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From the article you link:

"But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences."

Last I checked, Farmville was not associated with OFA. So you need to back up your assertion "All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. " and explain why this also renders the entire dataset collected by CA to be completely harmless, in contrast to the current narrative. Because it's not that interesting if a relatively benign political organization got a little more data than another which used it to impose the will of a foreign enemy upon the US electorate.

FarmVille had the benefit of being owned by an early Facebook investor, Mark Pincus. It was favoritism all around.

And Peter Thiel, who was a funder of Cambridge Analytica [1], sits on the board of Facebook, and he also worked directly on the Trump campaign. So there's some extremely fertile ground for favoritism there as well.

[1] https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...

There’s a massive difference between Farmville et al and the OFA app. Facebook had limits in place that constrained the ratio between the number of friend profiles that were allowed to be accessed and the number of people that had explicitly authorized the app. They were a black box on this issue, but for example I had apps that were stopped from accessing deep profile information of friends (likes, occupation, etc.) when I reached 10:1. OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood.

It was somewhat possible to overcome this by spreading the collection out of a number of months or years, which is what I believe the Kogan app did. But even in that case, with the data collection spread out over a long period of time, they had nowhere near the data that the Obama campaign was allowed access to. Finally, the CA data was years old, while the Obama data was allowed to stay fresh right up to election day because they had no API limits.

So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was not allowed to be as ridiculously asymmetric as Obama’s was. They still had access to large amounts of data, but only because of their massive authorized install bases (which in all of the cases you mention were far larger than the OFA install base). But none had the entire US social graph - with the exception of OFA.

> OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio.

Great, what's your source for that data ?

> So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was allowed to be so ridiculously asymmetric. They still had access to large amounts of data because of their massive authorized install bases. But none had the entire US social graph.

Nevertheless, they didn't seek to hoist a fascist leader apparently controlled by a foreign enemy on the US. It is perfectly fine that OFA and other organizations should not have this kind of access either. But this is whataboutism. Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.

OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio

Great, what's your source for that data ?

My source is that I can do math. The campaign admits it had “the entire US social graph”. With ~200 million US Facebook profiles, and less than 1 million people that actually authorized Obama’s app, we come out with a ratio of roughly 200:1.

Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.

It revealed an enormous problem when Obama did it (and worse, with Facebook’s approval). It only became an issue for the press, though, when they failed to manipulate the election in the way they wanted. I’m actually not an advocate of Trump - I’m just saying that this was either wrong or it wasn’t, regardless of who did it. In truth, they both did it. Obama just did it on a vastly larger scale.

lol. so your answer is you have no proof. people exaggerate all the time when they say things like "entire social graph". Do you have any data that in 2012, 200 million unique americans were using facebook? And that obama had specific permission to bypass facebook's limit and get the 200:1 ratio?

The data speaks for itself. Read it. As for proof that they got special permissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16669576

The statement made in the article:

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. "

is ridiculous. There are millions of voters who have never had a Facebook account, and lots more back in 2011. They are handwaving, and this is not data. You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more" and you also don't know what kinds of access Cambridge Analytica may have had that differs from the data limits you experienced in your own development.

You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more"

Obama took data from ~200 million people ("the entire US social graph" is unambiguous). The CA incident involves ~50 million profiles. I think a difference of 150 million is "vastly more". That's not exaggeration, that's math. It was wrong in either case, but one did it on a vastly larger scale.

You can sit here splitting hairs and arguing with the specific wording of my comments and the articles backing this up, or you can say "yes, it was wrong in principle" which is what any objective person would do. Democrats and Republicans alike do bad things sometimes. Are you actually trying to defend the actions of any party involved in any of this?

Are you sure that Farmville didn't have a 200:1 ratio?

