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"[Facebook] systems were so laxly designed as to actively encourage vast amounts of data to be sucked out, via API, without the check and balance of those third

"[Facebook] systems were so laxly designed as to actively encourage vast amounts of data to be sucked out, via API, without the check and balance of those third parties having to gain individual level consent." That is a gross oversimplification of the issue. There were controls in place to stop excessive data collection. In fact, the only app in this situation that was allowed to "suck out" "vast amounts of data" was the Obama For America app. According to Carol Davidsen, Obama's Former Campaign Director "We ingested the entire U.S. social graph" [1], despite the fact that less than 1 million people actively authorized the app to access their data. Approximately 99.5% of the hundreds of millions of people whose data Obama took, with Facebook's blessings (actively allowing it to bypass its data collection limits for apps), never knew about or authorized Obama to have or use their data. So only one app was "actively encouraged" to suck out vast amounts of data in the history of the existence of the API. All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. The API was not a data free-for-all, except in one unique case with the explicit authorization of Facebook. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

ec109685 9y ago
Where do you get that Obama’s campaign had special access that other apps didn’t have?
- downandout 9y ago
  "[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campign Director [1] [1] https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
  - portofcall 9y ago
    Basing your claim on what someone said to stroke the ego of a political operative, as communicated via a Tweet? I’m totally convinced, no further evidence required! (/s)
  - makomk 9y ago
    The NYT magazine article about this also mentions that the scale of the Obama campaign's data extraction tripped internal Facebook alerts which had to be overridden: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (Back in 2013, they of course spun this as a demonstration of just how impressive and well-done it was.)
    - daenz 9y ago
      This all should serve as another reminder to not yield certain leniencies to "our" guys just because we want them to have an advantage. Because it sets a precedent, and then future organizations, like CA, can do the same thing for people we don't like.
    - artursapek 9y ago
      Nice. So they intentionally helped Obama, but indirectly helping Trump has caused international outrage.
      - ineedasername 9y ago
        I'd say its that the intervening years have shed the bloom from the rose that was Facebook, and a lot more people have become a lot more savvy to the topic since then. That makes CA the tipping point for public sentiment in the US, but Europe has been ahead of us for these types of concerns. Worth noting that i haven't seen many people placing blame on the Trump campaign either, it seems to be going swuarely where it belongs: CA and Facebook. It would be nice if more splashed on to other big players for this type of data too, like google. Google hasn't yet betrayed their trust to as great an extent though.
scoggs 9y ago
Is it / was it known that other potential candidates were barred from doing the same or was the Obama election campaign the only one granted such permissions?
- downandout 9y ago
  "Barred" isn't exactly the right word, in that it implies that Facebook actively took steps to prevent other candidates from doing so. Instead, Facebook had standard data collection limits in place that were enforced automatically by the platform for all apps. When the Obama For America app hit these limits, Facebook explicitly removed them for that app. It is the only publicly known case where this was allowed for a political campaign.
  - scoggs 9y ago
    When you say removed "them" I'm assuming you mean removed the collection limits and not the Obama campaign, correct? Thanks for the info by the way!
    - downandout 9y ago
      Yes, by "them" I meant that they removed the collection limits.
  - arkades 9y ago
    Do you have a source on the exemption of the data:permission limit being lifted for them? Given the soft run at quote mining in your earlier post, I’d feel more comfortable if your core assertion was verifiable.
    - downandout 9y ago
      Umm..wut? Read the thread. Read the direct quote from his campaign director saying that they had special treatment. There are a hundred articles saying alarm bells went off over OFA’s data collection activities, and Facebook reacted by shutting them off. Google is your friend. Here’s one to get you started... “The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ “ [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html?referer= https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-cam...
emmelaich 9y ago
Other people have noted that 2007-2012 is notably absent from the timeline in Zuck's post. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071 https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071
zzzeek 9y ago
From the article you link: "But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences." Last I checked, Farmville was not associated with OFA. So you need to back up your assertion "All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. " and explain why this also renders the entire dataset collected by CA to be completely harmless, in contrast to the current narrative. Because it's not that interesting if a relatively benign political organization got a little more data than another which used it to impose the will of a foreign enemy upon the US electorate.
- thotaway 9y ago
  FarmVille had the benefit of being owned by an early Facebook investor, Mark Pincus. It was favoritism all around.
  - zzzeek 9y ago
    And Peter Thiel, who was a funder of Cambridge Analytica [1], sits on the board of Facebook, and he also worked directly on the Trump campaign. So there's some extremely fertile ground for favoritism there as well. [1] https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambridge-analytica/#1wf52Hi7GPqS https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...
- downandout 9y ago
  There’s a massive difference between Farmville et al and the OFA app. Facebook had limits in place that constrained the ratio between the number of friend profiles that were allowed to be accessed and the number of people that had explicitly authorized the app. They were a black box on this issue, but for example I had apps that were stopped from accessing deep profile information of friends (likes, occupation, etc.) when I reached 10:1. OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood. It was somewhat possible to overcome this by spreading the collection out of a number of months or years, which is what I believe the Kogan app did. But even in that case, with the data collection spread out over a long period of time, they had nowhere near the data that the Obama campaign was allowed access to. Finally, the CA data was years old, while the Obama data was allowed to stay fresh right up to election day because they had no API limits. So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was not allowed to be as ridiculously asymmetric as Obama’s was. They still had access to large amounts of data, but only because of their massive authorized install bases (which in all of the cases you mention were far larger than the OFA install base). But none had the entire US social graph - with the exception of OFA.

