#remove her from here and focus on wylie

[laughter-loving-thalia]

Wylie had the potential to be the bestest boy and character in the entire series but we were robbed by Shannon's white-centric writing in the first books (arguably still here despite slightly more rep) and Keefe Sencen overhype existing. I'd like to see y'all try to rob this opinion out of my dead body.

Just... just let me ramble about Wylie for a bit. I need y'all to see what I see for his character.

Arguably, he has the most connections to the Neverseen vs Black Swan vs Council conflict. The Council took his father, then the Neverseen murdered his mother, and now the Black Swan is well on its way to take the last biological family member he cares about, Maruca.

Like, if there is anything Shannon can do to make Maruca's character interesting, and I hate to say this, is to utilise her as a thematic device for Wylie. Maruca is underdevelopped anyways and there is nothing Shannon can do to make her her own character at this point of the serie because the flour-savory foundations of her character are already deep-rooted by now.

Wylie was begging Sophie and the Black Swan not to let Maruca in their ranks as she is severely under-experienced and far too young but not one of them listened to his concerns because they could not resist the idea of adding another child soldier to do their job for them. He is forced to accept that she is risking her life and Shannon has foreshadowed Gisela making everyone regret this decision (or at least I hope it’s foreshadowing and not just pretty talk from Gisela). What if she takes Maruca like she took Tam? What if Maruca gets hurt or killed? Who is to blame for this, really? Gisela, Maruca... or the Black Swan who allowed this to happen and knew the risks??

[Can I just add that it was severely out of character for Sophie to let Maruca join? I don't give a fuck that Maruca is a Psyonipath, and neither should Sophie. Sophie is the girl who said abilities are severely overrated. Sophie is the girl who hates to put her friends in danger. Sophie is the girl who is dealing with PTSD from at least ten events in the series. Sophie is the girl who saw Tam getting kidnapped and enslaved, Biana getting tortured for Vespera's amusement, and Fitz suffering from a long-lasting leg injury because of Umber. Sophie, finally, is the girl who blamed herself for Wylie's losses. Legacy Sophie is arguably the worst written Sophie after Stellarlune Sophie.]

Wylie's trauma is so stupidly overlooked it hurts me so bad. He watched his mother fade away when he was 7-8. His dad was presumed dead and not even a funeral was allowed. He is essentially orphaned before the age of 10 and I fucking hate Rayni (and Shannon) for undermining his horrible childhood by the fact that he was adopted by a loving father. Anyone who knows two things about adoption will know that adopting past the critical period (2.5 y.o.) is extremely challenging because the child already has formed an attachment to his parents... and even if Tiergan was loving, how the fuck does that cancel out his trauma??? That would require professional help from a therapist and conscious steps towards healing. A hug is never going to change the fact that he, an elf supposed to live a carefree life, has had the concept of death since he was six years old.

Worse than the adoption nonsense, the romance bullshit. I hate Wylinh with all my soul. Not only does it have a terrible age gap, a problematic foundation from the start, and has the flavour of an undercooked chicken past its best-eaten-before date, but it is used as a justification to not show the healing arc of Wylie. Oh sure he was tortured for hours in a place he considered super safe on top of his childhood trauma, and his father will never be the father he knew again, but he is perfectly happy now! You wanna know why?? Because this underaged Asian girl plays water tricks with him sometimes. I wish this was a terrible joke. Fuck this.

And his relationships. Gosh, the potential. The missed opportunities are dozens with this one. Sophie, Fitz, Alden, Quinlin, Forkle, Oralie, Marella, Caprise, Gethen, Gisela, Umber, Edaline, Grady, Rayni... it could go on and on and on. Wylie is one of the characters with the biggest potential for intrapersonal conflict in the entire series and only 0.5% of them get explored! He has not a single meaningful interaction with 99% of the people I've just listed! You wanna know why? Wylie is not our main girl's love interest, he is not the white bad boy who makes underwear jokes and has messy blonde hair, therefore Shannon doesn't care. Shannon I love you but what the actual fuck.

I'm also very mad that he joined Team Valiant. Wylie should have been the neutral character. One that doesn't support the Neverseen, nor the Council, not even the Black Swan. Leave my boy heal in peace. I want him to refuse Livvy as a doctor or reject the Black Swan's efforts to protect him. I want him to feel betrayed by Tiergan being Black Swan all along (never said when he learned that, but he shouldn't be so acceptant imo).

And Fandom's take (I'm talking, his wiki page) on his character is infuriating. What do you mean "he has a tendency to hold grudges". No the fuck he doesn't??? He forgave Sophie super quickly and even I don't know why he would need to forgive anyone?? Like how is that a flaw, the people he hold "grudges" again fucking deserve it??? The Black Swan for not helping his mom and risking Maruca's life, the Neverseen for murdering his mom and torturing him? The Council for murdering his dad??? Bitch I'd hold "grudges" too. I hate the word grudges so much. It sounds like a petty school boy pouting in the corner and giving you the cold shoulder.

I wanna end with his character appearance. I'm so disappointed that Wylie was not described as attractive or handsome like every other boy was (or at least I don't remember him to be). Can I just say that he's beautiful? Someone had to say it.

