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DL 207

The Great Hack

Published: 2019-07-27 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to issue 207. The great hack.

Hi all, my name is Ian O'Byrne and welcome to Digitally Literate. In this newsletter I distill the news of the week in technology into an easy-to-read resource. Thank you for reading.

This week I worked on a number of things in the background. More info coming soon.

This week's issue will be a deepdive. Buckle up. :)

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

In this newsletter, I've been actively questioning the role of technology as it disrupts democratic processes. Netflix's new documentary, The Great Hack will hopefully make you think a bit more deeply about your digital footprint.

The documentary provides a deep dive into the world of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and copious amounts of money. I also love the fact that the whole film begins as you follow David Carroll as he uses legal means to try and retrieve the data that Cambridge Analytica has collected about him.

Do yourself a favor. Stop reading this newsletter. Go watch the documentary. Come back after you've finished. I have some questions.

The Great Hack succeeds by making abstract data rights concrete through Carroll's personal quest. Most people can't visualize what "harvested data" means; watching someone fight legal battles across continents to see their own profile makes the stakes tangible. The documentary's strength is humanizing both sides—showing Cambridge Analytica employees who believed they were doing legitimate political work, not villains twirling mustaches. This complexity matters: the system that enabled election manipulation wasn't built by cartoon evil but by ordinary business decisions, optimizing for engagement, growth, and profit without considering democratic consequences.

📚 Read

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday announced that Facebook agreed to pay a $5 billion fine over privacy violations and its failure to inform tens of millions of users about a data leak that happened years ago. The fine is the largest the US regulator has levied against a tech company.

To prevent Facebook from deceiving its users about privacy in the future, the FTC's new 20-year settlement order overhauls the way the company makes privacy decisions by boosting the transparency of decision making and holding Facebook accountable via overlapping channels of compliance.

This fine is primarily a response to Facebook's actions as part of the Cambridge Analytica "data breach." The FTC also announced today separate law enforcement actions against Cambridge Analytica.

This fine will go directly into the U.S. Treasury's General Fund. The $5 billion is a fraction of Facebook's overall revenue, representing approximately 9% of the company's 2018 revenue.

The "record fine" framing obscures economic reality: $5 billion sounds enormous but represents quarterly profit, not existential threat. Facebook's stock rose on the announcement—investors understood the settlement as manageable cost, not fundamental business change. The 20-year oversight sounds serious until you realize enforcement requires ongoing government will that administration changes can undermine. The fine going to Treasury rather than affected users means no direct restitution. This is what regulatory capture looks like: penalties calibrated to appear significant while remaining absorbable, with compliance mechanisms that depend on the regulated party's good faith.

The social network has also agreed to pay the US Securities and Exchange Commission $100 million over charges of making "misleading disclosures" over the risk of abusing users' data.

The full complaint from the SEC holds a number of damning details about Facebook's actions. Specifically, Facebook ignored warnings about "sketchy" Cambridge Analytica in 2015. You should also skim this Twitter thread from Jason Kint as he unpacks the complaint.

Even though this is only a fraction of the settlement with the FTC, I believe the SEC complaint is much more important. I believe that this was not a "data breach." Facebook was doing what Facebook does. They collect and archive your data, and then sell it off to others. When this all comes to light, the social network deflects, obfuscates, and dissembles.

The SEC complaint matters more than the FTC fine because it documents knowing misconduct. Facebook employees flagged Cambridge Analytica as problematic in 2015—three years before public scandal—and leadership ignored warnings. This transforms the narrative from "we didn't know" to "we knew and didn't care." The "misleading disclosures" charge means Facebook told investors risks were hypothetical while knowing they were actual. The "data breach" framing Facebook prefers suggests external attack; the reality is intentional business practice that became embarrassing. What Cambridge Analytica did with data was what Facebook's platform enabled by design.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Thursday that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged.

The heavily redacted report, titled, "Russian Efforts Against Election Infrastructure" is the first volume the committee has publicly released, after more than 200 witness interviews and the collection and review of nearly 400,000 documents. Subsequent volumes will deal with Russia's effort to use social media and disinformation to influence voters.

When I talk about online disinformation campaigns, family & friends give me an eye roll with comments like "Uhhh…Russia." Regardless of political tribes, we need to acknowledge that the US (& other nations) have been under attack using social media & other tools to influence our perspectives.

