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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I hope you're kidding. Not sure what the rule on repeating myself is but since this is currently the top comment in this chain, I'll post it here anyway:

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-....

"Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campaign Director

They used the exact same technique to access data from 190 million profiles - and about 189 million of those were without explicit authorization. Exactly the same technique, just with 4X the reach that CA had.

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I'm not sure why you keep on repeating that line, it's just a statement of fact. There were hundreds (if not thousands) of FB apps from that time period that pulled comparable social graphs before FB switched to the v2 Graph API in 2015. What CA did beyond this is that (1) they collected their political data under the guise of a personality test, without any indication to users what their data would be used for, and (2) the data was used for political microtargeting (in violation of FB's TOS) instead of just sending voluntary messages to friends.

If you know of any evidence that Obama's campaign broke either the law or FB's ToS, please let me know.

There were hundreds (if not thousands) of FB apps from that time period that pulled comparable social graphs before FB switched to the v2 Graph API

That is simply not true. Facebook rate-limited apps for exactly this reason. Additionally, although it was technically possible, the TOS did not allow mass-scraping of friend data for any purpose, much less political purposes. Facebook monitored and routinely banned apps long before they ever accessed the data of even a few million friend profiles, let alone 190 million of them. That's why, according to Obama's own campaign manager, Facebook was "surprised" but then decided not to ban them - which they would have done to any other app.

the data was used for political microtargeting (in violation of FB's TOS)

Which is precisely what Obama did.

If you know of any evidence that Obama's campaign broke either the law or FB's ToS, please let me know.

See above.

I think the point neuronexmachina was trying to make about microtargeting is that Obama simply asked their users to send messages to their friends, whereas CA directly advertised to people.

The Obama campaign used that data in every way that CA did. The fact that the app only represented that it was sending messages to friends is just as misleading as what Kogan (not CA, who never had an app) did. They used this data that 99.5% of the people didn't authorize them to have for targeting, campaign strategy, etc.

Again, collecting data about friends while being upfront about the purpose is very different from collecting friends data with completely false pretenses, selling the data(Alex), and then later lying to Facebook that it was deleted when it was not(CA).

You keep stating the same allegations and assumptions, and now including statistics, without sources.

But this then suggests that we should look far more closely at the Hillary campaign and see why it didn’t win.

Was it bad management ?

Was it not using Facebook data effectively ?

Was CA that pivotal? Was it fake news or better microtargetting?

If both sides used it why did one side lose?

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