His hairstyle, although an existing hairstyle among boys of colour, is a bit too basic and not elvish imo (nothing against cropped hair baddies but like silhouette speaking there's better) and I'm disappointed that it didn't change throughout the course of the story like Maruca's hairstyle did.

So I'm imagining Wylie with cornrows, adorned with intricate golden hair-pieces from his mother's shop. He wears dozens of rings, bracelets and necklaces with sun, stars and moon motifs. He still wears a nexus and insists that Tiergan does too. He is lean rather than buff, he doesn't wear capes. Blue, yellow and purple are his favourite colour.

i got an art commission of wylie endal! i got it from sheepshoof on instagram. they were so sweet and fun to work with 🫶

wylie is honestly one of my favorite characters. after fitz, he's probably my biggest fixation even though he doesn't appear very often lol. he's such a complex character, i love his anger so much. and he's so loyal and protective. i wish we got to see more of him.

[transkingoryx]

we fell in love in october (marellinh songfic)

Is this a songfic? Whatever, it was inspired by we fell in love in october by girl in red, I’m calling it a songfic. 

Pairing: Marellinh

word count: 936

Taglist: @definitely-a-living-human (let me know if you want to be added or removed!)

The fire crackled merrily in Marella’s hand, and Linh couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. She shook her head, condensing water out of the air, and formed it into an orb that hovered just above her hand. 

“Ready?” Marella asked with a grin, as if she didn’t already know. Linh nodded, smiling back at her. The smaller girl’s fingers danced, directing the flames to spread across the wooden floors of their training gym, filling the air with the smell of burnt wood. Marella looked so beautiful, silhouetted by the flames running up the wall behind her, the firelight dancing across her face. Stop it, you need to focus, she scolded herself.

Linh called on more water, pulling as much as she could from the barrels on the shelves and the air itself. She swept it up into a wave, swirling the water around the building, leaving herself and Marella completely untouched by it in a bubble of air surrounding them. She was keenly aware of how close she was to Marella. If she just moved forward a little, they’d be almost touching… No, she shouldn’t think like that. Linh and Marella were friends, and only that. Her silly crush had gone on long enough as it was. 

Linh distracted herself with thinking about how much better she was at controlling her Hydrokinesis than she used to be. Her time as The Girl of Many Floods wasn’t something she’d soon forget. 

When she was satisfied that all the fire had been extinguished, she released her hold on the water, letting it splash across the floor. The air suddenly felt drier and hotter, and the water began to diminish. When Marella had evaporated all of the water, she turned to Linh.

“I’m done for the day, that was kind of a lot,” Marella said with a shrug. 

“Definitely,” Linh agreed. “Want to come over to my house after practice?” 

“I thought your parents didn’t like it when you had friends over,” Marella recalled.

“Not Choralmere, Tiergan’s place,” Linh clarified. 

“Works for me,” Marella smiled. Linh pulled out her home crystal, and held it up to the light, creating a glittering beam stretching across the floor. She focused her concentration, and let the light whisk her and Marella away. 

When they arrived, they waved hello to Tiergan, who was talking to Wylie on his Imparter, and headed up to Linh’s room. 

“What if we went up to the roof?” Linh suggested. Marella agreed, and she opened the door leading to the balcony on the roof. 

“Ugh, it’s freezing,” Linh grimaced, wrapping her arms around herself to try to block out the chilly wind. Marella unclasped her cape, and draped it around Linh’s shoulders. 

“Better?” she smiled warmly.

“Yeah, thanks. But won’t you be cold?” 

“See for yourself,” Marella said with a laugh, taking Linh’s hand. It was all she could do to keep herself from blushing, the wind roaring in her ears and her heart beating so loud she was almost surprised that Marella couldn’t hear it. That was why it took her a little while to realize that Marella was warm, as if the fire she could call down from the sky ran through her veins instead of blood. She certainly acted like it. 

Linh held on tighter, the heat radiating off Marella like she herself was a roaring fire. Noting Linh’s reaction, Marella put an arm around her shoulders, and Linh leaned against her. 

The sun had begun to set, and the sky was streaked with pink and orange. 

“Wow,” Marella breathed. “Now I understand why you wanted to come up here. The view is beautiful.” 

Linh swallowed. “Just like you.”  

Marella gasped the tiniest bit, and met Linh’s eyes. They were so close now, their faces inches away from each other. Linh leaned in, and Marella made up the remaining distance, and their lips met. After several perfect seconds, Linh pulled away, unable to do anything but smile.  Marella was looking at her like she’d just seen the sunrise for the first time. 

“I guess Biana was right,” Marella laughed. “She kept telling me you liked me, but I didn’t think she was serious.” 

Linh’s heart skipped a beat. “So… you do like me?” 

“Linh, I just kissed you.” “I- I know, I just needed to hear it,” Linh stammered. 

Marella’s eyes sparkled. “I like you, Linh. I’ve liked you since I really talked to you for the first time, when we were getting ready for Nightfall, remember?” 

“Yeah,” Linh smiled, lost in thought. “Wow, that was almost a year ago.” 

