other religious organizations though I do occasionally get fed ads for "Christian singles" near me.
Is this random fluke, or is fb somehow finding cues for ads in my gmail?
It can see your clipboard so if you copied some of the text to use in a message or IM to someone else that may have done it.
I learned this while updating my Christmas list, which is an OpenOffice text document. I copied "silver horse necklace" from the Ideas column to the Purchased column, switched over to facebook and saw an ad for... silver horse necklaces. Similar things have happened enough that I am sure it's not a fluke. The clipboard is how I explain that one but there have been others that are just spooky and I'm not sure how they did it.
Thanks for all the comments.
I didn't use the clipboard for anything related to this, nor search or browse related info such as funeral homes or burial traditions. I don't use the mobile app. Thanks for the suggestion of Privacy Badger - unfortunately it doesn't work on my browser (Safari).
I was not fb friends with the deceased (though I am friends with friends of his) and I am pretty sure that none of my fb friends posted anything about this death yesterday. After reading that comment above, I even went directly to the pages of the few fb friends of mine who might have done so, and they hadn't. The death was very recent and it's unlikely that anyone has notified fb yet. His fb page appears normal.
Back when I was on Facebook it started targeting me with IVF ads right after a friend told new via gmail she was using IVF. I am pretty convinced it was no coincidence. I suspect the phone app is extra stalkery, so maybe gmail on mobile is an even more likely vector.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 8:33 pm
FACEBOOK FAILED TO PROTECT 30 MILLION USERS FROM HAVING THEIR DATA HARVESTED BY TRUMP CAMPAIGN AFFILIATE
Mattathias Schwartz
March 30 2017, 1:01 p.m.
IN 2014, TRACES of an unusual survey, connected to Facebook, began appearing on internet message boards. The boards were frequented by remote freelance workers who bid on “human intelligence tasks” in an online marketplace, called Mechanical Turk, controlled by Amazon. The “turkers,” as they’re known, tend to perform work that is rote and repetitive, like flagging pornographic images or digging through search engine results for email addresses. Most jobs pay between 1 and 15 cents. “Turking makes us our rent money and helps pay off debt,” one turker told The Intercept. Another turker has called the work “voluntary slave labor.”
The task posted by “Global Science Research” appeared ordinary, at least on the surface. The company offered turkers $1 or $2 to complete an online survey. But there were a couple of additional requirements as well. First, Global Science Research was only interested in American turkers. Second, the turkers had to download a Facebook app before they could collect payment. Global Science Research said the app would “download some information about you and your network … basic demographics and likes of categories, places, famous people, etc. from you and your friends.”
“Our terms of service clearly prohibit misuse,” said a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services, by email. “When we learned of this activity back in 2015, we suspended the requester for violating our terms of service.”
Although Facebook’s early growth was driven by closed, exclusive networks at college and universities, it has gradually herded users to agree to increasingly permissive terms of service. By 2014, anything a user’s friends could see was also potentially visible to the developers of any app that they chose to download. Some of the turkers noticed that the Global Science Research app appeared to be taking advantage of Facebook’s porousness. “Someone can learn everything about you by looking at hundreds of pics, messages, friends, and likes,” warned one, writing on a message board. “More than you realize.” Others were more blasé. “I don’t put any info on FB,” one wrote. “Not even my real name … it’s backwards that people put sooo much info on Facebook, and then complain when their privacy is violated.”
In late 2015, the turkers began reporting that the Global Science Research survey had abruptly shut down. The Guardian had published a report that exposed exactly who the turkers were working for. Their data was being collected by Aleksandr Kogan, a young lecturer at Cambridge University. Kogan founded Global Science Research in 2014, after the university’s psychology department refused to allow him to use its own pool of data for commercial purposes. The data collection that Kogan undertook independent of the university was done on behalf of a military contractor called Strategic Communication Laboratories, or SCL. The company’s election division claims to use “data-driven messaging” as part of “delivering electoral success.”
SCL has a growing U.S. spin-off, called Cambridge Analytica, which was paid millions of dollars by Donald Trump’s campaign. Much of the money came from committees funded by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who reportedly has a large stake in Cambridge Analytica. For a time, one of Cambridge Analytica’s officers was Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser. Months after Bannon claimed to have severed ties with the company, checks from the Trump campaign for Cambridge Analytica’s services continued to show up at one of Bannon’s addresses in Los Angeles.
“You can say Mr. Mercer declined to comment,” said Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesperson for Robert Mercer, by email.
