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0 pointsdownandout8y ago0 comments

They got it by using the same technique that Obama did in 2008 and 2012. They got one of your friends to authorize their app, and then they were allowed to access most of the data about your friends that you could access. The only difference between CA and Obama is that Obama’s app was given special permission to blow through data collection limits enforced on all other apps, such that even though less than 1 million people authorized Obama to have their data, they had information on ~200 million people - the entire US social graph. The researcher that created the app at issue in the CA scandal, who eventually sold that data to CA years after the fact, only had access to about ~50 million profiles.

Both of these things were wrong, but it should have been a huge deal back in 2008 and again in 2012, when 4x the number of profiles were accessed and used, about 99.5% of which never authorized Obama to have or use their information.

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IAmEveryone8y ago· 2 in thread

There are, obviously similarities. Yet there are, I believe, also two major differences:

(a) This was 8 and 4 years earlier. A lot changed in that timeframe. While, yes, there were always concerns about privacy, the string of data leaks, and the increasingly obvious power of statistical methods for targeting, have had a strong effect on the general public's attitude towards the practice.

(b) The Obama campaign did not break their contract with Facebook. Facebook did apparently turn of their API limits, either because of sympathy or because that's just what they did for big clients back then (FarmVille got the same privilege). But in the end, it appears that nobody broke any rules back then.

Now this probably won't convince everybody. So let me say this: even if the reaction now is hypocritical, it seems everyone agrees that the current outrage is justified. If so, it would be foolish not take action now just because "your team" got caught while the other got away. After all, the chances of each party being advantaged by such practices going forward seem to be exactly equal.

(Not to mention the vastly larger universe of threats not involving the two US parties)

downandoutOP8y ago

The Obama campaign did not break their contract with Facebook.

While I generally agree with the rest of your comment, Obama did in fact break their contract with Facebook. The developer TOS said that any data obtained through the API was to be used exclusively for the purpose of the operation of your app. Unfortunately, by all accounts, they used this data for purposes outside the app, such as campaign strategy and voter targeting. Further, this was back when targeting Facebook ads by ID was allowed. So they likely did far scarier things than either Trump or Hillary were able to accomplish. We don’t know, because the media was OK with his win, and as a result, nobody investigated the specifics.

mistermann8y ago

> have had a strong effect on the general public's attitude towards the practice

This seems like common sense, but do we have substantial evidence proving this, and to the degree of newspaper coverage we're seeing claiming public outrage? And if so, did the outrage precede the news coverage or follow it?

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