“I know, right? I can’t believe how fast everything goes���” Marella said softly. The sun was over the horizon by this point, and the stars were beginning to peek out. It was almost night. Almost as if reading her mind, Marella snapped her fingers, and a small pile of wood in an indentation on the roof burst into flames, sending light and heat flickering across the rooftop. 

“That was fall too, right?” Linh asked.

“Yeah. It’s my favorite season,” Marella answered.

“Any particular reason why?”

“The leaves are so many different colors, and it’s cold but not too cold, warm but not too warm.”

“You’re right.”

A comfortable silence fell over them, and Linh stared off into the distance. 

“Hey, Linh?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you be my girlfriend?” Out of everything Marella could have said, that wasn’t what Linh was expecting to hear, but it was exactly what she wanted to hear. 

“Absolutely.” 

They sat like that for almost an hour, leaning on each other, and watching the stars. Linh never wanted it to end.

[nerdarchy-blog]

The follow up to 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything must indeed possess powerful magic to contain so much stuff in 192 pages — the exact page count of its predecessor according to Jeremy Crawford, principal rules designer of the game. The product of 18 months work the book includes material for Dungeons Masters and players of 5E D&D alike. I had an opportunity to join the press briefing with Crawford and Greg Tito, communications and press relations director for D&D and let me tell you, sitting on this was really exciting. Reading and hearing what players speculated on and wanting to say, “You’re all right! It’s all in the book. All the character options and new stuff you’re guessing about are inside!” So let’s get into Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

On the cover for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything Tasha holds an ornate grimoire covered with symbols from the planes of existence in stunning art by Magali Villeneuve.

A delightful conversation about 5E D&D

No sense burying the lead — all the options and fresh new modular content you thought might be in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is there. Subclasses for all the classes are in there. Alternate class features from the most popular Unearthed Arcana in the entirety of 5E D&D are in there. The artificer class is in there — including some tweaks, new infusions and the Armorer subclass that was loved by people, according to Crawford. The Aberrant Mind sorcerer, UA’s most highly rated content ever, is in there and so are many from the past year. Spell Versatility and new Beast Master Companions are in there and I know there’s untold numbers of players stoked to hear this. There’s new artwork for the Artillerist Artificer Specialist that was shared during the briefing too.

A human artificer balances his Eldritch Cannon on his shoulder as seen in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Art by Brian Valeza]

Like XGtE the book explores the titular character’s wonderfully complex point of view in comments on the content throughout, with nods to Tasha’s history in her comments and captions. One clue about Tasha’s mysterious origin reveals itself on the cover. The tattoo on her cheek is a chicken leg, which Crawford explained is an “echo of the chicken-legged hut that Baba Yaga lives in.”

A bunch of subclasses and class features only chicken scratches the surface of the scope of material. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is organized into four chapters. While perusing the material in the book readers learn more about Tasha and the lore surrounding her. Tasha’s life has involved the fantastic since the very beginning of her origins in the fey realms. As she became a brilliant and powerful wizard her adventures took her to other planes and dimensions so she is unfazed by beings of any sort, least of all her frenemy Mordenkainen.

Character options

Spells and magic items

Group patrons

Tools for Dungeon Masters

Customizing your origin is an important part of the development of the book and something the design team seems particularly proud of, for good reason. Players love the idea of more personalized character origin stories. I use This Is Your Life stuff from XGtE all the time and TCoE builds on that tremendously. Like, seriously a lot. The design goal was tools for players to create truly unique characters with amazingly magical origins and backstories.

This includes modifying traits during character creation to better reflect the story players want to tell and offers a lineage template with fill-in-the-blanks tools to totally personalize characters. The Lineage System introduces a new way to approach creating and playing characters and adventures in 5E D&D, a responsibility the design team takes very seriously as stewards of the game. During the press briefing Crawford and Tito explained how TCoE is one of multiple books demonstrating a shift in how D&D handles things like race.

Other changes include the removal of negative racial modifiers for certain races from Volo’s Guide to Monsters via errata. Crawford explained how their original intention for races like kobold and orc was as Monstrous Adventurers, separate from standard character options. This is why those options are included in their own section in VGtM along with options considered more powerful than standard in some cases, like yuan-ti and to a lesser extent goblins. Because this context is lost through the way so many players engage with 5E D&D through online tools and resources like D&D Beyond, it became a pain point for players and TCoE will include updated versions. Hooray for kobold and orc enthusiasts!

The Lineage System offers tools to create characters not bound by a species archetype. I love the way Crawford explained how this modular piece of content interacts with existing 5E D&D material. The core game, what is presented in the Player’s Handbook and other sources, illustrates an archetypal adventuring character like an elf. Choosing this option for your character represents playing Elfie McElferson in other words — the exact kind of elf that comes to mind when you think of D&D elves. The Lineage System gives players and DMs tools to disentangle characters’ personal traits with cultural traits. And worry not! The path to customization is very smooth according to Crawford, who emphasized it is not complicated at all.

Along with the new class options and alternate features players can customize how each class feels. This includes something that worms its way into the mind of every edition of D&D sooner or later.

