> Choosing to give away your property to third parties is not comparable to being robbed. Facebook collected the data on unsuspecting users and proceeded to willingly give away the data. Thus Facebook is responsible for what comes out of it. There is no way around it, and it boggles the mind how this fact is brushed aside.
This crucially omits the part where Cambridge Analytica lied about the purposes of the data that was collected, and subsequently lied again when Facebook learned of this deception and demanded that the data Cambridge Analytica collected be deleted.
You're right this isn't like a bank robbery. This is more like someone securing a loan and then running off with the money. The bank's customers were harmed and one could criticize the bank's scrutiny of its debtors. But there nefarious party is the one deceiving the bank.
> This crucially omits the part where Cambridge Analytica lied about the purposes of the data that was collected,
This line of complaint is absurdly disingenuous. The problems that Facebook has created are not solved with EULAs, and Facebook's responsibility on having created this whole mess is not brushed aside by claiming that third parties did not clicked on the right checkbox when downloading Facebook's data.
This is precisely the type of PR problem that Facebook creates for themselves: this insistent, desperate, cynical, and pathetically inneficient way they try to pin the blame on others for the problem Facebook single-handedly created. Force-feeding this nonsense through astroturfing campaigns doesn't change the problem and the responsibility that Facebook has.
> The problems that Facebook has created are not solved with EULAs, and Facebook's responsibility on having created this whole mess is not brushed aside by claiming that third parties did not clicked on the right checkbox when downloading Facebook's data.
"Third parties did not click on the right checkbox when downloading Facebook's data" is not even remotely close to what happened. The fact that this perspective is so common is big party of why I doubt many people received coverage of the events that was even close to objective.
Alexandr Kogan was a senior research associate at the University of Cambirdge, and developed a personality quiz app that collected data that he claimed he would use for academic purposes. He subsequently used this data for commercial and political purposes, and when Facebook discovered this they revoked Kogan's app's access and demanded that he delete the data that he had collected. Kogan told Facebook that he had deleted the data when he had not done so. This wasn't third parties not checking the right box, this was a deliberate and involved plan evade Facebook's data use policies.
Only if you're being metaphorical in what you meant by "checking the wrong boxes". Kogan had a research position in psychology at a world renowned university. He leveraged this position to claim that his work was for academic research on psychology, and then turned around and used this data for commercial purposes. This isn't some random app developer checking a box when they publish their app. And when Facebook learned that these restrictions were being breached, they revoked Cambridge analytica's access and demanded that the data be destroyed.
This crucially omits the part where Cambridge Analytica lied about the purposes of the data that was collected, and subsequently lied again when Facebook learned of this deception and demanded that the data Cambridge Analytica collected be deleted.
You're right this isn't like a bank robbery. This is more like someone securing a loan and then running off with the money. The bank's customers were harmed and one could criticize the bank's scrutiny of its debtors. But there nefarious party is the one deceiving the bank.