<story><title>How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked</title><url>http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/this-is-how-cambridge-analyticas-facebook-targeting-model-really-worked-according-to-the-person-who-built-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>etiam</author><text>Spoiler warning. Article punchline ahead.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The whole point of a dimension reduction model is to mathematically represent the data in simpler form. It’s as if Cambridge Analytica took a very high-resolution photograph, resized it to be smaller, and then deleted the original. The photo still exists — and as long as Cambridge Analytica’s models exist, the data effectively does too.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s an eloquent piece of explanation of a very important point.
And apropos the discussion about privacy legislation, it&amp;#x27;s also going to be a very interesting point. Will the Cambridge Analyticas of the world be able to claim they have held on to no personal data, when strictly speaking the raw data has indeed been deleted after being used to create a derivative work that can for all important purposes be used to recreate the original?
Assuming I find out I&amp;#x27;m being profiled and demand to have my data removed, will society grant me rights to have derivative forms removed or adjusted too?
I&amp;#x27;m somewhat pessimistic that legal hairsplitting about matters like these will make enforcement very difficult.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked</title><url>http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/this-is-how-cambridge-analyticas-facebook-targeting-model-really-worked-according-to-the-person-who-built-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emodendroket</author><text>I am really puzzled by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  It&amp;#x27;s not particularly savory, but is there something happening here that it wasn&amp;#x27;t basically already known about how Facebook worked?  By the protests of their own executive, the system was working as designed, and at worst Cambridge Analytica misled them about how they intended to use the data, right?  There was no actual security breach here, as far as I can understand it.</text></comment>