Psionics! The Aberrant Mind is just one of the psionic themed subclasses from UA. Along with a few others, these psionic subclasses use a modifed version of the playtest mechanics, which Crawford described as “evolved.” I’m pretty middle of the road when it comes to psionics, neither thrilled to use them or abhorred by their inclusion in the game but I’ve got to say I really dug that Psionic Talent die so I hope that’s what he meant.

During the press briefing they did not get too deep into new spells and magic items in TCoE but there are some tidbits to share. For starters Tasha adds new spells of her own design to D&D canon. Tasha’s caustic brew and Tasha’s otherworldly guise are two mentioned and I’m excited to see more. Spells named for the wizards who created them evokes a sense of mystery and wonder in all D&D players and after all her incredible excursions and magical experimentation I’m certain Tasha’s influence on 5E D&D will be immense.

Spellcasters can boost their power with new spell focus magic items too, which sounds awesome. There’s got to be a magical cauldron, right? One of the magic items Crawford talked about sounds totally awesome — the Tarokka Deck. Not like, any old prophetic card deck though. This is THE Tarokka Deck, an artifact capable of trapping spirits. Can I tell you I lost track of what they said for a moment because I was daydreaming about a Ghostbusters inspired 5E D&D campaign.

Sidekicks (remember them?) get expanded in TCoE too. Resources to create your own customized sidekicks sounds like a lot of fun new toys to play with. When asked what the most surprising thing about the book is, Crawford revealed there’s a sidekick class. You can play as a Warrior, Expert or Spellcaster, which offers a slimmed down experience for perhaps new players or those looking for less complexity. This sounds awesome to me. I’ve used the Sidekicks content from UA several times and it is terrific, so more of that and more ways to use it can’t go wrong.

More than that though Crawford was surprised by “how much liberty players have to customize.” The Lineage System, tons of new class options and alternate features, spells, feats (wow I didn’t even mention those!) all combine to create more levers and dials players and DMs can use to tailor our game experiences and tell the kinds of stories we want with exactly the kinds of characters we imagine.

“Our work on the game is a delightful conversation with the community that never ends,” as Crawford put it. With tremendous amounts of fun, cool sounding new content like they’re brewing up in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, I don’t doubt it.

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A tiefling sorcerer levitates several feet off the ground. [Art by Kieran Yanner]

A lineup of four homunculus servants. [Art by Irina Nordsol]

The young wizard Tasha studies her spellbook in front of Baba Yaga’s hut. Looming nearby is Baba Yaga herself, watching her adopted daughter intently. [Art by Brian Valeza]

This is a massive tome holding secrets of ultimate evil. The exterior of the book reflects the evil within. The covers are made of dark demon scales, which are trimmed in rune-carved metal shaped to look like demonic claws. [Art by David Sladek]

Two wood elf lads swim in a glittering pond, which is fed by a waterfall that pours out of a face carved in a bluff. [Art by Robin Olausson]

A youthful merfolk king lounges on his throne underwater. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Using a psychic spell, a wizard battles a troglodyte underground. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Sidekicks will be expanded in the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

An alternate cover art version is only available through local game stores. [Art by Wylie Beckert]

A heavy, ominous storm brews at sea as clouds gather. But these are not normal storm clouds. These have formed into a churning mass of enormous skulls in the sky. [Art by Titus Lunter]

Oh! Are you still here? One last thing I’ll mention is the section on Magical Environments includes Eldritch Storms, magical fruits and magical roads, a Mirror Realm and a Mimic Colony. Stay nerdy.

Congrats! That new #DnD stuff you thought would be in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is in there. #staynerdy The follow up to 2017's Xanathar's Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming…

[sheminecrafts]

How Facebook has reacted since the data misuse scandal broke

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned by US lawmakers today about the “use and abuse of data” — following weeks of breaking news about a data misuse scandal dating back to 2014.

Facebook responds to data misuse

The Guardian published its first story linking Cambridge Analytica and Facebook user data in December 2015. The newspaper reported that the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”.

Post-publication, Facebook released just a few words to the newspaper — claiming it was “carefully investigating this situation”.

Yet more than a year passed with Facebook seemingly doing nothing to limit third party access to user data nor to offer more transparent signposting on how its platform could be — and was being — used for political campaigns.

Through 2015 Facebook had actually been ramping up its internal focus on elections as a revenue generating opportunity — growing the headcount of staff working directly with politicians to encourage them to use its platform and tools for campaigning. So it can hardly claim it wasn’t aware of the value of user data for political targeting.

Yet in November 2016 Zuckerberg publicly rubbished the idea that fake news spread via Facebook could influence political views — calling it a “pretty crazy idea”. This at the same time as Facebook the company was embedding its own staff with political campaigns to help them spread election messages.

Another company was also involved in the political ad targeting business. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica signed a contract with the Trump campaign. According to former employee Chris Wylie — who last month supplied documentary evidence to the UK parliament — it licensed Facebook users data for this purpose.

The data was acquired and processed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan whose personality quiz app, running on Facebook’s platform in 2014, was able to harvest personal data on tens of millions of users (a subset of which Kogan turned into psychological profiles for CA to use for targeting political messaging at US voters).

Cambridge Analytica has claimed it only licensed data on no more than 30M Facebook users — and has also claimed it didn’t actually use any of the data for the Trump campaign.

