Obama campaign pioneered tactics used by Cambridge Analytica. | Hacker News Reader

Obama campaign pioneered tactics used by Cambridge Analytica.

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12 pointsrsuelzer4 comments

The difference I think is consent - the Obama campaign had an “app” that said what it would do, and by all accounts did the right things when you disabled or deleted it.

In this case the app was purported to do one(create your own psychological profile or some such nonsense) but instead stored and used the data for unrelated purposes (campaign targeting, pretty clearly unrelated to the stated purpose).

We can go on and on about “people should know that they’re the product”, but that only goes so far - you can explicitly say “this is what we’re doing with your data” and then do something else.

This is not to mention that Facebook’s TOS have changed since the Obama 2012 tool. As anyone working with Facebook’s Graph API will know, the amount of data and filtering available to developers has been dramatically restricted in the last few years. This Cambridge Analytica approach seems to be a clear attempt to circumvent the spirit of the TOS and the ability of users to control their own privacy.

If anyone remembers the flood of spammy apps that used to be commonplace Facebook, those were built off of access to your friends lists. All you needed was one of your friends to play poker or take a quiz, and your personal information would be siphoned up by the app maker.

It’s unclear whether the users who took part in the sham academic study paid for by Cambridge Analytica will be able to obtain any legal remedy, but it seems pretty clear that what they were being paid for was not taking a quiz, but rather for access to hundreds of their friends’ information.

Edit:

It seems that these restrictions were implemented in 2015: https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/. However, Facebook’s “platform policy” at the time did prohibit using data of a user’s friends for advertising (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analy...).

From 2014.

Actual title: "Facebook Tool the Obama Camp Called Groundbreaking is Going Away"

reading the article, this seems way different. Nowhere does it say Obama's tool secretely harvested information from facebook. Instead, it seems it provided tools for the user to encourage their friends to vote.

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