Is Facebook the Bad Guy, and Should Wunderkids Be Running the World's Internet Communications Platforms?

THE ONLY QUESTION TODAY -- IS FACEBOOK THE REAL BAD GUY?? Facebook and its leader Mark Zuckerberg are filling ths news space as the world tries to get to the bottom of the Cambridge Analytica ("CAMAL" for the Cambridge Analytica camel under the politcal tent) puzzle. • • • LAWMAKERS ON BOTH SIDES OF ATLANTIC SEEK ANSWERS FROM ZUCKERBERG. TheHill's Ali Breland and Harper Neidig reported on Wednesday that : "Mark Zuckerberg is drawing intense scrutiny from lawmakers demanding that the Facebook founder testify to Congress about the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Facebook’s data practices are under the microscope like never before following a report that the British research firm connected to President Trump’s campaign improperly obtained information on 50 million Facebook users as it sought to find ways of influencing voters at the polls." TheHill cites top Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee -- Senators John Thune, Roger Wicker, and Jerry Moran -- as having sent a list of questions to Zuckerberg about the “troubling” reports, with Moran saying Zuckerberg needed to testify. Moran spoke t oreporters : “That’s our first step, and then I think testimony in front of the Commerce Committee would be appropriate and required. I think there’s a lot of questions left to be answered.” And, of course, California Representative Adam Schiff got into the act -- and had media time on CNBC, because he is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee -- told TheHill on Tuesday that he believes Zuckerberg, along with other CEOs, should attend hearings : “We had the general counsel come in. That was quite some time ago. We’ve learned more about the Russian interference since then." • British lawmakers are also concerned about the episode with London-based Cambridge Analytica, and have called on Zuckerberg to appear before Parliament’s digital oversight committee to supplement prior testimony by Facebook executives. • BUT, where is Mark Zuckerberg. His grinning face and khaki teeshirt are usually taking credit for bringing the world together, but he has been silent. Facebook has tried to signal that it takes the CAMAL matter seriously, blaming Cambridge Analytica and other players. A Facebook prepared statement said : “Mark, Sheryl and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward, because they understand the seriousness of this issue. [Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook's Chief Operating Officer.] The entire company is outraged we were deceived. We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens.” And, finally late on Wednesday, Zuckerberg in a Facebook post acknowledged that Facebook had “made mistakes. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again,” Zuckerberg wrote. Zuckerberg said Facebook is “working with regulators” that are examining the issue, a possible reference to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and officials in the United Kingdom. • TheHill says Facebook "has also promised to investigate the incident and Cambridge Analytica’s handling of the data. For its part, Cambridge Analytica has denied any wrongdoing and says that the data was not used during its work for the Trump campaign." • We remember that last October, Facebook admitted that Russian groups used its platform to influence the US political process, and that revelation led to hearings in November at which lawmakers questioned Facebook and other tech companies about how the influence campaign was able to use their platforms to sow discord among voters. Facebook sent its general counsel to testify in November. But, this time, accroding to TheHill, "Congress is strongly hinting that sending lawyers won’t be enough." TheHill quotes GOP Senator John Kennedy : “The last time we had a hearing, Facebook and Google and Twitter sent their lawyers, which were undoubtedly expensive because they did a damn fine job of dodging and bobbing and weaving. They didn’t say a damn thing.” Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar and Kennedy this week urged Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs about how their platforms oversee political firms’ data practices. Klobuchar says : “This is a major breach that must be investigated. It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves.” Klobuchar says that the Facebook controversy with Cambridge Analytica is further evidence that internet companies need to be regulated. She and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Mark Warner, are touting their Honest Ads Act legislation, which aims to hold tech companies to the same political ad transparency standards as radio, TV and print outlets, as a way to do this. • • • EX-FACEBOOK INSIDER CALLS ITS DATA HARVESTING POLICIES "HORRIFYING." The Guardian published an article on Wednesday about Sandy Parakilas, who says numerous companies deployed these data harvesting techniques affecting hundreds of millions of users -- and that Facebook looked the other way. The Guardian's Paul Lewis was in San Francisco to interview Sandy Parakilas, the Facebook platforms manager responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers in the period 2011-2012. Parakilas told Lewis that hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica. Parakilas told Lewis that he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach : “My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data.” Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused. Although Parakilas left Facebook before the Global Science Research data harvesting was passed on to Cambridge Analytica -- he said recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings. When the Gurardian's Lewis asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, Parakilas replied : “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.” Parakilas told Lewis he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach. Parakilas said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him : “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening.” He added : “They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.” • Facebook's reply to the Parakilas accusations was to release a statement saying : “While it’s fair to criticize how we enforced our developer policies more than five years ago, it’s untrue to suggest we didn’t or don’t care about privacy. The facts tell a different story.” • What Parakilas, now a product manager at Uber, was objecting to was Facebook's previous policy of allowing developers to access the personal data of" friends" of people who used apps on the platform, without the knowledge or express consent of those friends. That feature -- "friends permission" -- was, says the Guardian, "a boon to outside software developers who, from 2007 onwards, were given permission by Facebook to build popular quizzes and games that were hosted on the platform. The apps proliferated on Facebook in the years leading up to the company’s 2012 initial public offering, an era when most users were still accessing the platform via laptops and computers rather than smartphones. Facebook took a 30% cut of payments made through apps, but in return enabled their creators to have access to Facebook user data. Parakilas does not know how many companies sought friends permission data before such access was terminated around mid-2014. However, he said he believes tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of developers may have done so." Parakilas estimates that “a majority of Facebook users” could have had their data harvested by app developers without their knowledge. Facebook, says the Guardian, now has stricter protocols around the degree of access third parties have to data. But, before 2104, Parakilas suggests that Facebook failed to take full advantage of its enforcement mechanisms, such as a clause that enables Fecebook to audit external developers who misuse its data. Parakilas said legal action against rogue developers or moves to ban them from Facebook were “extremely rare. In the time I was there, I didn’t see them conduct a single audit of a developer’s systems.” • Facebook announced on Monday that it has now hired a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica. The decision comes more than two years after Facebook was made aware of the reported data breach. • • • WHY DID FACEBOOK IGNORE SOFTWARE DEVELOPER HARVESTING OF FRIENDS. Before Facebook became a public company and listed its stock, it encouraged software developers to build apps for its platform. To encourage this, Facebook offered the developers access to user and friends data.” Parakilas said that shortly after arriving at Faceboook's Silicon Valley headquarters, he was told that any decision to ban an app required the personal approval of the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, although the policy was later relaxed to make it easier to deal with rogue developers, who were harvesting data of people who had not authorized the app to do it themselves. Facebook was relying on terms of service and settings that people "didn’t read or understand.” Cambridge Analytica exploited this policy through its contractor Global Science Research, that provided such data to Cambridge Analytica in 2014. The Guardian reports : "GSR was run by the Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, who built an app that was a personality test for Facebook users. The test automatically downloaded the data of friends of people who took the quiz, ostensibly for academic purposes. Cambridge Analytica has denied knowing the data was obtained improperly, and Kogan maintains he did nothing illegal and had a 'close working relationship' with Facebook. While Kogan’s app only attracted around 270,000 users (most of whom were paid to take the quiz), the company was then able to exploit the friends permission feature to quickly amass data pertaining to more than 50 million Facebook users." Parakilas says : “Kogan’s app was one of the very last to have access to friend permissions," adding that many other similar apps had been harvesting similar quantities of data for years for commercial purposes. Academic research from 2010, based on an analysis of 1,800 Facebooks apps, concluded that around 11% of third-party developers requested data belonging to friends of users." Parakilas says that the apps developers likely systematically culled “private and personally identifiable” data belonging to hundreds of millions of users because of the ease with which it was possible for anyone with relatively basic coding skills to create apps and start trawling for data. • Parakilas raised another key point -- Facebook was more concerned about the commercial value lost by Facebook through the trawling for "friends" data by apps developers than it was about the actual harvesting of the data. Parakilas says Facebook executives were worried "that the large app developers were building their own social graphs, meaning they could see all the connections between these people. They were worried that they were going to build their own social networks.” • Parakilas left Facebook disappointed that his warnigs were ignored, but he remained silent, according to the Guardian, until he heard the congressional testimony given by Facebook lawyers to Senate and House investigators in late 2017 about Russia’s attempt to sway the presidential election : “They treated it like a PR exercise. They seemed to be entirely focused on limiting their liability and exposure rather than helping the country address a national security issue.” At that point, Parakilas decided to go public with his concerns, writing an opinion article in the New York Times that said Facebook could not be trusted to regulate itself. Since then, Parakilas has become an advisor to the Center for Humane Technology, which is run by Tristan Harris, a former Google employee turned whistleblower on the industry. Paul Lewis can be contacted at < paul.lewis@theguardian.com >. • • • FACEBOOK AND CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA BARELY REACT. Fox News reporter Chris Ciaccia wrote on Tuesday that "Cambridge Analytica announced it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending the results of an ongoing investigation that it improperly accessed 50 million Facebook accounts." The Facebook statement said : "In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation." The UK-based Cambridge Analytica describes itself as “a data-driven communications and marketing agency.” In the undercover