5 ms·

> 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. permissio

> 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.
  - downandout 9y ago
    What exactly am I wrong about?
    - gbhn 9y ago
      It's an agency issue. If I use an attributed channel it's like meeting you and saying "hey remember your friend the CS guy? Our company is looking for someone like that. Could you pass the word along?" vs pretending to be chatting with you when all I'm looking for is relevant recruiting leads which I will then use unbeknownst to you. For hiring this isn't as touchy a subject, but surely there's a qualitative difference in these two interactions. One is based in an above-biard interaction. The other in subterfuge and hidden motives.
      - downandout 9y ago
        The end result for the friends, which comprise 99.5% of the victims in both the Obama and Kogan cases, is precisely the same. Nothing was represented to them, their data was just used because someone they were friends with installed the app.
        saiya-jin 9y ago
        you're wasting your time, since clearly in that case somebody they like won, so all is good and all is allowed. it really doesn't matter how amoral and abhorable the whole think with Obama was (that says somebody who would generally vote for democrats if based in US)
adamiscool8 9y ago
You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".
- weaksauce 9y ago
  > You're missing the point. I think you are the one missing the point. > The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. Yes, this was a political app, downloaded by people motivated to get obama to be the president. They shared that info willingly to the obama campaign. The obama campaign used that information to suggest "hey man, we need help in texas and you know someone that might be able to help us. Can you do us a solid and send them some of this info?" Nothing I have seen suggests that they did anything untoward with the information voluntarily and directly shared with the campaign. They used it to suggest people to share the message to. And they did any action with the direct permission of the people using the political app. > It's identical, except, for "the good guys". Not even a little bit. The Koger fellow used the data he harvested from those psych profiles and also got the friends information that the people taking those "tests" doubtfully wanted them to have. If I take a silly test that is a facebook app I would not expect them to datamine my friends to later sell that information off to a political campaigning firm to later use for a political campaign that they may not have wanted it to have. If trump had used an app that did the same as obama I would have had no issue with it. he didn't, and I do.
  - adamiscool8 9y ago
    Again, you're missing the point. The people who SIGNED UP for the Cambridge Analytica app, or the Obama For America app agreed to share their own information with the app. In doing so, they ALSO agreed to share data on their entire friends list with the app -- Facebook had no restrictions in place on this at the time. Those people who were opted-in by proxy, i.e. the friends you sold out, may not have wanted the Obama campaign or Cambridge Analytica to get that info, but they never had a choice! Both apps (well, OFA for sure, CA allegedly) took data legitimately provided to them, used it to feed predictive models, and then actioned marketing around exploiting those learnings. >We released this tool for the Obama Campaign in August 2012. Over the next 3 months, we had over a million supporters authorize our app, giving us potential access to over 200 million unique people in their social network. For each campaign activity (persuasion, volunteering, voter registration, get-out-the-vote), we ran predictive models on this friend network to determine who to target. We then constructed an “influence graph” that matched existing supporters with potential targets. For each supporter, we provided a customized list of key friends with whom to share different types of content. [0] Literally the ONLY difference, other than the political leanings, is Koger's app was then "acquired" by CA, in breach of Facebook's TOS. Which again, is something that happened probably ALL THE TIME in the pre-2014 wild west of Facebook app mining. [0] http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-social-media-targeting-done-by-the-obama-2012-campaign http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-so...

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.
- downandout 9y ago
  What exactly am I wrong about?
  - gbhn 9y ago
    It's an agency issue. If I use an attributed channel it's like meeting you and saying "hey remember your friend the CS guy? Our company is looking for someone like that. Could you pass the word along?" vs pretending to be chatting with you when all I'm looking for is relevant recruiting leads which I will then use unbeknownst to you. For hiring this isn't as touchy a subject, but surely there's a qualitative difference in these two interactions. One is based in an above-biard interaction. The other in subterfuge and hidden motives.
    - downandout 9y ago
      The end result for the friends, which comprise 99.5% of the victims in both the Obama and Kogan cases, is precisely the same. Nothing was represented to them, their data was just used because someone they were friends with installed the app.
      - saiya-jin 9y ago
        you're wasting your time, since clearly in that case somebody they like won, so all is good and all is allowed. it really doesn't matter how amoral and abhorable the whole think with Obama was (that says somebody who would generally vote for democrats if based in US)

adamiscool8 9y ago

You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

weaksauce 9y ago
> You're missing the point. I think you are the one missing the point. > The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. Yes, this was a political app, downloaded by people motivated to get obama to be the president. They shared that info willingly to the obama campaign. The obama campaign used that information to suggest "hey man, we need help in texas and you know someone that might be able to help us. Can you do us a solid and send them some of this info?" Nothing I have seen suggests that they did anything untoward with the information voluntarily and directly shared with the campaign. They used it to suggest people to share the message to. And they did any action with the direct permission of the people using the political app. > It's identical, except, for "the good guys". Not even a little bit. The Koger fellow used the data he harvested from those psych profiles and also got the friends information that the people taking those "tests" doubtfully wanted them to have. If I take a silly test that is a facebook app I would not expect them to datamine my friends to later sell that information off to a political campaigning firm to later use for a political campaign that they may not have wanted it to have. If trump had used an app that did the same as obama I would have had no issue with it. he didn't, and I do.
- adamiscool8 9y ago
  Again, you're missing the point. The people who SIGNED UP for the Cambridge Analytica app, or the Obama For America app agreed to share their own information with the app. In doing so, they ALSO agreed to share data on their entire friends list with the app -- Facebook had no restrictions in place on this at the time. Those people who were opted-in by proxy, i.e. the friends you sold out, may not have wanted the Obama campaign or Cambridge Analytica to get that info, but they never had a choice! Both apps (well, OFA for sure, CA allegedly) took data legitimately provided to them, used it to feed predictive models, and then actioned marketing around exploiting those learnings. >We released this tool for the Obama Campaign in August 2012. Over the next 3 months, we had over a million supporters authorize our app, giving us potential access to over 200 million unique people in their social network. For each campaign activity (persuasion, volunteering, voter registration, get-out-the-vote), we ran predictive models on this friend network to determine who to target. We then constructed an “influence graph” that matched existing supporters with potential targets. For each supporter, we provided a customized list of key friends with whom to share different types of content. [0] Literally the ONLY difference, other than the political leanings, is Koger's app was then "acquired" by CA, in breach of Facebook's TOS. Which again, is something that happened probably ALL THE TIME in the pre-2014 wild west of Facebook app mining. [0] http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-social-media-targeting-done-by-the-obama-2012-campaign http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-so...