Obama for America was upfront about what they were doing, and the user initiated the action willingly. Cambridge Analytics was not, and people had no idea what their data was being used for. This is not some capricious delineation.
"The entire social graph" did not agree to be used by the Obama campaign. What the Obama campaign did was worse that what CA could have done because by the time CA rolled around the API holes had been closed. (As I said yesterday, CA was deceptive and the Obama campaign wasn't, sure, because the Obama campaign didn't have to ask at all. This is not an improvement.) And they knew it was sketchy, too.
Facebook may view its internal policies as akin to the law, but I don't. The fact that CA violated some Facebook policy and OfA didn't is a distinction without difference. Facebook let both pull friends' personal information without consent, which people probably didn't realize they were sharing because Facebook has a history of obscuring sharing like that.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:
> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.
You would not approve if Trump did the exact same thing. That is not a question, because it doesn't need to be, and please don't insult anybody's intelligence by trying to claim otherwise. Either apply the standards evenly, or don't be shocked when the world turns on Silicon Valley for its unwillingness to apply the standards evenly.
But then CA got caught in a video sting talking about illegal and frankly horrifying tactics to compromise elections globally by attacking and comprimising politicians.
By their own admission.
Yes, Facebook's user agreement allowed them to do that. But I'd bet most people didn't consider that by signing up for Facebook, their personal profile data could be given to political campaigns without their knowledge, if any of their friends consented to it.