Channel 4 recording, according to Fax News, Nix is heard saying that the company could use unorthodox methods to wage successful political campaigns for clients. He said the company could "send some girls" around to a rival candidate's house, suggesting that girls from Ukraine are beautiful and effective in this role. But, Cambridge has denied any wrongdoing in the Facebook data scandal, and Facebook said it is looking into forensic audits to investigate Cambridge's claims. In the statement about Nix, Cambridge added Dr. Alexander Tayler will serve as the acting CEO while the independent investigation is ongoing. It has also asked, Julian Malins, QC, to lead the investigation. The company's board of directors will share the findings publicly in due course. The UK firm has come under fire in recent days after it was suspended by Facebook for improper access to 50 million Facebook accounts. Cambridge has said that it had deleted the data in a legal document to Facebook, but the facts have been disputed. • And, the New York Post reported on Tuesday that : "Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie might have a few regrets about pissing off Facebook. Wylie’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended as news broke last weekend that CA was able to access private information from more than 50 million Facebook users. Wylie said Tuesday that it is as if Facebook had deleted him from the entire internet. 'We use Facebook to log in to everything,' he said. 'I can’t use Tinder now because you have to use f–king Facebook to verify yourself!' ” • • • FACEBOOK STOCK DOWN 8%. Facebook has lost approximately $8 billion in its market cap since Monday, but, Breitbart reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “saved tens of millions of dollars” by selling his Facebook stock before the company’s decline this week : “Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by about $5 billion Monday, but it could have been worse,” Breitbart said, quoting Market Watch : “Ahead of Facebook’s worst one-day decline since 2012, prompted by news that data affecting 51.3 million members was improperly shared with a political consulting firm, Zuckerberg had been busy selling stock. So far this year, he has sold nearly 5 million shares. Disposing of those Facebook shares before Monday ended up saving about $40 million, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings and some arithmetic by MarketWatch. At Monday’s close, the 4.9 million shares Zuckerberg has sold this year under a predetermined plan would be worth $855 million. Zuckerberg made about $900 million selling those shares, according to calculations using average weighted prices reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” Zuckerberg’s stock sales were planned transactions on file with the SEC, reportedly to fund his charitable foundation. Facebook’s stock declined by almost 7% on Monday following allegations that the company mishandled user data from the platform. The controversy resulted in an emergency meeting with employees of Facebook, the resignation of Facebook’s data security chief, and a pending investigation from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)." • • • CONGRESS AND FTC CHASING FACEBOOK FOR ANSWERS. Bloomberg journalists David McLaughlin, Ben Brody, and Billy House report that : "Facebook Inc. is drawing scrutiny from the main US privacy watchdog and a half dozen congressional committees over how the personal data of 50 million users was obtained by a data analytics firm "that helped elect President Donald Trump." That includes the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, as well as the commerce and intelligence committees of both chambers. The US Federal Trade Commission is also probing whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree over its handling of personal user data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica without users’ knowledge, according to a person familiar with the matter. The FTC will be sending a letter to the company, another person said. Facebook slumped on the news, extending Monday’s decline. The FTC is the lead US agency for enforcing companies’ adherence to their own privacy policies and could fine the company into the millions of dollars if it finds Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree." Bloomberg also reported that New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced on Tuesday that he and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey had sent a demand letter to Facebook as part of a joint probe stemming from the fallout. Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen announced his own probe Monday. Bloomberg says that : "Facebook will be confronting immediate demands by Congress. In addition to the briefings, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wants to hear testimony from Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said any decision about calling Zuckerberg to appear before the panel is farther off. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who also serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that she has 'grown increasingly concerned as we’re learning more and more about the manipulation of data, the harvesting of data from Facebook, the ads that were placed to sow the seeds of discord in this country.' The panel has previously heard testimony into Russia’s use of Facebook to attempt to meddle in the 2016 election. 