How the Trump campaign benefitted from a Facebook breach (The 3:59, Ep. 371)

[MUSIC]. Welcome to the 3:59, I am Roger Cheng. I am Ben Fox Robin. I am [UNKNOWN]. Facebook isn't trouble again, the cabinet disclosed that user data being used was being used by Campbridge Analytica a firm used by the Donald Trump campaign to help target voters. Another big question is how the data got transferred from this. It's a seemingly innocuous app to Cambridge Analytica. Alfred, you're here to break this down. What happened here? Yeah, so you know those quizzes that you always take on Facebook, that's like, here's what your personality is? I love those quizzes! Yeah, so that's where all the data came from. So when you sign up for those quizzes, you're basically giving permission to these apps, like they can see your profile. They can see your political affilitation. They can see who your friend Friends are and things like that. That's something that goes across the board for all third party apps that are on Facebook. Right. And the idea is they're in agreement with Facebook. Facebook allows them to exist on their website. But in return they can't use this information for any political purpose or anything like that. You can still use it for advertising purposes which is why they make money. And the app itself on the site was like, this is your digital life? Yeah. Yeah. How long are they able to scrape your data, Is this for a week? Or is it you do the app [CROSSTALK] Yeah, they have it. They pretty much have it. And they usually sell it to advertisers, but in this scenario, they were able to keep it and then somehow it I got to Cambridge Analytica through the person that developed this app, and they used it for political purposes. When Facebook found out they told them, hey you have to delete this. And they said they did, and then on Friday they made the announcement. So, actually they didn't and that's why we're banning them for this. Right. So, I mean, look, we had a bunch of coverage over the weekend. I think the better question being asked is, Facebook is taking pains to kind of blame this app. They're trying to blame Cambridge Analytica, but ultimately I think a lot of the debate now is whether or not Facebook is to blame for this, right? I mean, I would make the argument that they are. The fact that it was desgined in this way that There's really no check for them to see what they're using that data for. Yeah. In the first place. They're very optimistic about how people are using data taken off of Facebook. They are like, okay, just don't use this for any political purposes, or they don't have any Safety checks or something like that. Do you really not think that if somebody wants to find out what their personality color is, why would they need to know my political affiliation for something like that? [CROSSTALK] And that was a big thing, it wasn't just taking your data but all your friends data and a total of 15 million, Users were effected right? Yep. All right, so scary stuff. Next up Bloomberg's report that Apples working on it's own Micro LED display. Now Micro LED we saw an example of this at Samsung, the wall, that giant 146 inch A foot. Television doesn't look so micro to me. What makes it MicroLED? That's the thing, the technology right now it's really difficult to shrink all that stuff. It's actually why Samsung had this giant wall. They couldn't quite get it down to phone size. And so if Apple's able to actually use this technology and get it down to the size for phones, that's actually a huge breakthrough. They could mean that Apple would break its independece from suppliers like LG and Sumsang which already supply LCD screens as well as older screens to IPhones. Now according to the report importantly you don't hold your brother on this one yet, it's expected to show up. In wearables, and unlikely to reach the iPhone in at least 3 to 5 years. Yeah, there's a lot of challenges here. Even ramp up production for the iPhone, I mean, it would take years and billions of investment. Having a facility to actually make the stuff. Yeah, and it's also important to remember they did a huge investment in Sapphire. Yep. Potential displays, like the display covers, and that never came to fruition. It's interesting to hear that they're doing this, but there's no telling whether it's actually gonna happen. All right, for more on these stories, check us out at Cnet. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]