Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a Twitter thread by someone who worked on Obama's campaign talking about her firm's use of Facebook data. It was tweeted by Julian Assange so I'm assuming it's one of the more damning examples of the Obama campaign using social media data:

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

This person asserts that people from Facebook gave them their blessing because FB was "on our side". However, she says that from what she knew, FB was on the other team's side too. Kind of need more specifics about who from FB said what, and what "suck out the whole social graph" means. But it's still a different situation than what CA is being accused of, which is using the guise of a quiz app to mine the social data of the quiz participants' friends.

In contrast, the Obama campaign Facebook app/outreach was explicitly connected to the Obama campaign efforts, i.e. people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data.

edit: Here's a tweet by someone on the Obama campaign, protesting angrily to a tweet by Cambridge Analytics:

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.

Of course, we shouldn't take Obama's team at their word that absolutely everything they did was on the up-and-up. But it's important to acknowledge that there are distinct differences between what we know of their work so far compared to what has been revealed with CA.

In other words, it's fair to say that the Obama team was lauded for their "innovation" at mass usage of FB data, which they talked about publicly. It is unfair to say that what they talked about publicly is anything like what CA is currently being accused of.

edit: I more or less agree with u/makomk that @mbsimon (the staffer who tweeted angrily at CA) is not giving the most complete description of how Obama's campaign harvested FB data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624794

> 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.

But isn't the bigger problem sucking up the entire social graph from a small seed of users, not how those users signed up in the first place? If I'm getting spammed via a friends-of-friends connection, I'm not particularly worried about the pretense that initial vector signed up with.

Precisely! From what I cant tell, that tweet (which went rather viral) is misleading at best; based on the public information, the 2012 Obama campaign wasn't using that access to target people who volunteered access to their Facebook data, they were using that access to get info about their non-consenting friends and figure out how to get them to vote for Obama. (I commented about this in one of the other threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620454) The 2008 campaign may have been more benign, but the CA Tweet he was debunking was about both, and those Carol Davidsen tweets appear to be about 2012 specifically.

More specifically, based on the NYT story that you linked to, Obama's campaign did things like match the mined user and user-friends' data with voter registration and donor lists, and also attempt to calculate who a user's "real-life friends" were, versus their casual FB acquaintances, which involved an analysis of photo-tagging, among other things:

> Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall”

In the next paragraph, FB said it was "satisfied" that this met their data and privacy standards. Which is a bit curious because IIRC, it was not kosher to cache data scraped from FB for any reason beyond having a reasonable cache (to prevent unneeded API requests), nevermind for independent data collation and analysis. I would bet that the users who did knowingly sign up for the Obama app did not think the app would be scraping the walls and photo albums of their friends and attempting to do friendship-strength analyses.

CA still has an extra level of subterfuge, but I agree, what the Obama campaign is reported to have done is definitely not as innocent as the Obama campaign staffer claims in the aforementioned tweet.

When you have a Facebook account, you are explicitly granting permission to FB to use your personal information and social graph to sell ads. There is nothing deceptive about this.

This isn’t about FB selling ads. Cambridge Abalytica and the Obama campaign are third-parties

Really?

You don’t see “Sign up for this quiz to find out your true personality” as different than “sign up to support change and spread the word about Barack Obama”?

Facebook is a cesspool, but shady onboarding tactics makes a far more dangerous cesspool.

I don't see a difference if I didn't sign up for either of those things and I'm targeted anyway, which is what happened.

Rephrased: Both campaigns spammed non-signees, and it looks like the CA people spammed signees as well.

No doubt, spamming is a practice that people hate. Whether it's as unethical as what's being alleged against CA is another matter, though. AFAIK, there was nothing when signing up for the quiz app that said your data would be used for political purposes. At most, the quiz might have been said to be affiliated with a Cambridge professor and his studies [0].

[0] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/conf-presentati...

  people who signed up for the app knew they would be explicitly 
  allowing this Obama-connected app access to info/friend data.

But the targeted friends had no say in the matter and gave no consent to being isolated and targeted.

What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"? What does that even mean? Did they spam friends with unwanted emails and phone calls? Did they try to propagandize friends with ads targeted to certain demographics? Did they literally light up the friends with green lasers?

  What on earth makes you think they "targeted friends"?

I wrote "the targeted friends". In other words, the "volunteer's" friends did not themselves volunteer to participate, yet their contact info was handed over, and they were then targeted.

They targeted friends who would be on the fence about who to vote for. Easy to find out about based on Facebook information.

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