The FTC's basis for this ruling against Cambridge Analytica is that they deceived users about what data was being gathered and how it was being used in order to

The FTC's basis for this ruling against Cambridge Analytica is that they deceived users about what data was being gathered and how it was being used in order to get access. The 2012 Obama campaign didn't. Now that's not to say that they had any sort of consent from the people they were gathering information from - they clearly didn't, because they were scraping information about friends just like CA - or that what they were doing wasn't creepy and morally dubious. It just means that the reasoning in this opinion doesn't apply. In fact, they don't seem to allege that CA committed any kind of violation by scraping the data of US friends of people who used their app, precisely because those users didn't consent. Their argument is that CA breached the FTC Act by making false or misleading representations to get people to give them access to their data, but they can't stretch that to cover scraping of their friends' data because those friends never agreed to anything and CA made no promises to users about their friends.