Playboy deletes its Facebook accounts following Cambridge Analytica scandal

[Recruit]

 

Playboy has announced that it is pulling its accounts from Facebook, saying that it doesn’t want to be complicit in Facebook’s mismanagement of user data. The company has 25 million fans who follow and engage with its pages. The decision follows revelations that Facebook's users' data was misused by Cambridge Analytica. Elon Musk took similar steps to remove SpaceX and Tesla from Facebook last week.

 

 

For Playboy, the data misuse revelations were the last straw. In its statement it said:

 

 

Quote

“For years, it has been difficult for Playboy to express our values on Facebook due to its strict content and policy guidelines. We have been faced with the only alternative being to alter Playboy's voice in order to meet Facebook's views of what is and is not appropriate on its platform.

 

While that has challenged our business objectives and the ability to reach our audience in an authentic way, the recent news about Facebook's alleged mismanagement of users' data has solidified our decision to suspend our activity on the platform at this time.”

 

 

With Playboy, Tesla and SpaceX all quitting Facebook, and the WhatsApp co-founder, Brian Acton, encouraging people to delete their Facebook accounts this misstep seems different from all the other times Facebook has garnered criticism.

 

 

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It is time. #deletefacebook

— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018

 

 

The wider media has been running continual coverage on the topic which has made sure everyone is aware of the issue – it has even reportedly caused Facebook to delay the launch of its smart speaker devices. Whether Facebook is done for is still up for debate, but companies leaving the platform certainly isn’t reassuring.

 

Source

 

[luisam]

1 hour ago, Recruit said:

 

Playboy has announced that it is pulling its accounts from Facebook, saying that it doesn’t want to be complicit in Facebook’s mismanagement of user data.

 

My opinion is that the core of the issue is not the mismanagement of user data. The problem is the proper ESSENCE of Facebook. People feel encouraged and pushed to share their very personal data with COMPLETE STRANGERS , and to start with, I mean personal opinions, family photos, family background and family activity.  I have a mostly non-descriptive Facebook account, just because I neded it to get in contact wtih some people, but I get each day dozens of "invitatons of friendship" from perfect strangers. I know that lots of users accept these contacts, incredibly, to widen their friendship circle!  So, worst enemy of user's privacy are the proper users of Facebook! Facebook NEVER should habe been more than it was initially: an Intranet bulletin board application.

[rasbridge]

Facebook now faces myriad legal actions for its apparent misuse of private data on its members. But one possible legal problem that isn't getting any attention involves whether Facebook (FB) made, and the Obama campaign accepted, illegal "in-kind" contributions to Obama's 2012 re-election effort.
As we noted earlier, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook data dwarfed anything Trump did. Cambridge Analytica purchased data from an academic, who gathered it in 2014 through an app that said the data would only be used for academic purposes. There's no question that was misleading.

But by the time the general election rolled around, the Trump campaign had dumped Cambridge as a consultant, which means the data Cambridge bought had no impact on the general election.

In contrast, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook was massive, and even more intrusive. About a million people let the campaign gather not only data on themselves, but on all their friends, who didn't know their data was being harvested as well — a number that could easily have reached 190 million, which, at the time, was about equal to every active Facebook user in the U.S.

Obama's tech gurus were able to match this rich treasure trove of personal data — likes, dislikes, photos, etc. — with other databases, creating the largest and most detailed profiles on voters ever assembled.

And the campaign aggressively used its unique access to influence millions of people the campaign identified as "persuadable," sending them highly targeted campaign messages that appeared to come from their Facebook friends, rather than the Obama campaign.

Obama's people saw this as a massive advantage, telling the press after the election that it was "the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for the campaign." The press, in turn, heralded Obama for his brilliance at leveraging social media to activate voters and win an election at a time when its approval ratings were low and the economy was doing poorly.

Apparently, Facebook knew its user data was being harvested en masse, but didn't care.

After the Cambridge Analytica story broke, an Obama campaign staffer, Carol Davidsen, tweeted about how "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized what we were doing." By "whole social graph," she presumably meant profiles of every Facebook user in the U.S.

She went on to tell the Washington Post that "We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all."

She also said that Facebook officials came to the campaign offices after the election recruiting Obama's tech team, and that "they were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."

This wasn't entirely new news, by the way. The New York Times reported in 2013, in another glowing piece on Obama's tech team, how "The campaign's exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site's internal safeguards." Facebook's response, according to one campaign official: "They'd sigh and say, 'You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.'"

That's where the potential legal trouble starts. Despite all the hosannas for Obama's technical prowess, the arrangement between the campaign and Facebook might have been outside the law.

According to Heritage Foundation election expert Hans von Spakovsky, federal law "bans corporations from making 'direct or indirect' contributions to federal candidates."

That ban, he says, doesn't just include cash, but anything of value. "In other words, corporations cannot provide federal candidates with free services of any kind."

He goes on, if "Facebook gave the Obama campaign free access to this type of data when it normally does not do so for other entities — or usually charges for such access — then Facebook would appear to have violated the federal ban on in-kind contributions by a corporation. And the Obama campaign may have violated the law by accepting such a corporate contribution."

To be sure, von Spakovsky isn't saying that Facebook or Obama did break the law, only that, given what Davidsen has now admitted (and so far as we know, no one from Facebook has disputed her claims), the Federal Election Commission, if not the Justice Dept., should investigate.

"Carol Davidsen's admissions should provide a sufficient basis for opening a federal investigation of what may have been a serious violation of the law," he concludes.

We agree. And if the mainstream press weren't so pro-Obama and anti-Trump, you'd be hearing a lot more people besides von Spakovsky calling for such an investigation.

 

Source:  https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scanadal-trump-obama-campaign-election-meddling/

 

[Matrix]

Another big company walks away from the platform

If you’re a fan of long-running magazine Playboy and enjoy the publication’s various Facebook accounts, here’s some unfortunate news: the company has announced it is has become the latest big name to withdraw from the platform over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In a statement published late Tuesday night, Playboy said it was deactivating its various pages following "the recent news about Facebook's alleged mismanagement of users' data." It added that over 25 million fans engage with the company through its Facebook presence, and it does “not want to be complicit in exposing them to the reported practices.”

“Playboy has always stood for personal freedom and the celebration of sex. Today we take another step in that ongoing fight,” wrote the company.

On Twitter, Cooper Hefner, Playboy’s chief creative officer and son of late founder Hugh Hefner, said Facebook continues to be “sexually repressed,” and that its content guidelines and corporate policies continue to contradict its values.

News that political-advertising company Cambridge Analytica used the data of 50 million Facebook members, gathered by a now-defunct firm called Global Science Research, has plunged the social network into its biggest crisis ever.

Not only has the company’s share price been falling, but the #deletefacebook campaign continues to gain traction; even WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has joined the cause (as has Will Ferrell). Last week also saw Elon Musk pull the Facebook pages of Space X and Tesla, while Mozilla and Commerzbank stopped running their ads on the social network. Additionally, the controversy has resulted in Facebook postponing the unveiling of its smart speakers at May’s F8 developer conference.

If you absolutely must get a social media fix of Playboy, Tesla, and Space X, all three are still on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

 

Source

[Matrix]

17 minutes ago, DonyMach1 said:

If you absolutely must get a social media fix of Playboy, Tesla, and Space X, all three are still on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Now that's funny

[Reefa]

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