You Might Be A Liberal If...

Are you at all concerned about the Trump campaign's use of some company neither you nor I had heard of before last week, Cambridge Analytica, to harvest data on internet users?

I'm not.

Were you concerned when the Obama campaign's Carol Davidsen says, before an adoring audience, that her campaign was able to "ingest" the entire social network (Facebook)?
(start at about 19:48)

Did you think Maxine Waters was crazy (which she is), lying, or telling the truth when she talked about the Obama campaign's database on Americans?

Did it matter to you then?

Does it matter to you that CBS News, no Republican shill, says that the Trump campaign "hardly used" the data they're said to have gotten, that they "phased out" the use of that data well before the election:

Cambridge Analytica, a data vendor for the Trump campaign, was phased out during the general election, CBS News reports. The firm is now at the center of reports that it exploited Facebook data and harvested millions of U.S. voter profiles  without user authorization during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data's reporting -- principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value. The profiling approach utilized by Cambridge Analytica allowed it to predict the voting likelihoods of individual people based on personality, the firm claimed.

If you are all concerned about Cambridge Analytica but not concerned about the Obama campaign's even worse doings, you might be a liberal.

Now here's the thing about Facebook: Facebook doesn't charge the average user for its service.  If you're getting something for free, it's not because a company is generous and kind--it's because you are what's being sold.  Your data.  Which you freely and willfully give them.

And how much does Facebook care about you and your privacy?  This much:

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach...

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”.

He added: “They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.”

And Mark Zuckerberg isn't a known conservative, knowwhatimean?

I don't know if he's serious or not, but Instapundit sometimes makes the argument that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and Amazon should be regulated as "common carriers".  Since liberals love regulation so much, they should be all for that.

Update, 3/25/18:  The NYTimes is on the case:

Hope lies, instead, with our power as citizens. We must demand that legislators and regulators get tougher. They should go after Facebook on antitrust grounds. Facebook is by far the dominant social platform in the United States, with 68 percent of American adults using it, according to the Pew Research Center. That means Facebook can gobble up potential competitors, as it already has with Instagram, and crowd out upstarts in fields such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

The Department of Justice should consider severing WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger from Facebook, much as it broke up AT&T in 1982. That breakup unleashed creativity, improved phone service and lowered prices. It also limited the political power of AT&T.