alt Hacker NewsThat can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:
https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...
Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...
Replies
I think you would be hard pressed to come up with any evidence for your assertion. First of all the UK is not a foreign adversary (quite the opposite). Secondly Facebook didn't sell data in that case, it was collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook's platform APIs (as described in your own link). In general Facebook doesn't sell data, their entire business model is based on having exclusive access to data from its platforms.
And the difference is that the US government can tell them to stop doing it.
> That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia.
I'm not sure they do that anymore, not in the current geopolitical climate and not with the DC ghouls having taken over the most sensitive parts of Meta the company (there were many posts on this web-forum about former CIA people and not only working at the highest levels inside of Meta).
This whole Cambridge Analytica thing is such a nothing burger - I have yet to be given a concise reason how it was anything other than targeted advertising. Something that happens day-in, day-out a billion times over on all our "western" platforms in the form of ads. And no, the fact that this data wasn't "consented to" doesn't mean anything other than being a technicality. If anything, I'd chalk the whole thing up to anti-Trump hysteria that happened around that time.
I assure you, if you read the opinion, that is indeed it, and the objection you raise about other instances of data collection not being targeted is addressed directly.