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> 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 s

> 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.
  - downandout 9y ago
    the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? No. An independent developer had an app many years ago, recorded data from that app, and then sold that data to CA years after the fact. That developer did in fact violate Facebook's developer platform policies by selling the data, but CA had nothing to do with the app or what was represented to the people using it when they installed it.
    - belltaco 9y ago
      Didn't CA report to fb that the data was deleted when in fact it was not?
      - weaksauce 9y ago
        koger did report that but ended up not deleting it and also ended up selling the data to CA.
    - intended 9y ago
      Something is off here - not in the discussion but on the larger picture. Why didn’t Hillary win? I’m sure she had access to similar tools? I think someone needs to take a look at the Hillary campaign and contrast it to identify exactly how effective Facebook data is
    - codezero 9y ago
      Are you playing mental gymnastics here? CA bought the data. CA had nothing to do with the app. They did, they bought the data. I get that they aren’t responsible for the person violating facebook’s rules. I think we already established Facebook is the boogeyman here. But we were comparing the Obama campaign app to an app unrelated to a campaign. In this thread there was the implication “obama did the same thing” and I think we can hopefully agree that Obama’s campaign didn’t sell their data in violation of the fb tos as far as we know and the owner of the app who sold to CA did. Sorry I got the name mixed up. Yes CA didn’t sell. But neither did the Obama campaign. So there is not an equivalence.
- weaksauce 9y ago
  > That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. permission for one. > The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, 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. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind. intent and deliberate action up front by the user of the facebook app for two not some shady psych profile that gets sold later and used behind the scenes to target them without any link to the campaign. that's absolutely a false equivalence. Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit. Say I have 190 friends with a significant overlap with say 50 friends who all know each other and are likely also friends with each other. it simply doesn't follow that every single friend has 190 unique friends to get a graph of that size even though the average across all users might be 190 friends. have a few more of those for different groups (business, whatever) and you have a much lower number. coupled with the fact that you have no idea what the average number of friends the people that opt into that app have if you are just comparing it to the overall average number of friends for the entire set of facebook users you possibly have a lower number still.
  - downandout 9y ago
    permission for one. Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people. Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit According to their own campaign manager, they obtained the entire US social graph, and Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. The 190 million number may actually be low.
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      > Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people. you're still wrong but at this point, with all the evidence showing just how different the situation is, i suspect you want to be for whatever reason.
- illumin8 9y ago
  You're completely wrong about this: 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."
  - downandout 9y ago
    See above quote from their own campaign manager. Here's a link to her own tweet on this issue if you don't believe me or the publication I linked to above: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

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.
- downandout 9y ago
  the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? No. An independent developer had an app many years ago, recorded data from that app, and then sold that data to CA years after the fact. That developer did in fact violate Facebook's developer platform policies by selling the data, but CA had nothing to do with the app or what was represented to the people using it when they installed it.
  - belltaco 9y ago
    Didn't CA report to fb that the data was deleted when in fact it was not?
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      koger did report that but ended up not deleting it and also ended up selling the data to CA.
  - intended 9y ago
    Something is off here - not in the discussion but on the larger picture. Why didn’t Hillary win? I’m sure she had access to similar tools? I think someone needs to take a look at the Hillary campaign and contrast it to identify exactly how effective Facebook data is
  - codezero 9y ago
    Are you playing mental gymnastics here? CA bought the data. CA had nothing to do with the app. They did, they bought the data. I get that they aren’t responsible for the person violating facebook’s rules. I think we already established Facebook is the boogeyman here. But we were comparing the Obama campaign app to an app unrelated to a campaign. In this thread there was the implication “obama did the same thing” and I think we can hopefully agree that Obama’s campaign didn’t sell their data in violation of the fb tos as far as we know and the owner of the app who sold to CA did. Sorry I got the name mixed up. Yes CA didn’t sell. But neither did the Obama campaign. So there is not an equivalence.
weaksauce 9y ago
> That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. permission for one. > The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, 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. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind. intent and deliberate action up front by the user of the facebook app for two not some shady psych profile that gets sold later and used behind the scenes to target them without any link to the campaign. that's absolutely a false equivalence. Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit. Say I have 190 friends with a significant overlap with say 50 friends who all know each other and are likely also friends with each other. it simply doesn't follow that every single friend has 190 unique friends to get a graph of that size even though the average across all users might be 190 friends. have a few more of those for different groups (business, whatever) and you have a much lower number. coupled with the fact that you have no idea what the average number of friends the people that opt into that app have if you are just comparing it to the overall average number of friends for the entire set of facebook users you possibly have a lower number still.
- downandout 9y ago
  permission for one. Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people. Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit According to their own campaign manager, they obtained the entire US social graph, and Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. The 190 million number may actually be low.
  - weaksauce 9y ago
    > Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people. you're still wrong but at this point, with all the evidence showing just how different the situation is, i suspect you want to be for whatever reason.
illumin8 9y ago
You're completely wrong about this: 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."
- downandout 9y ago
  See above quote from their own campaign manager. Here's a link to her own tweet on this issue if you don't believe me or the publication I linked to above: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975