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> Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan “gaine

> Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he passed the information on to third parties. This is exactly how Facebook was designed. You get a stupid quiz or photo frame in exchange for a copy of your friends list. It's always worked that way, and it's why Facebook OAuth was more popular than Google+ and other Oauth since 5+ years ago -- because app devs can make more money from Facebook OAuth since it comes with a copy of your friends list, so they prefer to integrate Facebook.

yeldarb 9y ago
As of ~4 years ago when graph api 2.0 was released that’s not true. The /friends endpoint only returns friends of the user who have also already installed your application.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  As of April 2016 wasn't it limited to 50 "close friends"? IIRC it was also possible to abuse iOS webview and the FB library by modifying some private methods and injecting some JS to get the info of more than 50 friends. I don't remember the details, but I saw it in the wild in a high growth top 10 iOS app (reverse engineered to see how they were getting so many users so quickly).