A lot of game/contest mechanics relied on things like posting on friends' timelines, or your own timelines, etc.
In my case there was no real interest from our customers in taking the data and doing something with it, but if the intent was there, it could have very easily been done.
Furthermore, when my firm did security and pentesting projects, we routinely found exploits that could eventually lead to us getting the access tokens and secrets for their user database, or the app token and secret. If I had to guess - 70% of the game/contest applications that we audited had these vulnerabilities after they had been launched leading to companies approaching us us panicked, asking for help with users who were cheating. Many were aghast to learn of what could have potentially happened over and above rigging the leaderboards.
It's not enough that there were apps out there who had the ability to get this data. It's also not enough that there were apps who wanted to get the data intentionally. You also have to consider the number of apps that had this data and had weak security. Someone could have just broken in, taken the keys, and taken their users' data that way. Nobody would have known. At best it may have emerged in Facebook's "auditing process" in 2017 that they conducted to see which apps performed these kinds of queries - does anyone believe they did this in good faith and disclosed 100% of such apps which looked at social graph, friend posts, messages, etc?
I am pretty sure the Obama 2012 campaign did something similar with their outreach Facebook apps too, as it was reported in the press at the time (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...)
Most users were uninformed and blindly hit accept at the permissions screen because they could win a car or an iPad or a Playstation by entering the contests.
In my view, the entire story was exaggerated and turned into a public spectacle, for very obvious reasons that nobody likes to admit to.
Are you claiming that online advertising doesn't work, or that gathering large amounts of data about individual users to tailor ads to them doesn't increase the effectiveness of those ads?
I'm not the GP, but I think the idea is that advertising isn't coercive. When I see an ad for a Swiffer WetJet, I'm not immediately compelled to go out and buy it against my will. I only buy it if it actually meets a need that I have. Ad-tech tries to guess who actually might be most likely to have that kind of a need and target advertising accordingly (eg it would be probably dumb to show a Peloton ad to a handicapped person, etc).
> gathering large amounts of data about individual users to tailor ads to them doesn't increase the effectiveness of those ads?
Is just a lot of words for "being able to find people that might agree with some ideas and showing them media that expresses those ideas". In a world with free expression, it's hard to see what the problem with that is.
From where I sit, there appears to be opposition to the fact that there exists people who have the appetite for certain "bad" ideas, and the only way to blunt those peoples' democratic power is to curb the ability for them to be exposed to those viewpoints.
> The ICO found Cambridge had more or less the same tech in the 2016 campaign that competitors did—and even within the company, staff worried that Nix & Co. were exaggerating CA’s “impact and influence.”
> All those things you read about the thousands of data points CA had on American voters? Most of it was commercially available to anyone with the $. Points to larger issues of data & privacy but not something unique to CA.
It's one of the reasons for why third parties can't break into the American system - it's hard to compete without access to a curated-over-decades dataset of likely voters, swing voters, potential volunteers, single-issue voters, etc, etc.
