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Comment by vanattab | Hacker News Reader

I am all for taking a look at these privacy issues and seeing if we can develop some new regulations to address these concerns but the way the media covers this story is a complete joke. Obama was labeled a political geniuses who was truly in-touch with the young generation when he used the Facebook graph api to micro target ads but when Trump campaign uses the exact same approach to micro target ads it is a despicable act that assisted in "theft" of the election.

EDIT: In an attempt to protect my karma from those who have drunk far to much kool-aid I should point out I did not vote for Trump and I think he is a total clown. I just think the current clickbait/outrage media culture is far more a danger to the american values I cherish then 3 more years of this ass-hat.

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You don’t think there’s a difference between people who signed up/registered/interacted with Obama and just buying 50 million records from a personality quiz that was on FB 4+ years before?

The idea that Obama only collected data from people who signed up and registered is total nonsense. See the comments from Obama's media director in the below article or go back and read the news articles on the topic from 2010-2013 back then they did not even pretend like they were only collecting data from people who signed up.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai...

I personally used the OFA Facebook application and the intent is incredibly different. Notably, the folks who authorized the OFA application knew that the data about their friends was being collected. Because that was entirely the point! We were using it to send out requests to our friends to persuade to them to vote/register to vote.

If you'd like a more in-depth explanation, I found this post by the former Chief Scientist of Obama For America campaign (2012) that goes into the key differences between how the data was collected & used compared to Cambridge Analytica: https://medium.com/@rayid/why-what-cambridge-analytica-did-w...

Their friends didn't, though, that's why it's comparable and the intent is irrelevant. A small number of willing users fans out to a massive number of unwitting ones.

I don't think it's a fair comparison, people weren't (or at least, fewer people were) screaming fake news back then. It's not micro-targeting or advertising that has people riled up, it's the way it is being been used.

Exactly my point! People are not upset by "psychometric advertising" they are upset that the other side making use of the technique. If you honestly think both sides don't use the technique to engage in despicable disinformation campaigns you've probably already drank a fatal dose.

The people seemingly screaming "fake news" the most in recent times are the same people vanattab is referring to as being misleading. People have always been screaming something synonomous to "fake news" against the other side.

Trump isn't mentioned once in this article, nor is any theft of an election.

I am obviously referring to the overall media portrayal of the Facebook/CA scandal.

I agree it was wrong to label Obama a political genius for that, but that doesn't make the current movement wrong too.

Hence my first sentence. I am not opposed to topic but I am opposed to the media bending over backwards to pretend like this totally different then what Obama did.

Maybe it was correct. Maybe Obama and whoever puppeteers Trump are both geniuses.

This is not about using Facebook. It's about doing shady, manipulative stuff.

I don't understand why people keep falling for this whataboutism. They're not comparable uses of the facebook API at all.

Please elaborate on how they are not comparable uses?

This has been answered ad nauseam.

  The Obama app was clearly a political campaign app
  They did not use fake quizzes to steal user data
  they asked supporters to contact their friends explicitly
  they did not download friend of friend data surreptitiously
  they did not buy or re-sell data in violation of FB's TOS
  they did not lie and claim to have deleted it when required
  they used user submitted data to build a database of potential supporters and contacted them to encourage them to vote
  they did not engage in psychometrics to spread fear and fake news
  they did all this domestically with US residents

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