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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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