UPDATE: Five thousand points of light:
David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, used British data protection laws last year to ask Cambridge Analytica to provide him with a rundown of what data had been gathered about him and how it was used to construct a detailed profile. [...]
Carroll’s lawyers filed a claim last Friday asking Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), to hand over all the data they have on the professor, as well as how they got it. According to the claim, Cambridge Analytica and SCL “by their own description, engage in the business of ‘behavioral microtargetting’ — the collating and/or creating and then selling of data profiles which are used for…targeted advertising and political campaigning.” Cambridge Analytica is said to use up to 5,000 data points to help construct their profiles.
“We have theories as to their process but part of my initial effort is to get disclosure so we can confirm what people knew,” Carroll said. “If it was Facebook likes as the single truth for the [Cambridge Analytica] algorithms or if there were other data sets, we need to figure that out.”
In late 2016, the German publication Das Magazine first ran a piece documenting how data firms could reliably predict users behavior based on their Facebook likes, which allows political firms to “micro-target” ads for very particular subsections of likely voters. Cambridge Analytica has previously said that it “abides by all relevant data protection laws and, just as importantly, the company’s core values of integrity, respect and honesty.” [...]
[italics added, link in original] The linked to item (pdf version) is worth study, and, past the cover sheets at the complaint text itself, at its p.5 the complaint document expressed concern that the data collection/selling firm's response was incomplete; with the five thousand points of light being cited per item paragraph 19:
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Stick 'em, Professor. There does seem to be a wilful noncompliance with purported lawful requirements. From review of that document it appears Prof. Carroll used a requestee form, which quelled the hoot of an idea of submitting a download demand to Cambridge Analytica in the name of "Stephanie Clifford," a notion quelled by how personal identification was required and a processing fee imposed. But wouldn't that be a fun thing to do, indeed, even to anticipate?
Back to the five thousand points of light Think Progress report (online here, also linked to at start of the update), later in that item:
“Just the fact that they intended to do this — whether or not it worked — the impetus behind was to find people susceptible to propaganda and manipulation,” Carroll said. “It is truly disturbing.”
For Carroll, the important thing about his legal claim is that it sets up precedent for larger, wider suits against Cambridge Analytica. He was also extremely critical of Facebook’s role in allowing the data to be used. After initially trying to deny responsibility, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform last Friday, while on Monday Facebook’s shares plunged by 7 percent.
Carroll said that Facebook had a series of tough questions to answer about its relation with Cambridge Analytica, including why it currently employs Joseph Chancellor as a social psychologist. Chancellor previously worked with Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, and are believed to have harvested Facebook data which was ostensibly for academic research but was then shared with Cambridge Analytica.
[Multiple links in the original omitted.] Just think how the entire thing grows in importance when disclosure is that harvested personal data was provided to a sleaze like John Bolton. That should have any class action judicial award imposing exemplary (a/k/a punitive) damages, as a certainty.
May the effort grow big lasting legs.
For a perspective, however, consider the paragraph,
“Just the fact that they intended to do this — whether or not it worked — the impetus behind was to find people susceptible to propaganda and manipulation,” Carroll said. “It is truly disturbing.”
Readers may feel differently, but an "impetus [...] to find people susceptible to propaganda and manipulation," makes me think of FOX and MSNBC, and most recently, that Pence "America First" dog/pony tax-lies and possibly half-truths tour using Air Force Two to move about with the impetus to spread manipulative disinformation all over the nation's key cities to susceptible people (a/k/a the "super gullible").
Might there be a nice lawsuit for that propagandistic bluster-orgy too? Likely not, but the motive and actions arguably are as despicable, and somebody paid big bucks for fueling that big airplane's going all over creation. If not the public, who?
FURTHER: MSN news, here, presents CA-related links. Also, this MSN page presents a CNN coverage update of CA in the news.