But this month Facebook confirmed that data on as many as 87M users was pulled via Kogan’s app.

What’s curious is that since March 17, 2018 — when the Guardian and New York Times published fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, estimating that around 50M Facebook users could have been affected — Facebook has released a steady stream of statements and updates, including committing to a raft of changes to tighten app permissions and privacy controls on its platform.

The timing of this deluge is not accidental. Facebook itself admits that many of the changes it’s announced since mid March were already in train — long planned compliance measures to respond to an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework, the GDPR.

If GDPR has a silver lining for Facebook — and a privacy regime which finally has teeth that can bite is not something you’d imagine the company would welcome — it’s that it can spin steps it’s having to make to comply with EU regulations as an alacritous and fine-grained response to a US political data scandal and try to generate  the impression it’s hyper sensitive to (now highly politicized) data privacy concerns.

Reader, the truth is far less glamorous. GDPR has been in the works for years and — like the Guardian’s original Cambridge Analytica scoop — its final text also arrived in December 2015.

On the GDPR prep front, in 2016 — during Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica ‘quiet period’ — the company itself told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support compliance.

Facebook and Zuckerberg really has EU regulators to thank for forcing it to do so much of the groundwork now underpinning its response to this its largest ever data scandal.

Below is a quick timeline of how Facebook has reacted since mid March — when the story morphed into a major public scandal…

March 16, 2018: Just before the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook quietly drops the news that it has finally suspended CA/SCL. Why it didn’t do this years earlier remains a key question

March 17: In an update on the CA suspension Facebook makes a big show of rejecting the notion that any user data was ‘breached’. “People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it writes

March 19: Facebook says it has hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. It subsequently confirms its investigators have left the company’s UK offices at the request of the national data watchdog which is running its own investigation into use of data analytics for political purposes. The UK’s information commissioner publicly warns the company its staff could compromise her investigation

March 21: Zuckerberg announces further measures relating to the scandal — including a historical audit, saying apps and developers that do not agree to a “thorough audit” will be banned, and committing to tell all users whose data was misused. “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well,” he writes on Facebook.

He also says developers’ access to user data will be removed if people haven’t used the app in three months. And says Facebook will also reduce the data users give to an app when they sign in — to just “your name, profile photo, and email address”.

Facebook will also require developers to not only get approval but also “sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data”, he says.

Another change he announces in the post: Facebook will start showing users a tool at the top of the News Feed “to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data” and with “an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data”.

He concedes that while Facebook already had a tool to do this in its privacy settings people may not have seen or known that it existed.

These sorts of changes are very likely related to GDPR compliance.

Another change the company announces on this day is that it will expand its bug bounty program to enable people to report misuse of data.

It confirms that some of the changes it’s announced were already in the works as a result of the EU’s GDPR privacy framework — but adds: “This week’s events have accelerated our efforts”

March 25: Facebook apologizes for the data scandal with a full page ad in newspapers in the US and UK

March 28: Facebook announces changes to privacy settings to make them easier to find and use. It also says terms of services changes aimed at improving transparency are on the way — also all likely to be related to GDPR compliance

March 29: Facebook says it will close down a 2013 feature called Partner Categories — ending the background linking of its user data holdings with third party data held by major data brokers. Also very likely related to GDPR compliance

At the same time, in an update on parallel measures it’s taking to fight election interference, Facebook says it will launch a public archive in the summer showing “all ads that ran with a political label”. It specifies this will show the ad creative itself; how much money was spent on each ad; the number of impressions it received; and the demographic information about the audience reached. Ads will be displayed in the archive for four years after they ran

April 1: Facebook confirms to us that it is working on a certification tool that requires marketers using its Custom Audience ad targeting platform to guarantee email addresses were rightfully attained and users consented to their data being used them for marketing purposes — apparently attempting to tighten up its ad targeting system (again, GDPR is the likely driver for that)

April 3: Facebook releases the bulk app deletion tool Zuckerberg trailed as coming in the wake of the scandal — though this still doesn’t give users a select all option, but it makes the process a lot less tedious than it was.

It also announces culling a swathe of IRA Russian troll farm pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It adds that it will be updating its help center tool “in the next few weeks” to enable people to check whether they liked or followed one of these pages. It’s not clear whether it will also proactively push notifications to affected users

April 4: Facebook outs a rewrite of its T&Cs — again, likely a compliance measure to try to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements — making it clearer to users what information it collects and why. It doesn’t say why it took almost 15 years to come up with a plain English explainer of the user data it collects

April 4: Buried in an update on a range of measures to reduce data access on its platform — such as deleting Messenger users’ call and SMS metadata after a year, rather than retaining it — Facebook reveals it has disabled a search and account recovery tool after “malicious actors” abused the feature — warning that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities.

The company also reveals a breakdown of the top ten countries affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leakage, and subsequently reveals 2.7M of the affected users are EU citizens

April 6: Facebook says it will require admins of popular pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location — in an effort to fight disinformation on its platform. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked

April 9: Facebook says it will begin informing users if their data was passed to Cambridge Analytica from today by dropping a notification into the News Feed.

