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You're framing this improperly. Prior to 2014, anybody could create an app, and if people authorized it to, it could access some friend data. Your comment rea

You're framing this improperly. Prior to 2014, anybody could create an app, and if people authorized it to, it could access some friend data. Your comment reads as if they went and made some special arrangement with Facebook and lied to them saying it was for "academic purposes". That just isn't the case. Every single Facebook user with the ability to write code could do this easily and automatically for the 7 years leading up to the change in 2014. What Facebook did with the Obama campaign was far worse. No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph. Didn't like Obama and didn't authorize an app to access your and your friends' info? Too bad, your information was still given to them and used to help get him elected. That wasn't a problem for anyone in the press though, because of course, Obama was a Democrat. edit: I misspoke. There was an app required, but the Obama campaign accessed 190 MILLION profiles, versus 50 million involved in CA. According to [1]: "The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent...A former [Obama] campaign director, Carol Davidsen, tweeted that Facebook "was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."" [1] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/ https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

detaro 9y ago
> No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph Source? All I can find is a scheme where they prompted people to sign in to a campaign site and grabbed the friend data that way. Icky as hell, but it's not obvious why that's "even worse" than CA.
- downandout 9y ago
  For starters, they accessed 4X the number of profiles that CA did. I have edited my comment, however, because it appears that they did (just like CA) have an app that they used. Except they used it, as one Obama campaign manager put it, to "suck out the whole social graph" of voters in the US, and Facebook "was surprised, but didn't stop [them] once they realized they were doing it". By the way, this is something that would have been stopped on any other app long before they ever accessed 190 million profiles. So Facebook essentially gave them the entire US social graph, that they wouldn't have allowed any other app with only 1 million users to have.
- mirimir 9y ago
  It does seem like the Obama campaigns got preferential access to Facebook data. Data for even more people than CA got. And perhaps the Clinton campaign did as well, or at least got access to the older data. What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitter. Plus entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe or whatever. And maybe they went further, discouraging potential Clinton and Sanders supporters fron voting. But anyway, the key point isn't whether CA or Obama/Clinton got more data from Facebook, or whether Facebook willingly helped Obama/Clinton. The key point is how well voters can now be manipulated. It's another level in the problem that money buys political power. And it's arguably how AI could do the same.
  - downandout 9y ago
    CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. I've seen no hard data showing that any of this did Trump any good. Apparently not a single study has been done as to whether people either failed to vote or changed their vote based upon fake news or the use of this data.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      I haven't either. My opinion is based on my own anecdotal observations, and news coverage, both of which may be biased. I do follow fringes of online anarchism and anomie, and I was surprised to see so much support for Trump, when the polls were showing him so far down. And much of that support was so odd that I thought it ironic. But whatever. I'd like to see such a study, for sure. But I'm not optimistic. Arguably, many who voted for Trump would be no more forthcoming to researchers than they were to those doing the election polling. There's just too much polarization, I suspect.
  - illumin8 9y ago
    There's a lot of bad information in this thread. https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 "I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work."
weaksauce 9y ago
> According to a Time magazine account just after Obama won re-election, "the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button." you are doing the old classic false equivalence... the deliberate use of an obama sanctioned facebook app that asks you to press a button to share the get out to vote (probably for obama) with their friends is 100% different than Cambridge University creating psyche profiles on people to ostensibly use as a fun way to find out your profile. then to sell that harvested data to a different campaigning firm Cambridge Analytica to use to micro target ads to them for political purposes unbeknownst to them is way different. It's about expectations: one expects it to be used in a political fashion because they opted into it and the other is not expecting it to be used to target themselves and their friends later.
- downandout 9y ago
  The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 189 million people expected or specifically authorized their data "to be used in political fashion". So how is that a false equivalence?
  - codezero 9y ago
    I'm not taking sides here, and I could be very wrong – my assumption here is that Cambridge didn't have a "Trump Campaign App" they had some other app, then sold that data to a third party. Obama's campaign had a "campaign" app, and used the data collected from that app. We can all argue about whether facebook should even allow apps the kind of data they do, but the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? This is where the two aren't the same, as far as I'm aware, but like I said, I'm not super in the know.
    - 9y ago

detaro 9y ago

> No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph Source? All I can find is a scheme where they prompted people to sign in to a campaign site and grabbed the friend data that way. Icky as hell, but it's not obvious why that's "even worse" than CA.

downandout 9y ago
For starters, they accessed 4X the number of profiles that CA did. I have edited my comment, however, because it appears that they did (just like CA) have an app that they used. Except they used it, as one Obama campaign manager put it, to "suck out the whole social graph" of voters in the US, and Facebook "was surprised, but didn't stop [them] once they realized they were doing it". By the way, this is something that would have been stopped on any other app long before they ever accessed 190 million profiles. So Facebook essentially gave them the entire US social graph, that they wouldn't have allowed any other app with only 1 million users to have.
mirimir 9y ago
It does seem like the Obama campaigns got preferential access to Facebook data. Data for even more people than CA got. And perhaps the Clinton campaign did as well, or at least got access to the older data. What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitter. Plus entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe or whatever. And maybe they went further, discouraging potential Clinton and Sanders supporters fron voting. But anyway, the key point isn't whether CA or Obama/Clinton got more data from Facebook, or whether Facebook willingly helped Obama/Clinton. The key point is how well voters can now be manipulated. It's another level in the problem that money buys political power. And it's arguably how AI could do the same.
- downandout 9y ago
  CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. I've seen no hard data showing that any of this did Trump any good. Apparently not a single study has been done as to whether people either failed to vote or changed their vote based upon fake news or the use of this data.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    I haven't either. My opinion is based on my own anecdotal observations, and news coverage, both of which may be biased. I do follow fringes of online anarchism and anomie, and I was surprised to see so much support for Trump, when the polls were showing him so far down. And much of that support was so odd that I thought it ironic. But whatever. I'd like to see such a study, for sure. But I'm not optimistic. Arguably, many who voted for Trump would be no more forthcoming to researchers than they were to those doing the election polling. There's just too much polarization, I suspect.
- illumin8 9y ago
  There's a lot of bad information in this thread. https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 "I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work."

weaksauce 9y ago

> According to a Time magazine account just after Obama won re-election, "the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button." you are doing the old classic false equivalence... the deliberate use of an obama sanctioned facebook app that asks you to press a button to share the get out to vote (probably for obama) with their friends is 100% different than Cambridge University creating psyche profiles on people to ostensibly use as a fun way to find out your profile. then to sell that harvested data to a different campaigning firm Cambridge Analytica to use to micro target ads to them for political purposes unbeknownst to them is way different. It's about expectations: one expects it to be used in a political fashion because they opted into it and the other is not expecting it to be used to target themselves and their friends later.

downandout 9y ago
The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 189 million people expected or specifically authorized their data "to be used in political fashion". So how is that a false equivalence?
- codezero 9y ago
  I'm not taking sides here, and I could be very wrong – my assumption here is that Cambridge didn't have a "Trump Campaign App" they had some other app, then sold that data to a third party. Obama's campaign had a "campaign" app, and used the data collected from that app. We can all argue about whether facebook should even allow apps the kind of data they do, but the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? This is where the two aren't the same, as far as I'm aware, but like I said, I'm not super in the know.
  - 9y ago