'I believe that Facebook, Twitter, the other social media platforms have a lot of questions to answer,' she said." • Bloomberg reprots that Facebook signed an FTC Consent Decree in 2011. Under the terms of the 2011 FTC settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of its resolution of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time. If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company more than $40,000 a day per violation. Facebook previously said in a statement it rejects "any suggestion of violation of the consent decree." • Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, tried t-o turn the affair into an attack on Trump, saying in a statement that that it would "be helpful for Facebook to testify about how the company protects user privacy and what steps it’s taking to combat bad actors. We have a lot of questions about how this information was used, whether it was given to Russia and whether Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign communicated with WikiLeaks." • WikiLeaks?? -- Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive officer faced questions during a meeting with the House Intelligence Committee in December about whether he sought material from WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that was stolen from computers of the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, who chaired Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, according ot Bloomberg. • • • CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA AND THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN. White House spokesman Raj Shah said Tuesday that President Trump “believes that Americans’ privacy should be protected” and supports federal investigations into the incident. “If Congress wants to look into the matter or other agencies want to look into the matter, we welcome that," Shah said on Fox News. • American Thinker's Rick Moran proposed the pro-Trump arguments, writing on Sunday that : "On the surface, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica (CA) face-off is fairly straightforward : big tech vs. big data. But what happens if big tech was in bed with big data? What if Facebook's highly touted "privacy" efforts were nothing but a sham? And why is the use personal information of 50 million Facebook acounts being called "a breach"?....if you dig a little further, you find that Facebook actually worked with CA. Despite Facebook’s concerns in 2015, the social network continued to work with Cambridge Analytica. During the presidential election, Facebook employees assisting Donald Trump’s digital operation worked in the same office as Cambridge Analytica workers, according to a video by the BBC. One former Cambridge employee, Joseph Chancellor, continues to work at Facebook as a user-experience researcher, according to Facebook’s public website. Until 2015, Facebook allowed developers to use data harvested from apps available on the website. CA developed an app called 'Thisisyourdigitallife.' It was just one of several interesting apps that 'predicted' personality traits based on your 'likes' and other social media data. CA did absolutely nothing wrong when 270,000 Facebook users downloaded the app, giving the company access to not only some personal data of those who downloaded it, but their Facebook 'friends' as well. Estimates put the number of Facebook accounts that were mined for data at 50 million. But the problem is how CA used that data and whether they hung on to it despite promising to delete it." • Democrat Senator Mark Warner calls the online political advertising market "essentially the Wild West. Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive microtargeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency.” • The Trump campaign has been singled out by the media because Cambridge Analytica was funded by Trump supporter and hedge fund executive Robert Mercer, and once had on its board the President’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica has denied wrongdoing, but has said its “psychometric profiles” could predict the personality and political leanings of most US voters : “We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted.” That was CAMAL's Saturday statement. • Government scrutiny in the US and UK has skyrocketed not because was illegal, but becasue it scares them. CAMAL claims that they can predict voter behavior are almost certainly grossly exaggerated, if not a bunch of snake oil, says Rick Moran : "What they can do with all that data is find your likes and dislikes and precisely target ads and messages. How much 'persuasion' is involved is unknown. For instance, the idea that Russian-bought ads on Facebook won the election for Trump is pretty dumb -- but it sounds good on TV and makes Hillary Clinton feel better. Whether it's the truth is doubtful. I think Senator Warner is right. The sort of data mining is frightening when all things are considered. Facebook should suffer the consequences of their lax privacy policies and change them to make it harder for developers to access the kinds of data that Cambridge Analytica was able to utilize." Moran says : "Maybe I’m missing something since I’m not on Facebook, but isn’t the whole market value of Facebook based upon its ability to exploit its database of personal information for the purpose of influencing consumers on behalf of advertisers? Why would targeted advertising for elections be any different? And weren’t the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 lauded for their sophisticated use of digital and social media, and didn’t the DNC and Hillary’s campaign geniuses attempt to build upon that and take the use of social media to a more advanced level?" • That is the Swamp at work. ProgDems are eager to accuse Donald Trump of using illegally obrtained data to target voters, but when that same tactic was used by Obama or Hillary, it was "genius." • Moran raises another piece of Swamp duplicity aimed at sticking it to Trump : "And I don’t understand why involvement of foreign persons in Cambridge Analytica would all of a sudden be this enormous and shocking issue. Wasn’t the individual who was secretly hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign via cutouts to create the dossier that was weaponized against the Trump campaign, a guy named Christopher Steele, a foreigner, albeit from a friendly country?" • As all of us, Rick Moran acknowledges that "Cambridge Analytica may have obtained the data from Facebook under false pretenses. But wouldn’t that be an issue to be resolved or litigated by the two parties? What would have prevented either campaign from paying Facebook directly to exploit its social media database capabilities to try to win votes? Doesn’t everyone do that when they pay for targeted advertisements?....is it possible that Facebook has no foreign computer geniuses working for it? Is it possible that Facebook doesn’t operate in and make money in other countries as Cambridge Analytica apparently does?" • All good questions. And, they are meant to point out the Swamp's double dealing and double standards that are routinely applied to Obama and