It certainly looks suspicious, but I don't think you can rule out the profit motive. Perhaps in 2012 Facebook's position was, "If you pay us enough money we'll remove the API limits"

Farmville had a massive install base. So they weren’t accessing that much data relative to the number of people that had directly authorized their app. The difference between it and the Obama app was the leverage that was allowed: less than 1 million people gave them access to their data, and they were able to use that to get deep profile data on nearly every US Facebook user - ~200 million accounts. Their attempts to do this set off all kinds of alarms, but Facebook went in and manually shut those alarms off and opened the floodgates to the data. Our data.

Considering that at least half of them - ~100 million people - would have consciously objected to helping Obama do anything, much less get elected, that should have been earth shatteringly scandalous and probably should have buried Facebook right then and there. But instead, the press celebrated this technique, right up until it helped create a result other than the one it wanted.

There are two questions here:

(1) Was Facebook biased in favor of the Democratic party?

(2) Should the press have been more critical of the way personal data was used for political purposes?

My answer to (1) is 'probably', but maybe Facebook would have been willing to "manually shut those alarms off and open the floodgates to the data" for anyone who gave them a million dollars?

Other people have noted that 2007-2012 is notably absent from the timeline in Zuck's post.

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071

Where do you get that Obama’s campaign had special access that other apps didn’t have?

"[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campign Director [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997

The NYT magazine article about this also mentions that the scale of the Obama campaign's data extraction tripped internal Facebook alerts which had to be overridden: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (Back in 2013, they of course spun this as a demonstration of just how impressive and well-done it was.)

This all should serve as another reminder to not yield certain leniencies to "our" guys just because we want them to have an advantage. Because it sets a precedent, and then future organizations, like CA, can do the same thing for people we don't like.

Nice. So they intentionally helped Obama, but indirectly helping Trump has caused international outrage.

I'd say its that the intervening years have shed the bloom from the rose that was Facebook, and a lot more people have become a lot more savvy to the topic since then. That makes CA the tipping point for public sentiment in the US, but Europe has been ahead of us for these types of concerns. Worth noting that i haven't seen many people placing blame on the Trump campaign either, it seems to be going swuarely where it belongs: CA and Facebook. It would be nice if more splashed on to other big players for this type of data too, like google. Google hasn't yet betrayed their trust to as great an extent though.

I disagree. Its undoubtedly a political issue. When it was used by Obama, the media lauded it as a genius use of tech and proof that his campaign was 'hooked in' to modern tools. Trump is obviously less popular in certain circles, which is the only reason why this is now a huge issue.

The Obama campaign took all that data and did normal political campaigning with it: targeting likely voters and bombarding them with campaign messaging. Cambridge Analytica ran Facebook-powered ratfucking operations: for example, organizing Black Lives Matter rallies with violent messaging, then highlighting the violent BLM rallies to scared white rural voters.

Facebook should never have facilitated this level of data collection for any campaign, but characterizing the current anger at Facebook as media-driven favoritism is Internet Research Agency level trolling.

Yep, liberals are so full of themselves and surround themselves with other liberals only, so the thought of someone actually voting differently is hard to fathom for them, be it Trump, Brexit, Le Pen. They are trying to rationalize it somehow that the poor people are being manipulated by Russia/fake news/Facebook/CA/insert the next week's boogeyman.

And that's why I am getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious. Classic HN.

Claiming that other people are ignorant doesn't justify your own ignorant argument. The only things you have showed here is that you thinks all liberals are the same and that they must be acting irrational. Which is exactly what you accuse all of them of doing, something far more implausible since they are a large group of people.

That of course doesn't conclude that liberals or what you prescribe to liberals is correct. But there were still significant differences between the reelection of Obama, a sitting president who won with a lesser margin than expected and Trump, an outsider not only to politics but the republican party, who won by a slim margin targeting certain fringe issues and key states.

That is overly simplistic. Undoubtedly Trump's unpopular status has helped the issue gain traction this time around, but there are two key aspects you can't overlook here: First, CA obtained the data improperly, raising the new question of just how much abuse has occurred. Second, blame here isn't being cast on Trump or his campaign, but the entities that improperly obtained data, or allowed it to happen.

