Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case

19 hours ago (cbsnews.com)

> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.

This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.

Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.

  • The multi-state settlement was a huge loss for Meta.

    You are focusing on the money, which is not the important part. The important part is that the settlement just settled that one lawsuit. There are many thousands of individual lawsuits over many of the same issues, mostly by local governments (school districts).

    Almost all the work the nearly 50 states in the multi-state lawsuit put in to prepare their case, such as depositions, getting expert reports, their successful legal arguments, the testimony from the trial, etc can be used by the plaintiffs in all those other suits.

    This basically gives all those plaintiffs a fully loaded giant legal cannon that was custom built using the vast resources of the Attorney General's offices of almost 50 states specifically as an anti-Meta weapon.

  • I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a big deal, and even used it to reinforce and reprioritize some privacy-focused initiatives at a past job. But I heard some credible voices on social media say that the actual impact was negligible. Anyone know what they mean? Maybe that has some bearing here?

  • How is this:

    > people who want more "regulation"

    Same as this:

    > who believe states with high levels of paper regulation

    I _do_ want real regulations with teeth against shitty companies like Meta. Just because California has done a performative take doesn't make expecting more controls on these scumbags a wrong thing to expect. Bad execution doesn't make the idea wrong, your scare-quotes be damned.

    • I wish HN was more of a reliable aggregator and not just people protecting their industry at all cost

      You can reliably tell what the most upvoted comments will be

      Does that mean we should always hate on big tech? No. If a platform is getting unfairly targeted, that's nice to know. But you come here to get the general sense of the landscape and the first comment is always slanted in favor of big corporate

  • Nobody wants more “regulation” in the abstract, any more than they want more “water” in the abstract (to drink? When drowning? In a drought? In a flood?).

    Positioning yourself as zealously in favor of or opposed to abstract concepts like regulation is silly.

  • > This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation"

    Some people say they want more “food,” but did you know that consuming calories can lead to obesity?! The existence of fat people is an inconvenient reminder for people who claim to be “malnourished” or “wasting away.”

  • ...what's inconvenient about it? The less "regulation" in dem scary quotes there is, the easier it is for companies to shirk them (and cheaper, too). The only actual argument there can be is that that $18 bn fine will have to ultimately come out of the pockets of the Meta's customers, and perhaps that'll force Meta to adopt even uglier business practices (defying the whole point of regulating it).

    > Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.

    Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.

    • > ...what's inconvenient about it?

      Putting aside the fact that a huge amount of regulation is designed by the most powerful companies to promote and defend their interests, the issue is that regulation, when not enforced, provides a way for corporations to inflict massive harm on individuals and discharge it for pennies on the dollar.

      $18 billion was a paltry sum and represents about a month's worth of Meta's revenue. Let that sink in: a month's worth of revenue to discharge liabilities associated with years of massive harm to young people that some legal experts concluded could have reasonably resulted in damages in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, and possibly exceeding $1 trillion.

      And as part of the settlement, Meta didn't even have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

      > Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.

      You're acting as if there's no precedent for what I stated when the evidence is overwhelming.

      A handful of examples for you:

      1. Eric Holder, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for D.C. and Deputy AG. He was a partner at Covington & Burling, where he represented Chiquita Brands in the case over its payments to a Colombian paramilitary group and also represented Uber and Airbnb.

      2. Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ's Criminal Division from 2009 to 2013. He didn't prosecute senior bank executives after the financial crisis and then went on to do white collar defense work as vice chair at Covington & Burling.

      3. James Comey, U.S. Attorney for SDNY and Deputy AG. He became general counsel for Lockheed Martin and then Bridgewater Associates before he became FBI Director.

      4. Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney for SDNY. She defended financial institutions at Debevoise & Plimpton afterwards, then chaired the SEC between 2013 and 2017, and then went back to Debevoise.

      5. Louis Freeh, federal prosecutor for SDNY, federal judge and FBI Director from 1993 to 2001. He went on to become general counsel credit card company MBNA and later represented Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was alleged to have received over £1 billion in bribes from BAE Systems for arms deals. In his defense, Freeh argued that the money was actually going into official Saudi government accounts so they weren't bribes. BAE later pleaded guilty to US charges related to false statements and export violations.