Hillary vs Donald Trump. The ProgDem porpagandist Washington Post ran a headline on Saturday that read : "Trump campaign consultant took data about millions of users without their knowledge." • • • DEAR READERS, Facebook has piously stated : "In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list." But, it took Facebook until Friday, MArch 17, 2018, to ban Kogan, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and a former Cambridge employee for improperly sharing the data and failing to destroy it after concerns arose about it in 2015. Facebook had asked the parties back then to certify they would not abuse data, but it did not take further action beyond that warning. And, Facebook continued to work with Cambridge Analytica -- during the 2016 presidential election, Facebook employees assisting Donald Trump’s digital operation worked in the same office as Cambridge Analytica workers, according to the BBC. • Despite years of reported abuse of Facebook data by developers, Facebook’s processes for dealing with developers who broke the company’s rules were lax -- no audits and no steps to ensure that data wrongfully obtained was returned or deleted. • The very idea that data, once obtained by anyone for any reason is "deleted" is ludicrous. We live in the data-community age where all data is hoarded and used to multiple purposes without consent by anyone. • So, let's honest about Facebook trying to retrieve data. It was never going to happen, and Facebook knew it. In fact, based on all the reports available about Facebook and apps developers who used Facebook data, it seems that Facebook had a financial interest in the data being taken, including "friends" data being harvested and hoarded, because Facebook got a 30% cut of any profits the apps generated. So why would Facebook want to restrict developers from harvesting all the Facebook data it could find??? And, all this was done, at least as to Kogan, his company Global Science Research, and Cambridge Analytica AFTER Facebook has signed a Consent Decree with the FTC in 2011. Facebook’s subsequent actions may have run afoul of its 2011 Consent Decree specifying that Facebook must give consumers clear and prominent notice and obtain their express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established. Facebook may play 'innocent,' but it is not. • And, to get right down to it, CAMAL entered the US political market in 2015, not for Donald Trump but by working on what was touted at the time as a groundbreaking voter outreach effort on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz. At first, Cruz campaign officials credited Cambridge’s “psychographic targeting” techniques -- including its use of Facebook data -- with pushing Cruz to the top tier of presidential hopefuls. But later, some officials expressed disappointment in some of Cambridge’s work, and its work for the Cruz campaign ultimately proved uneven, according to campaign officials, who said that while the firm’s data scientists were impressive, the psychographic analysis did not bear fruit as hoped. • Cambridge Analytica then moved on to serve as the Trump campaign’s data-science provider. While company officials said they did not have sufficient time to employ psychographics in the Trump campaign, they did data modeling and polling that showed Trump’s strength in the industrial Midwest, shaping a homestretch strategy that led to his upset wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. • We may take that as self-serving CAMAL marketing. • And, SCL, Cambridge’s parent company, says it has worked in 100 countries, including serving military clients with techniques in “soft power,” or persuasion. Nix described it as a modern-day upgrade of early efforts to win over a foreign population by dropping propaganda leaflets from the air. The clients? One was NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, which hired SCL to conduct a two-month training session in 2015 at its Riga, Latvia, facility for NATO personnel, followed by additional sessions in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, officials said. The nearly $1 million contract was financed by Canada, as part of its support to help NATO allies counter Russia’s influence in the region. Another early client needed to identify groups of “persuadables,” and then target them with tailored messages, so SCL began testing the technique on health and development campaigns in Britain in the early 1990s, then branched out into international political consulting and later defense contracting. In a 2015 article for a NATO publication, Steve Tatham, a British military psychological operations expert who leads SCL’s defense business outside of the United States, explained that one of the benefits of using the company’s techniques is that it “can be undertaken covertly. Audience groups are not necessarily aware that they are the research subjects and government’s role and/or third parties can be invisible.” • Welcome to the data age. In this messy history of who used what data gotten how for which purposes, one thing is true. The world has entrusted the its worldwide internet communications system to a bunch of wunderkids in teeshirts. That these 20-somethings do not understand the importance of privacy is completely reasonable -- they are, after all, the ones who worked out how to eliminate privacy. Whether the CAMAL-Faceboook scandal will result in actual changes in the use of Facebook platform data remains to be seen. Will Facebook survive? Probably, but perhaps in a tightly regulated fashion that the wunderkids will then set out to avoid. If an FTC Consent Decree means nothing to them, why would a federal law??? • In the meantime, the internet is beginning to fill up with advice about how to de-Facebook yourself. Go to < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely > if you want the exact advice. It isn't easy, but you can actually get out of Facebook and "eliminate" your profile and other data -- I'm not sure I totally believe that last bit -- it will ONLY take until September 2018 -- right, 6 months -- and you will be Facebook-free to pursue your life without data spies watching over your unsuspecting shoulder. • Talk about letting the children run the world -- we really fell into it this time. Will we learn our lesson???