FaceBook Elections signs stand in the media area at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015, before the first Republican presidential debate. (AP Photo/John Minchillo) Facebook Elections signs in the media area at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Aug. 6, 2015, before the first Republican presidential debate of the 2016 election. Photo: John Minchillo/AP
The Intercept interviewed five individuals familiar with Kogan’s work for SCL. All declined to be identified, citing concerns about an ongoing inquiry at Cambridge and fears of possible litigation. Two sources familiar with the SCL project told The Intercept that Kogan had arranged for more than 100,000 people to complete the Facebook survey and download an app. A third source with direct knowledge of the project said that Global Science Research obtained data from 185,000 survey participants as well as their Facebook friends. The source said that this group of 185,000 was recruited through a data company, not Mechanical Turk, and that it yielded 30 million usable profiles. No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters.
Kogan declined to comment. In late 2014, he gave a talk in Singapore in which he claimed to have “a sample of 50+ million individuals about whom we have the capacity to predict virtually any trait.” Global Science Research’s public filings for 2015 show the company holding 145,111 British pounds in its bank account. Kogan has since changed his name to Spectre. Writing online, he has said that he changed his name to Spectre after getting married. “My wife and I are both scientists and quite religious, and light is a strong symbol of both,” he explained.
The purpose of Kogan’s work was to develop an algorithm for the “national profiling capacity of American citizens” as part of SCL’s work on U.S. elections, according to an internal document signed by an SCL employee describing the research.
“We do not do any work with Facebook likes,” wrote Lindsey Platts, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica, in an email. The company currently “has no relationship with GSR,” Platts said.
“Cambridge Analytica does not comment on specific clients or projects,” she added when asked whether the company was involved with Global Science Research’s work in 2014 and 2015.
The Guardian, which was was the first to report on Cambridge Analytica’s work on U.S. elections, in late 2015, noted that the company drew on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Kogan disputed this at the time, telling The Guardian that his turker surveys had collected no more than “a couple of thousand responses” for any one client. While it is unclear how many responses Global Science Research obtained through Mechanical Turk and how many it recruited through a data company, all five of the sources interviewed by The Intercept confirmed that Kogan’s work on behalf of SCL involved collecting data from survey participants’ networks of Facebook friends, individuals who had not themselves consented to give their data to Global Science Research and were not aware that they were the objects of Kogan’s study. In September 2016, Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, said that the company built a model based on “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans” filling out personality surveys, generating a “model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.”
Shortly after The Guardian published its 2015 article, Facebook contacted Global Science Research and requested that it delete the data it had taken from Facebook users. Facebook’s policies give Facebook the right to delete data gathered by any app deemed to be “negatively impacting the Platform.” The company believes that Kogan and SCL complied with the request, which was made during the Republican primary, before Cambridge Analytica switched over from Ted Cruz’s campaign to Donald Trump’s. It remains unclear what was ultimately done with the Facebook data, or whether any models or algorithms derived from it wound up being used by the Trump campaign.
In public, Facebook continues to maintain that whatever happened during the run-up to the election was business as usual. “Our investigation to date has not uncovered anything that suggests wrongdoing,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.
Facebook appears not to have considered Global Science Research’s data collection to have been a serious ethical lapse. Joseph Chancellor, Kogan’s main collaborator on the SCL project and a former co-owner of Global Science Research, is now employed by Facebook Research. “The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.
Chancellor declined to comment.
Cambridge Analytica has marketed itself as classifying voters using five personality traits known as OCEAN — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — the same model used by University of Cambridge researchers for in-house, non-commercial research. The question of whether OCEAN made a difference in the presidential election remains unanswered. Some have argued that big data analytics is a magic bullet for drilling into the psychology of individual voters; others are more skeptical. The predictive power of Facebook likes is not in dispute. A 2013 study by three of Kogan’s former colleagues at the University of Cambridge showed that likes alone could predict race with 95 percent accuracy and political party with 85 percent accuracy. Less clear is their power as a tool for targeted persuasion; Cambridge Analytica has claimed that OCEAN scores can be used to drive voter and consumer behavior through “microtargeting,” meaning narrowly tailored messages. Nix has said that neurotic voters tend to be moved by “rational and fear-based” arguments, while introverted, agreeable voters are more susceptible to “tradition and habits and family and community.”
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State University, said he was skeptical of the idea that the Trump campaign got a decisive edge from data analytics. But, he added, such techniques will likely become more effective in the future. “It’s reasonable to believe that sooner or later, we’re going to see widespread manipulation of people’s decision-making, including in elections, in ways that are more widespread and granular, but even less detectable than today,” he wrote in an email.
LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 15: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) throws a hat to supporters during a campaign rally aboard the USS Iowa on September 15, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. Donald Trump is campaigning in Los Angeles a day ahead of the CNN GOP debate that will be broadcast from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Donald Trump throws a hat to supporters during a campaign rally on Sept. 15, 2015, in Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Trump’s circle has been open about its use of Facebook to influence the vote. Joel Pollak, an editor at Breitbart, writes in his campaign memoir about Trump’s “armies of Facebook ‘friends,’ … bypassing the gatekeepers in the traditional media.” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, has written in his own campaign memoir about “geo-targeting” cities to deliver a debunked claim that Bill Clinton had fathered a child out of wedlock, and narrowing down the audience “based on preferences in music, age range, black culture, and other urban interests.”
Clinton, of course, had her own analytics effort, and digital market research is a normal part of any political campaign. But the quantity of data compiled on individuals during the run-up to the election is striking. Alexander Nix, head of Cambridge Analytica, has claimed to “have a massive database of 4-5,000 data points on every adult in America.” Immediately after the election, the company tried to take credit for the win, claiming that its data helped the Trump campaign set the candidate’s travel schedule and place online ads that were viewed 1.5 billion times. Since then, the company has been de-emphasizing its reliance on psychological profiling.
The Information Commissioner’s Office, an official privacy watchdog within the British government, is now looking into whether Cambridge Analytica and similar companies might pose a risk to voters’ rights. The British inquiry was triggered by reports in The Observer of ties between Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica, and the Leave.EU campaign, which worked to persuade British voters to leave the European Union. While Nix has previously talked about the firm’s work for Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica now denies that it had any paid role in the campaign.
Twickenham, members of Leave EU and UKIP hand out leaflets<br /><br /><br /><br /> Grassroots Out action day on EU membership, London, Britain - 05 Mar 2016</p><br /><br /><br /> <p> (Rex Features via AP Images) Leave.EU signage is displayed in London on March 5, 2016. Photo: Rex Features/AP Images
In the U.S., where privacy laws are looser, there is no investigation. Cambridge Analytica is said to be pitching its products to several federal agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. SCL, its parent company, has new offices near the White House and has reportedly been advised by Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, on how to increase its federal business. (A spokesperson for Flynn denied that he had done any work for SCL.)
Years before the arrival of Kogan’s turkers, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to address privacy concerns around the company’s controversial Beacon program, which quietly funneled data from outside websites into Facebook, often without Facebook users being aware of the process. Reflecting on Beacon, Zuckerberg attributed part of Facebook’s success to giving “people control over what and how they share information.” He said that he regretted making Beacon an “opt-out system instead of opt-in … if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon went ahead and still shared it with their friends.”
Seven years later, Facebook appears to have made the same mistake, but with far greater consequences. In mid-2014, however, Facebook announced a new review process, where the company would make sure that new apps asked only for data they would actually use. “People want more control,” the company said at that time. “It’s going to make a huge difference with building trust with your app’s audience.” Existing apps were given a full year to switch over to have Facebook review how they handled user data. By that time, Global Science Research already had what it needed.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/30/fac ... affiliate/
by identity » Tue May 02, 2017 4:54 am
Report: Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel “worthless”
Leaked 2017 document reveals FB Australia's intent to exploit teens' words, images.
Sam Machkovech - May 1, 2017 7:00 am UTC
Facebook's secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company's Australian office. This 23-page document discovered by The Australian, details in particular how Facebook executives promote advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users' emotional states—and how these are aimed at users as young as 14 years old.
According to the report, the selling point of this 2017 document is that Facebook's algorithms can determine, and allow advertisers to pinpoint, "moments when young people need a confidence boost." If that phrase isn't clear enough, Facebook's document offers a litany of teen emotional states that the company claims it can estimate based on how teens use the service, including "worthless," "insecure," "defeated," "anxious," "silly," "useless," "stupid," "overwhelmed," "stressed," and "a failure."
The Australian says that the documents also reveal a particular interest in helping advertisers target moments in which young users are interested in "looking good and body confidence” or “working out and losing weight." Another section describes how image-recognition tools are used on both Facebook and Instagram (a wholly owned Facebook subsidiary) to reveal to advertisers "how people visually represent moments such as meal times." And it goes into great detail about how younger Facebook users express themselves: according to Facebook Australia, earlier in the week, teens post more about "anticipatory emotions" and "building confidence," while weekend teen posts contain more "reflective emotions" and "achievement broadcasting."