It also offers a tool where people can do a manual check

April 9: Facebook also announces an initiative aimed at helping social science researchers gauge the product’s impact on elections and political events.

The initiative is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Facebook says the researchers will be given access to “privacy-protected datasets” — though it does not detail how people’s data will be robustly anonymized — and says it will not have any right or review or approval on research findings prior to publication.

Zuckerberg claims the election research commission will be “independent” of Facebook and will define the research agenda, soliciting research on the effects of social media on elections and democracy

April 10: Per its earlier announcement, Facebook begins blocking apps from accessing user data 90 days after non-use. It also rolls out the earlier trailed updates to its bug bounty program

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned by US lawmakers today about the “use and abuse of data” — following weeks of breaking news about a data misuse scandal dating back to 2014.

Facebook responds to data misuse

The Guardian published its first story linking Cambridge Analytica and Facebook user data in December 2015. The newspaper reported that the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”.

Post-publication, Facebook released just a few words to the newspaper — claiming it was “carefully investigating this situation”.

Yet more than a year passed with Facebook seemingly doing nothing to limit third party access to user data nor to offer more transparent signposting on how its platform could be — and was being — used for political campaigns.

Through 2015 Facebook had actually been ramping up its internal focus on elections as a revenue generating opportunity — growing the headcount of staff working directly with politicians to encourage them to use its platform and tools for campaigning. So it can hardly claim it wasn’t aware of the value of user data for political targeting.

Yet in November 2016 Zuckerberg publicly rubbished the idea that fake news spread via Facebook could influence political views — calling it a “pretty crazy idea”. This at the same time as Facebook the company was embedding its own staff with political campaigns to help them spread election messages.

Another company was also involved in the political ad targeting business. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica signed a contract with the Trump campaign. According to former employee Chris Wylie — who last month supplied documentary evidence to the UK parliament — it licensed Facebook users data for this purpose.

The data was acquired and processed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan whose personality quiz app, running on Facebook’s platform in 2014, was able to harvest personal data on tens of millions of users (a subset of which Kogan turned into psychological profiles for CA to use for targeting political messaging at US voters).

Cambridge Analytica has claimed it only licensed data on no more than 30M Facebook users — and has also claimed it didn’t actually use any of the data for the Trump campaign.

But this month Facebook confirmed that data on as many as 87M users was pulled via Kogan’s app.

What’s curious is that since March 17, 2018 — when the Guardian and New York Times published fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, estimating that around 50M Facebook users could have been affected — Facebook has released a steady stream of statements and updates, including committing to a raft of changes to tighten app permissions and privacy controls on its platform.

The timing of this deluge is not accidental. Facebook itself admits that many of the changes it’s announced since mid March were already in train — long planned compliance measures to respond to an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework, the GDPR.

If GDPR has a silver lining for Facebook — and a privacy regime which finally has teeth that can bite is not something you’d imagine the company would welcome — it’s that it can spin steps it’s having to make to comply with EU regulations as an alacritous and fine-grained response to a US political data scandal and try to generate  the impression it’s hyper sensitive to (now highly politicized) data privacy concerns.

Reader, the truth is far less glamorous. GDPR has been in the works for years and — like the Guardian’s original Cambridge Analytica scoop — its final text also arrived in December 2015.

On the GDPR prep front, in 2016 — during Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica ‘quiet period’ — the company itself told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support compliance.

Facebook and Zuckerberg really has EU regulators to thank for forcing it to do so much of the groundwork now underpinning its response to this its largest ever data scandal.

Below is a quick timeline of how Facebook has reacted since mid March — when the story morphed into a major public scandal…

March 16, 2018: Just before the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook quietly drops the news that it has finally suspended CA/SCL. Why it didn’t do this years earlier remains a key question

March 17: In an update on the CA suspension Facebook makes a big show of rejecting the notion that any user data was ‘breached’. “People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it writes

March 19: Facebook says it has hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. It subsequently confirms its investigators have left the company’s UK offices at the request of the national data watchdog which is running its own investigation into use of data analytics for political purposes. The UK’s information commissioner publicly warns the company its staff could compromise her investigation

March 21: Zuckerberg announces further measures relating to the scandal — including a historical audit, saying apps and developers that do not agree to a “thorough audit” will be banned, and committing to tell all users whose data was misused. “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well,” he writes on Facebook.

He also says developers’ access to user data will be removed if people haven’t used the app in three months. And says Facebook will also reduce the data users give to an app when they sign in — to just “your name, profile photo, and email address”.

Facebook will also require developers to not only get approval but also “sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data”, he says.

Another change he announces in the post: Facebook will start showing users a tool at the top of the News Feed “to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data” and with “an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data”.

He concedes that while Facebook already had a tool to do this in its privacy settings people may not have seen or known that it existed.

These sorts of changes are very likely related to GDPR compliance.

Another change the company announces on this day is that it will expand its bug bounty program to enable people to report misuse of data.

