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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless I'm reading this interface totally wrong
http://www.jonloomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/create-f...
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.