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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know, they should have done it when Obama committed even worse Facebook privacy violations back in 2008/2012.

Citation needed. Everything I've seen indicates Obama's campaign didn't violate the rules: 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."

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Citation needed.

Sure....coming right up! How about a statement from Obama's former campaign director saying that they "sucked out the whole of the social graph" with Facebook's blessings?

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

...

That doesn't prove what you are saying. "sucked out the whole of the social graph" is a non-technical statement that doesn't have an explicit meaning, nor is it specified what user data they were scraping.

Look later in the thread. The estimate is that Obama took data from about 190 million profiles, about 189 million of which gave his campaign no explicit access to their data, and about half of whom would have explicitly objected to Obama’s use of their data had they known about it.

You might think “well that’s egregious, but the rules at the time allowed it”. Unfortunately, even that isn’t true. Obama’s app did not play by the rules. The Facebook developer platform rules at the time stated, essentially, that you could not use the data you gained access to through your apps for any purpose outside of the operation of your apps. In other words, you weren’t allowed to create an app that claims it just sends a message to your friends about how wonderful Obama is, and then take the friend data you gain access to through that app and use it for the targeting of political advertising and/or campaign strategy, which is by all accounts precisely what they did. So they broke the same rules that Kogan did, just on a much larger scale, and with Facebook’s tacit approval.

Pulling user data(and friend data) from the API was "fair game" pre 2014. It was an explicit permission you could ask for.

Gleaming insights from that data and then using that data for targeting on FB is/was the point.

Creating an app that collected the data under false pretenses, transferring that data to another 3rd party and then claiming you never had that data makes it a different situation.

Pullling the data that your app needed for its stated functionality, exclusively for use within your app, was “fair game”. Pulling anything beyond that, and/or using it outside your app, was absolutely not allowed, ever, on the platform, even at the very beginning in 2007. Allowing it to be analyzed for targeting was never allowed, nor was it the point of the platform. You’re simply wrong.

How do I know this? I developed apps on the platform from 2007-2014 and was always reading the rules and any changes they issued because I didn’t want to violate them and have my app banned. They were exceedingly clear on this issue. Sadly, Obama’s app was allowed to violate these rules and received no ban.

I'd have to dig through the TOS again to confirm my memory on some of this stuff. You definitely could create a custom audience and target your fb app users based on UID.

Unless I'm reading this interface totally wrong

http://www.jonloomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/create-f...

You used to be able to target ads based on user ID. That option was closed off a few years ago - I was actually awarded a $2,000 Facebook Bug Bounty for spotting a vulnerability that allowed that option even after they shut it off.

But regardless, it was still a developer TOS violation to export user IDs of people that hadn’t personally authorized your app and use those IDs in any custom audience even back when Obama did it. In other words, you weren’t supposed to grab user IDs of friends of your users and use those in custom audiences. In fact at one point, in an attempt to enforce this policy, Facebook stopped returning friend user IDs, and instead gave proxy user IDs that were meaningful only within the API, but couldn’t be used for custom audience targeting. Then they got rid of the target by ID option altogether.

That was different than what they did in 2012 - which was a facebook hoover.

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