ec109685 9y ago

Where do you get that Obama’s campaign had special access that other apps didn’t have?

downandout 9y ago
"[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campign Director [1] [1] https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
- portofcall 9y ago
  Basing your claim on what someone said to stroke the ego of a political operative, as communicated via a Tweet? I’m totally convinced, no further evidence required! (/s)
- makomk 9y ago
  The NYT magazine article about this also mentions that the scale of the Obama campaign's data extraction tripped internal Facebook alerts which had to be overridden: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (Back in 2013, they of course spun this as a demonstration of just how impressive and well-done it was.)
  - daenz 9y ago
    This all should serve as another reminder to not yield certain leniencies to "our" guys just because we want them to have an advantage. Because it sets a precedent, and then future organizations, like CA, can do the same thing for people we don't like.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    Nice. So they intentionally helped Obama, but indirectly helping Trump has caused international outrage.
    - ineedasername 9y ago
      I'd say its that the intervening years have shed the bloom from the rose that was Facebook, and a lot more people have become a lot more savvy to the topic since then. That makes CA the tipping point for public sentiment in the US, but Europe has been ahead of us for these types of concerns. Worth noting that i haven't seen many people placing blame on the Trump campaign either, it seems to be going swuarely where it belongs: CA and Facebook. It would be nice if more splashed on to other big players for this type of data too, like google. Google hasn't yet betrayed their trust to as great an extent though.

scoggs 9y ago

Is it / was it known that other potential candidates were barred from doing the same or was the Obama election campaign the only one granted such permissions?

downandout 9y ago
"Barred" isn't exactly the right word, in that it implies that Facebook actively took steps to prevent other candidates from doing so. Instead, Facebook had standard data collection limits in place that were enforced automatically by the platform for all apps. When the Obama For America app hit these limits, Facebook explicitly removed them for that app. It is the only publicly known case where this was allowed for a political campaign.
- scoggs 9y ago
  When you say removed "them" I'm assuming you mean removed the collection limits and not the Obama campaign, correct? Thanks for the info by the way!
  - downandout 9y ago
    Yes, by "them" I meant that they removed the collection limits.
- arkades 9y ago
  Do you have a source on the exemption of the data:permission limit being lifted for them? Given the soft run at quote mining in your earlier post, I’d feel more comfortable if your core assertion was verifiable.
  - downandout 9y ago
    Umm..wut? Read the thread. Read the direct quote from his campaign director saying that they had special treatment. There are a hundred articles saying alarm bells went off over OFA’s data collection activities, and Facebook reacted by shutting them off. Google is your friend. Here’s one to get you started... “The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ “ [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html?referer= https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-cam...

emmelaich 9y ago

Other people have noted that 2007-2012 is notably absent from the timeline in Zuck's post. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071 https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071

zzzeek 9y ago

From the article you link: "But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences." Last I checked, Farmville was not associated with OFA. So you need to back up your assertion "All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. " and explain why this also renders the entire dataset collected by CA to be completely harmless, in contrast to the current narrative. Because it's not that interesting if a relatively benign political organization got a little more data than another which used it to impose the will of a foreign enemy upon the US electorate.

thotaway 9y ago
FarmVille had the benefit of being owned by an early Facebook investor, Mark Pincus. It was favoritism all around.
- zzzeek 9y ago
  And Peter Thiel, who was a funder of Cambridge Analytica [1], sits on the board of Facebook, and he also worked directly on the Trump campaign. So there's some extremely fertile ground for favoritism there as well. [1] https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambridge-analytica/#1wf52Hi7GPqS https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...
downandout 9y ago
There’s a massive difference between Farmville et al and the OFA app. Facebook had limits in place that constrained the ratio between the number of friend profiles that were allowed to be accessed and the number of people that had explicitly authorized the app. They were a black box on this issue, but for example I had apps that were stopped from accessing deep profile information of friends (likes, occupation, etc.) when I reached 10:1. OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood. It was somewhat possible to overcome this by spreading the collection out of a number of months or years, which is what I believe the Kogan app did. But even in that case, with the data collection spread out over a long period of time, they had nowhere near the data that the Obama campaign was allowed access to. Finally, the CA data was years old, while the Obama data was allowed to stay fresh right up to election day because they had no API limits. So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was not allowed to be as ridiculously asymmetric as Obama’s was. They still had access to large amounts of data, but only because of their massive authorized install bases (which in all of the cases you mention were far larger than the OFA install base). But none had the entire US social graph - with the exception of OFA.