Further, the "only angry because it's President Trump" narrative ignores the fact that there has been a rising tide of concern and pushback on data collection and customer surveillance business models. The fact that Trump's campaign was involved may have been a catalyst, but a catalyst cannot operate in a vacuum, it requires very specific preconditions, ready and primed for that spark. And the longer it builds, the smaller the spark needs to be.

I believe it's quite obvious that the campaign director either remembers this wrong, or the person they talked to gave them the wrong reason.

Why? Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

And even after learning about CA's breach of trust, they chose to mostly remain inactive, even when they learnt that the company was working for Ted Cruz and Trump, two candidates you probably wouldn't want to help if you're making business decisions based on political sympathy.

First, Facebook didn’t allow CA to do anything. That’s because CA didn’t ever have an app on Facebook. The app in question was a personality quiz created by an independent developer. It accessed a small fraction of the number of profiles that OFA did, and it was only able to do so over a much longer period of time. The data from the app was then sold to CA years after the fact. It was a normal app that operated within the normal parameters imposed by Facebook on all other applications.

That’s far different than the Obama situation. They accessed ~4 times the number of profiles, and were allowed to keep the data current because Facebook voluntarily removed the API limits for them. Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

> Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

Precisely because everyone knows/thinks Facebook was sympathetic towards Obama, I believe it's not unthinkable that someone used that fact as an explanation when they were asked and did not actually know the specific reason.

Her statements are highly specific.

Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

Ruling out money as a reason seems a bit presumptuous.

I hope you can take a step back and realize that this is one of the most blatant examples of mental gymnastics / cognitive dissonance that I personally have ever seen. In the face of direct, first-hand evidence that the Obama campaign did exactly the same thing that the media and social media ecosystem is now very angry at Trump for doing, your response is literally to go into denial about it, and insist that the evidence is inaccurate. You are essentially just yelling "fake news". This exact behavior, denying reality when it goes against what you want to believe, is how we get people insisting that climate change isn't real, and discrimination doesn't exist. Shame on you. I truly believe that you're better than this, please use this as a growing moment.

Is it / was it known that other potential candidates were barred from doing the same or was the Obama election campaign the only one granted such permissions?

"Barred" isn't exactly the right word, in that it implies that Facebook actively took steps to prevent other candidates from doing so. Instead, Facebook had standard data collection limits in place that were enforced automatically by the platform for all apps. When the Obama For America app hit these limits, Facebook explicitly removed them for that app. It is the only publicly known case where this was allowed for a political campaign.

When you say removed "them" I'm assuming you mean removed the collection limits and not the Obama campaign, correct? Thanks for the info by the way!

Yes, by "them" I meant that they removed the collection limits.

Do you have a source on the exemption of the data:permission limit being lifted for them? Given the soft run at quote mining in your earlier post, I’d feel more comfortable if your core assertion was verifiable.

Umm..wut? Read the thread. Read the direct quote from his campaign director saying that they had special treatment. There are a hundred articles saying alarm bells went off over OFA’s data collection activities, and Facebook reacted by shutting them off.

Google is your friend.

Here’s one to get you started...

“The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ “

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-cam...

No, it's known that Facebook did not take any meaningful action even after learning that this sort of data had been retained against their developer ToS, and was being used by the Trump campaign.

There are also enough stories from FarmVille and far smaller apps and the access they had. I wonder if anyone remembers running into API rate limits in the 2010-2012 timeframe?

I remember being as surprised by the API access as many of the testimonials we now hear. I had initially implemented rate limiting on my side. After never running into any problems, I gradually reduced the delays to 0 without ever hitting any limits. But I only ever accessed maybe a few dozen GB of data, not the 100+ million accounts others apparently got.

It may also have been important that CA saved all the data with no expiration policy. The API limits may have been set based on the usage pattern the ToS prescribed, namely never caching data for more than 24 hours. If you save and reuse the data instead, you save a lot of duplicate API calls and get new data instead.

Yes, I did all the time. Even the Obama campaign itself ran into them, and then Facebook explicitly removed them for their app to help them along.