      Revolving doors in the US have gold handles.

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  • > Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs

    Aren't they supposed to be replaced by AI by then?

    There won't even be human bodyguards; just Zuck, Musk, Bezos and Rasputin in their Thunderdomes sheltered by swarms of T-800s going StarCraft 3 on our ass

    • I say let them. They're not keeping us away from them - they're keeping themselves away from us, as it should be.

This was 10 years ago. Pretty crazy that this is finally seeing the justice system.

Move fast and break t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ the law. Because the law moves very slowly.

  • I genuinely thought that was the baseline assumption in that statement.

    Uber only exists because it ignored taxi regulations long enough to be too big to kill, right?

    • And by the clever move of pitching itself as ride sharing between casual users, don't forget. If they were offering "call a taxi" from the start, the outcome may have been very different. People still say "call an Uber" and not "call a taxi with Uber".

10-years old ago thing? Yeah, so fast. And what exactly will the settlement money go to?

  • Probably to similar purposes as the 2024 opioid settlement: housing assistance, schools, subsidized child care. Legislators will probably try to align it with goals that seem like they would counter the stuff Meta's doing. Smaller communities will probably fail to allocate it promptly.

  • I am sure instead of more bombs, missiles and other military stuff, they will invest it into the public good, education for citizens, and infrastructure. No one will line their pockets. Not in the US. No, no, they will use that money to make things better. for all the people abused by tech giants. I am so sure of it.

    • Is the USA even still producing bombs and missiles? Last I heard it's completely ineffective due to all the corruption (same as Russia's problem).

How about real fines?

So far all these fines have been "ugh that's one day of net profits only", be it at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook - you name it. Are there kickbacks involved to keep the fines at a minimum?

  • Yeah, fully agree. Fines for companies bigger than a certain threshold should be percentages of their global annual income and potentially include jail time for the decision makers that enabled them.

    As long as these are the incentives companies/execs will continue to do this shit

    • > include jail time for the decision makers

      This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).

      Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.

      2 replies →

The key to this story is in the word "liable." That's lawyer-speak for a civil, not criminal, legal judgment. The loser must pay money, no one goes to jail, and Meta has so much money that the judgment means nothing.

Meta already pays billions to gain access to people's personal data. This is just another business expense, a line item on a balance sheet.

When faced with an adverse ruling, an individual raises his hands, is handcuffed and led away. A corporation raises its prices.

Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.

I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.

Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.

Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.

Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.

  • Cambridge Analytica didn’t break the TOS.

    If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.

    • My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.

      > Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.

      1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

  • > the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.

    This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.

    • Are you ok?

      Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.

      2 replies →

  • Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.

    • Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.

      3 replies →

  • You may be missing the actual crimes.

    You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?

    Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.

    What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?

    • There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.

      1 reply →

  • > it did not affect the 2016 election.

    This is false.

    > all of his Meta advertising

    You don't appear to have any understanding of how Cambridge Analytica affected the election.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

> "Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state," Torrez said Friday. "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."

This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.

If I was on any jury ever I would vote Zuckberger guilty of everything. He is a creature of nepotism, a monster of a broken system.

  • I think the point is that jury members have to be objective at all times. So you would do him a favour by being not objective, since the ruling may be overturned and dismissed. So, stay objective.

    Then again the whole court system is so skewed in favour of who has more money.

    • Do they? What happens if you do the opposite of jury nullification and find someone guilty who's innocent?

Since these articles tend to actually bury the data that was scraped:

  > .. the information likely included one's "public profile, page likes, birthday and current city" ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

This information was limited to what was publicly accessible on the site rather than some private data as many outlets tend to claim.

  • The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:

    > Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]

  • Is that not parsed as,

    > (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city

    ?

    (I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)

  • I am not sure that this is the case.

    The app had access to data about the friends of its participants.

    AFAIR that included attributes that were set “friends-only”.