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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
by 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 agoFarmVille had the benefit of being owned by an early Facebook investor, Mark Pincus. It was favoritism all around.
- zzzeek 9y agoAnd 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 agoThere’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.
- zzzeek 9y ago> OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio. Great, what's your source for that data ? > 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 allowed to be so ridiculously asymmetric. They still had access to large amounts of data because of their massive authorized install bases. But none had the entire US social graph. Nevertheless, they didn't seek to hoist a fascist leader apparently controlled by a foreign enemy on the US. It is perfectly fine that OFA and other organizations should not have this kind of access either. But this is whataboutism. Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.
- downandout 9y agoOFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio Great, what's your source for that data ? My source is that I can do math. The campaign admits it had “the entire US social graph”. With ~200 million US Facebook profiles, and less than 1 million people that actually authorized Obama’s app, we come out with a ratio of roughly 200:1. Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem. It revealed an enormous problem when Obama did it (and worse, with Facebook’s approval). It only became an issue for the press, though, when they failed to manipulate the election in the way they wanted. I’m actually not an advocate of Trump - I’m just saying that this was either wrong or it wasn’t, regardless of who did it. In truth, they both did it. Obama just did it on a vastly larger scale.
- oculusthrift 9y agolol. so your answer is you have no proof. people exaggerate all the time when they say things like "entire social graph". Do you have any data that in 2012, 200 million unique americans were using facebook? And that obama had specific permission to bypass facebook's limit and get the 200:1 ratio?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 9y agoMaybe refresh your memory, watch the relevant southpark episode a few more times, go on, I'll wait... done? Good. There was never anything "relatively benign" about farmville. It's up there with the iTunes clickwrap TOS in pure evil, so don't you dare. (I could probably do worse than Southpark as a primary news source, but it does leave some gaps)
- zzzeek 9y agoNor was Farmville a political organization so perhaps read what I wrote more carefully.
- ineedasername 9y agoNot political? It's only the biggest pro-Farma lobbying effort ever. ConAgra and Monsanto's fingerprints were all over that "game" /s
- zzzeek 9y agoAgree, Facebook was always in cahoots with Big Farma.
- ineedasername 9y agosorry if it wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to troll, just a little tongue-in-cheek Southpark humor