Can anyone tell me what’s going on with Facebook? I haven’t used Facebook in 7 years. Sorry for living under a rock but I don’t get what’s so bad about Cambridge Analytica. It seems the information they scraped is publicly available regardless of permissions. Likes? Who your friends are? I’m not sure..

📌

Here we go. This information wasn't by default publicly available and was collected for 'academic research'.

Fair enough, right? Nope.

They collected the data of everyone who used the app and consented but also of all of their friends, many of whom didn't consent at all.
Then it was revealed yesterday that they also scraped private chats through a Facebook api. If you've talked to someone who had their data scraped by this evil company, all your chat history is in their hands.

Also, this data wasn't used for research purposes but for manipulation through Facebook ads. Political views manipulation to be exact.

Then there's the fact that if you use(d) messenger and clicked next-next-next etc at installation, Facebook collected your entire (offline) call history and your texts next to collecting videos it claimed it had deleted about 5-10 years ago.

Next to this, Facebook found out about this in 2015 and did nothing except for asking for an official statement from that company that they had deleted the data. Got the statement, Facebook didn't give it a second thought.

The data wasn't deleted and got used for the American elections in favor of trump (members of his team worked closely with Cambridge analytica).

@linuxxx Nice write up! Now I understand, Mr. Linuxxx