The "all 50 states" finding demolishes any narrative that Russian interference was limited or incidental. This was systematic reconnaissance of American election infrastructure—probing for vulnerabilities, testing defenses, gathering intelligence. The bipartisan Senate committee—not partisan actors—reached this conclusion after extensive investigation. The eye-roll response reflects successful information warfare: when facts become associated with partisan positions, acknowledging them feels like taking sides. But election infrastructure security shouldn't be tribal. Foreign actors probing voting systems is threat regardless of which party benefits or suffers.

What's your screenome? "Screenome" is a play on the word "genome," which refers to the unique set of genetic material that every living organism contains.

In a paper published in the journal Human-Computer Interaction, social scientists at Stanford define a screenome as "the record of individual experiences represented as a sequence of screens that people view and interact with over time."

HOW you interact might be more important than HOW LONG.

The screenome concept advances screen time debates beyond crude duration measures. Two hours gaming with friends differs from two hours doomscrolling alone; creating content differs from passive consumption; intentional use differs from compulsive checking. The genome analogy suggests individual variation matters—the same screen exposure affects different people differently based on their particular patterns. This has research implications (measuring duration misses the point) and practical implications (blanket time limits ignore quality distinctions). The challenge: screenome measurement requires granular tracking that itself raises privacy concerns. How do we study screen interaction without surveilling it?

This post by Omri Gillath in the Scientific American discusses the recent trend of the "solomoon." Solomooning, according to recent news articles, is a new phenomenon in which just-marrieds take a post-wedding trip separately from each other.

The post goes on to share research by Gillath and colleagues as they examine disposability and the ways in which social media impacts intimacy with others.

Gillath crystalizes some of these challenges: "Technology is not going to stop or go away, so unless we start taking these implications seriously, we may wake up one day in the near future with a broken heart and without the relationships that are so vital to our wellbeing."

The "disposability" research connects technology to relationship patterns in concerning ways. Dating apps present endless options, potentially undermining commitment to any single person. Social media enables maintaining many weak ties at the expense of few deep ones. The solomoon example is striking: honeymoons traditionally celebrated union; solo versions celebrate individual needs. This isn't necessarily pathological—some couples may genuinely prefer separate vacations—but the pattern suggests technology-enabled individualism may be reshaping fundamental relationship expectations. Gillath's warning is clear: technological convenience in relationships may exact costs we're only beginning to understand.

🔨 Do

After watching the documentary and reviewing the stories I shared…are you ready to delete your Facebook account?

Probably not. As we've regularly discussed in this newsletter, technology regularly offers us reasons to stop using their products, apps, and services. Yet…we stick around for some reason.

If you're not going to delete your account…take some time and give it a good cleanse, or refresh.

Download your information from your settings. To download your information:

  1. Click at the top right of any Facebook page and select Settings
  2. Click Download a copy of your Facebook data at the bottom of General Account Settings
  3. Click Start My Archive

After that, test out two of the options shared in the post above (Facebook Timeline Cleaner and F___book Post Manager), to clean out your data.

I'm still deciding whether or not it is time to delete my Facebook account. I have been in the process of scaling back what the social network knows about me. I've been downloading and deleting all of my photos from the service. I've also refreshed my privacy settings as well. I'll test out the tools above…and a total purge may soon be in my future.

The cleanse approach acknowledges reality: most people won't delete Facebook despite knowing its problems. The alternative—reducing data exposure while maintaining account—is pragmatic harm reduction. Downloading your archive first matters: you maintain your memories while removing Facebook's access to them. The timeline cleaner tools address what manual deletion can't: years of accumulated posts, comments, and reactions that would take forever to remove individually. This gradual withdrawal represents middle path between full participation and complete exit, appropriate for those unwilling to lose network connections entirely.

🤔 Consider

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." — Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty in Blade Runner)

Hauer's iconic monologue connects to this issue's themes of data, memory, and mortality. Cambridge Analytica collected moments from millions of lives; those profiles persist even as the company dissolved. Our digital footprints outlive us in ways "tears in rain" never could. The question The Great Hack raises: who controls those moments, and what happens when they're weaponized against democracy itself?

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