It confirms that some of the changes it’s announced were already in the works as a result of the EU’s GDPR privacy framework — but adds: “This week’s events have accelerated our efforts”

March 25: Facebook apologizes for the data scandal with a full page ad in newspapers in the US and UK

March 28: Facebook announces changes to privacy settings to make them easier to find and use. It also says terms of services changes aimed at improving transparency are on the way — also all likely to be related to GDPR compliance

March 29: Facebook says it will close down a 2013 feature called Partner Categories — ending the background linking of its user data holdings with third party data held by major data brokers. Also very likely related to GDPR compliance

At the same time, in an update on parallel measures it’s taking to fight election interference, Facebook says it will launch a public archive in the summer showing “all ads that ran with a political label”. It specifies this will show the ad creative itself; how much money was spent on each ad; the number of impressions it received; and the demographic information about the audience reached. Ads will be displayed in the archive for four years after they ran

April 1: Facebook confirms to us that it is working on a certification tool that requires marketers using its Custom Audience ad targeting platform to guarantee email addresses were rightfully attained and users consented to their data being used them for marketing purposes — apparently attempting to tighten up its ad targeting system (again, GDPR is the likely driver for that)

April 3: Facebook releases the bulk app deletion tool Zuckerberg trailed as coming in the wake of the scandal — though this still doesn’t give users a select all option, but it makes the process a lot less tedious than it was.

It also announces culling a swathe of IRA Russian troll farm pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It adds that it will be updating its help center tool “in the next few weeks” to enable people to check whether they liked or followed one of these pages. It’s not clear whether it will also proactively push notifications to affected users

April 4: Facebook outs a rewrite of its T&Cs — again, likely a compliance measure to try to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements — making it clearer to users what information it collects and why. It doesn’t say why it took almost 15 years to come up with a plain English explainer of the user data it collects

April 4: Buried in an update on a range of measures to reduce data access on its platform — such as deleting Messenger users’ call and SMS metadata after a year, rather than retaining it — Facebook reveals it has disabled a search and account recovery tool after “malicious actors” abused the feature — warning that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities.

The company also reveals a breakdown of the top ten countries affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leakage, and subsequently reveals 2.7M of the affected users are EU citizens

April 6: Facebook says it will require admins of popular pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location — in an effort to fight disinformation on its platform. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked

April 9: Facebook says it will begin informing users if their data was passed to Cambridge Analytica from today by dropping a notification into the News Feed.

It also offers a tool where people can do a manual check

April 9: Facebook also announces an initiative aimed at helping social science researchers gauge the product’s impact on elections and political events.

The initiative is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Facebook says the researchers will be given access to “privacy-protected datasets” — though it does not detail how people’s data will be robustly anonymized — and says it will not have any right or review or approval on research findings prior to publication.

Zuckerberg claims the election research commission will be “independent” of Facebook and will define the research agenda, soliciting research on the effects of social media on elections and democracy

April 10: Per its earlier announcement, Facebook begins blocking apps from accessing user data 90 days after non-use. It also rolls out the earlier trailed updates to its bug bounty program

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How Facebook has reacted since the data misuse scandal broke

How Facebook has reacted since the data misuse scandal broke

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned by US lawmakers today about the “use and abuse of data” — following weeks of breaking news about a data misuse scandal dating back to 2014.

Facebook responds to data misuse

The Guardian published its first story linking Cambridge Analytica and Facebook user data in December 2015. The newspaper reported that the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”.

Post-publication, Facebook released just a few words to the newspaper — claiming it was “carefully investigating this situation”.

Yet more than a year passed with Facebook seemingly doing nothing to limit third party access to user data nor to offer more transparent signposting on how its platform could be — and was being — used for political campaigns.

Through 2015 Facebook had actually been ramping up its internal focus on elections as a revenue generating opportunity — growing the headcount of staff working directly with politicians to encourage them to use its platform and tools for campaigning. So it can hardly claim it wasn’t aware of the value of user data for political targeting.

Yet in November 2016 Zuckerberg publicly rubbished the idea that fake news spread via Facebook could influence political views — calling it a “pretty crazy idea”. This at the same time as Facebook the company was embedding its own staff with political campaigns to help them spread election messages.

Another company was also involved in the political ad targeting business. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica signed a contract with the Trump campaign. According to former employee Chris Wylie — who last month supplied documentary evidence to the UK parliament — it licensed Facebook users data for this purpose.

The data was acquired and processed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan whose personality quiz app, running on Facebook’s platform in 2014, was able to harvest personal data on tens of millions of users (a subset of which Kogan turned into psychological profiles for CA to use for targeting political messaging at US voters).

Cambridge Analytica has claimed it only licensed data on no more than 30M Facebook users — and has also claimed it didn’t actually use any of the data for the Trump campaign.

But this month Facebook confirmed that data on as many as 87M users was pulled via Kogan’s app.

What’s curious is that since March 17, 2018 — when the Guardian and New York Times published fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, estimating that around 50M Facebook users could have been affected — Facebook has released a steady stream of statements and updates, including committing to a raft of changes to tighten app permissions and privacy controls on its platform.

The timing of this deluge is not accidental. Facebook itself admits that many of the changes it’s announced since mid March were already in train — long planned compliance measures to respond to an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework, the GDPR.