This document makes clear to advertisers that this data is specific to Australia and New Zealand—and that its eyes are on 6.4 million students and "young [people] in the workforce" in those regions. When reached for comment by The Australian, a representative for Facebook Australia issued a formal and lengthy apology, saying in part, "We have opened an investigation to understand the process failure and improve our oversight. We will undertake disciplinary and other processes as appropriate."
Facebook Australia did not answer The Australian's questions about whether these youth-targeted advertising practices were the same or similar to those at other international Facebook offices. (The document's scope is actually more compliant with US FTC regulations, which apply to users 13 and younger, than with Australian ones, which apply to users 14 and younger.)
The Australian's report does not include screen shots of the document, nor does it describe sample advertising campaigns that would take advantage of this data. Two Facebook Australia executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez, are named as the document's authors.
Facebook's ability to predict and possibly exploit users' personal data probably isn't news to anybody who has followed the company over the past decade, but this leak may be the first tacit admission by any Facebook organization that younger users' data is sorted and exploited in a unique way. This news follows stories about Facebook analyzing and even outright manipulating users' emotional states, along with reports and complaints about the platform guessing users' "ethnic affinity," disclosing too much personal data, and possibly permitting illegal discrimination in housing and financial ads.
Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: Facebook has issued a statement disputing The Australian's report. "The premise of the article is misleading," the company wrote in its authorless statement. "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."
Just like the company said in its original apology, it repeated this vague explanation: "Facebook has an established process to review the research we perform. This research did not follow that process, and we are reviewing the details to correct the oversight." However, the statement didn't acknowledge why Facebook did not make any distinction clear to The Australian. As of press time, The Australian has not updated its report, nor has it printed or disclosed full pages of the quoted to either confirm or dispute Facebook's response.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:26 pm
Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election
Facebook says it discovered Russian ad sales from the 2016 election
By Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman September 6 at 3:59 PM
Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.
Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.
A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said. Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.
The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help elect Trump, including by using paid social media trolls to spread fake news intended to influence public opinion.
President Trump has weighed in on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election time and time again. Here's a look at how he can limit the probe, and what Congress is trying to do about it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months.
“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware really raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry,” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a May airing of the podcast Pod Save America. “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”
An official familiar with Facebook’s internal investigation said the company does not have the ability to determine whether the ads it sold represented any sort of coordination.
The acknowledgment by Facebook follows months of criticism that the social media company served as a platform for the spread of false information before the November election. In a statement posted days after the election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to explore the issue but said that 99 percent of information found on Facebook is authentic and only “a very small amount” is fake or hoaxes. In December, however, the company announced that it would begin flagging articles that had been deemed false or fake, with the assistance of fact-checking organizations.
Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically-motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company.
Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads.
A Facebook official said “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm.” The official declined to release any of the ads it traced to Russian companies or entities.
Who’s who in the government’s investigation into Russia ties VIEW GRAPHIC
“Our data policy and federal law limit our ability to share user data and content, so we won’t be releasing any ads,” the official said. The official added that the ads “were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment, and immigration.”
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said in a statement that the company is committed to continuing to protect the integrity of its site and improve its ability to track fraudulent accounts. He said Facebook has shut down the accounts that remained active.
“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” he said.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced technology improvements to detect fake accounts and more recently announced it would no longer allow Facebook pages to advertise if they have a pattern of sharing false news stories. Over the past few months, Stamos said, the company has also taken action to block fake accounts tied to election meddling in France and Germany.
The Internet Research Agency has received attention in the past for its activity.
In 2013, hackers released internal company documents showing it employed 600 people across Russia. Ex-employees who have gone public with their experiences at the company in Internet postings and in media interviews have said their work entailed creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts and using them to circulate pro-Kremlin propaganda. They said Internet Research Agency employees, for instance, spread derogatory information about Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in the days after his 2015 murder.
In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched social media campaigns in the United States, including a sophisticated hoax that spread false news of a chemical leak in Louisiana in 2014, apparently to sow chaos and fear.
In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency’s “likely financier” is a “close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”
In May, Time Magazine reported that U.S. intelligence officials had discovered evidence that Russian agents had purchased ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. A Facebook spokesman told the magazine that the company had no evidence of such buys.
Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election.
Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC. (Permanent residents who hold green cards, however, are not considered foreign nationals.) Violators face civil penalties, as well as criminal prosecution if they are found to have knowingly broken the law.
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