If GDPR has a silver lining for Facebook — and a privacy regime which finally has teeth that can bite is not something you’d imagine the company would welcome — it’s that it can spin steps it’s having to make to comply with EU regulations as an alacritous and fine-grained response to a US political data scandal and try to generate  the impression it’s hyper sensitive to (now highly politicized) data privacy concerns.

Reader, the truth is far less glamorous. GDPR has been in the works for years and — like the Guardian’s original Cambridge Analytica scoop — its final text also arrived in December 2015.

On the GDPR prep front, in 2016 — during its Cambridge Analytica ‘quiet period’ — Facebook told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support compliance.

The company really has EU regulators to thank for forcing it to do so much of the groundwork now underpinning its response to this its largest ever data scandal.

Here’s a timeline of how the company has reacted since mid March — when the story morphed into a major public scandal.

March 16, 2018: Just before the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook quietly drops the news that it has finally suspended CA/SCL. Why it didn’t do this years earlier remains a key question

March 17: In an update on the CA suspension Facebook makes a big show of rejecting the notion that any user data was ‘breached’. “People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it writes

March 19: Facebook says it has hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. It subsequently confirms its investigators have left the company’s UK offices at the request of the national data watchdog which is running its own investigation into use of data analytics for political purposes. The UK’s information commissioner publicly warns the company its staff could compromise her investigation

March 21: Zuckerberg announces further measures relating to the scandal — including a historical audit, saying apps and developers that do not agree to a “thorough audit” will be banned, and committing to tell all users whose data was misused. “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well,” he writes on Facebook.

He also says developers’ access to user data will be removed if people haven’t used the app in three months. And says Facebook will also reduce the data users give to an app when they sign in — to just “your name, profile photo, and email address”.

Facebook will also require developers to not only get approval but also “sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data”, he says.

Another change he announces in the post: Facebook will start showing users a tool at the top of the News Feed “to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data” and with “an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data”.

He concedes that while Facebook already had a tool to do this in its privacy settings people may not have seen or known that it existed.

These sorts of changes are very likely related to GDPR compliance.

Another change the company announces on this day is that it will expand its bug bounty program to enable people to report misuse of data.

It confirms that some of the changes it’s announced were already in the works as a result of the EU’s GDPR privacy framework — but adds: “This week’s events have accelerated our efforts”

March 25: Facebook apologizes for the data scandal with a full page ad in newspapers in the US and UK

March 28: Facebook announces changes to privacy settings to make them easier to find and use. It also says terms of services changes aimed at improving transparency are on the way — also all likely to be related to GDPR compliance

March 29: Facebook says it will close down a 2013 feature called Partner Categories — ending the background linking of its user data holdings with third party data held by major data brokers. Also very likely related to GDPR compliance

At the same time, in an update on parallel measures it’s taking to fight election interference, Facebook says it will launch a public archive in the summer showing “all ads that ran with a political label”. It specifies this will show the ad creative itself; how much money was spent on each ad; the number of impressions it received; and the demographic information about the audience reached. Ads will be displayed in the archive for four years after they ran

April 1: Facebook confirms to us that it is working on a certification tool that requires marketers using its Custom Audience ad targeting platform to guarantee email addresses were rightfully attained and users consented to their data being used them for marketing purposes — apparently attempting to tighten up its ad targeting system (again, GDPR is the likely driver for that)

April 3: Facebook releases the bulk app deletion tool Zuckerberg trailed as coming in the wake of the scandal — though this still doesn’t give users a select all option, but it makes the process a lot less tedious than it was.

It also announces culling a swathe of IRA Russian troll farm pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It adds that it will be updating its help center tool “in the next few weeks” to enable people to check whether they liked or followed one of these pages. It’s not clear whether it will also proactively push notifications to affected users

April 4: Facebook outs a rewrite of its T&Cs — again, likely a compliance measure to try to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements — making it clearer to users what information it collects and why. It doesn’t say why it took almost 15 years to come up with a plain English explainer of the user data it collects

April 4: Buried in an update on a range of measures to reduce data access on its platform — such as deleting Messenger users’ call and SMS metadata after a year, rather than retaining it — Facebook reveals it has disabled a search and account recovery tool after “malicious actors” abused the feature — warning that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities.

The company also reveals a breakdown of the top ten countries affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leakage, and subsequently reveals 2.7M of the affected users are EU citizens

April 6: Facebook says it will require admins of popular pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location — in an effort to fight disinformation on its platform. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked

April 9: Facebook says it will begin informing users if their data was passed to Cambridge Analytica from today by dropping a notification into the News Feed.

It also offers a tool where people can do a manual check

April 9: Facebook also announces an initiative aimed at helping social science researchers gauge the product’s impact on elections and political events.

The initiative is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Facebook says the researchers will be given access to “privacy-protected datasets” — though it does not detail how people’s data will be robustly anonymized — and says it will not have any right or review or approval on research findings prior to publication.

Zuckerberg claims the election research commission will be “independent” of Facebook and will define the research agenda, soliciting research on the effects of social media on elections and democracy

April 10: Per its earlier announcement, Facebook begins blocking apps from accessing user data 90 days after non-use. It also rolls out the earlier trailed updates to its bug bounty program