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Actually, if you look, the original source said that Facebook admitted that they were only doing so because they wanted Obama to win - and that for anyone else it would be a violation of their practices. The OFA postulated that Facebook did the same for other parties, but no evidence has come to light.

In fact, reading what the OFA admitted, and what is under investigation here, the only difference seems to be that Facebook didn't unofficially bless the efforts of Cambridge, while they did for OFA.

Here is the money quote - directly from Twitter:

“They 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"

That's not a conspiracy theory, or some evil double standard. That is a director for OFA explicitly mentioning that they were being given special data "because they were on our side".

You should be very very scared about social network deciding to be on peoples side. See Trump and Twitter.

It's as if the last two years hasn't convinced you to be deeply skeptical of social networks and surveillance as a service operations. This universal confirmation bias is the exact same bias that Trumpkins use to ignore any news they don't like. Facebook will keep selling you to the highest bidder. They don't give a fsck about your political point of views.

(And this is probably tame for what they do for China to suppress their people).

Actually, if you look, the original source said that Facebook admitted that they were only doing so because they wanted Obama to win - and that for anyone else it would be a violation of their practices.

No, it doesn't. Between the two sources, they say that Facebook was "surprised" that they were able to get so much data, and that Facebook didn't stop them. The sources do not say that the Obama campaign violated Facebook's policies.

This is the false equivalence: "What the Obama campaign and Cambridge Analytica did to acquire data on tens of millions of Americans is the same."

In reality, Cambridge Analytica obtained the data from a 3rd party not authorized to provide it, and who collected the data under false pretenses.

The Obama campaign did neither.

EDIT: Here's The Washington Post. "Facebook’s rules for accessing user data lured more than just Cambridge Analytica" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru... :

Cambridge Analytica — unlike other firms that access Facebook’s user data — broke Facebook’s rules by obtaining the data under the pretense of academic use. But experts familiar with Facebook’s systems and policies say that the greater problem was that the rules for accessing the social network’s information trove were so loose in the first place.

“They 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"

The willingness to excuse Facebook selling your privacy because you agree with a political point of view is part of the problem.

Both the articles you cite concede that some meeting some time somewhere at which somebody from Facebook said "they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side" doesn't mean that the Obama campaign violated Facebook policies. It's an important distinction.

If we trust The Daily Mail article:

Davidsen said that she felt the project was 'creepy' - 'even though we played by the rules, and didn't do anything I felt was ugly, with the data'

If we trust the IBD article:

The only difference, as far as we can discern, between the two campaigns' use of Facebook, is that in the case of Obama the users themselves agreed to share their data with the Obama campaign, as well as that of their friends.

The users that downloaded the Cambridge app, meanwhile, were only told that the information would be used for academic purposes. Nor was the data to be used for anything other than academic purposes.

It's an important distinction, to be sure, and Facebook is right to be attacked for its inability to control how its user data were being gathered and shopped around.

(Though it should be pointed out that it wasn't a Cambridge Analytica app, and Cambridge Analytica obtained the data from a 3rd party who wasn't authorized to provide it.)

In any case, Zuckerberg's senate testimony should reveal the circumstances under which facebook data was shared or not shared with the Obama and Trump campaigns.

After all, both campaigns (and most major US political campaigns) surely had embedded Facebook employee account managers helping them spend as much money as effectively as possible, while scrutinizing their account usage.

That is assuming the testimony doesn't wind up being an hours long repetition of the words "I do not recall". I'm not all that familiar with Facebook's org chart, but there might even be some plausible deniability with the CEO getting involved with day-to-day API access requests.

(Who, me, cynical?)

That sort of rank partisanship can barely be hidden. It's discrediting. FB is clearly in the worse here, even if they were entirely within their rights while Cambridge Analytica was entirely not. What's legal is not always what's right.

this.

It's becoming clear exactly what the cost of social surveillance is in our lives. This is just one of many significant problems with it.

There have always been jackasses willing to sacrifice morals (or rightness) in favor of power. Social networks just make it easier to ignore signals that should humanize power.

The behavior is objectionable whether any of the parties had FB's approval or not. That Cambridge Analytica lacked FB's approval makes what they did either no different, or a lot worse, depending on your p.o.v. -- if you're FB, you're likely to think that Cambridge Analytica did something terrible; if you're the public then the end result was the same as in the Obama campaign case, so you might find the Cambridge Analytica no worse.

Seriously, being on the public side I can't tell the difference. Both cases involve (ab)use of user data from FB without the users' knowledge. Both are bad -- or neutral, if you're the sort of user that understands the implications of using Facebook at all. Indeed, I'm not even surprised by these incidents. If anything I'm surprised that anyone is. I'm not even surprised -though annoyed- by partisan attempts to make one side or the other look worse.

Please, let's stop pretending that Facebook's blessing makes one (ab)use of user data OK and the other not. If you object to a campaign's use of your data, why wouldn't you object to a campaign's use of someone else's data?

And yes, your data, when shared with FB, is FB's data. But do people even understand that? You and I do, but does your mom? Mine certainly does not.

Wonder if anyone from Facebook went back and asked them to delete all that data. Then later on verified that they did so. What about other outfits that figured out how extract the data in the same way?

The commenter isn't arguing that they're the same:

> That said, this really doesn't address either the Cambridge situation, or the fact that Facebook themselves allowed the Obama campagin to pull demographic information in violation of their own polices...

The sentence is essentially "this doesn't address A, nor does it address B", which requires that A and B be different.

There were rumors of Zuck wanting to run for president.

Somehow, I think after this, it is ( I hope ) unthinkable.

It's always been laughable.

It was laughable that Trump would run for President, until he did. And Ronald Reagan: "The actor?"

Reagan was also Governor of California.

we are firmly in the era of celebrity presidents - every president since Carter has been less qualified then the previous in terms of previous executive experience.

Zuck, Kamala Harris and Oprah are whetting their appetites.

Kamala Harris may be a political darling at the moment, but she is not a celebrity politician and so it doesn’t make sense to compare her to Oprah or Mark Zuckerberg. Harris has been in law/politics for basically her whole career:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

One of those three people is a sitting US Senator.

Who will not have even served out her term when she runs for president.

These are the type of people we feel are well qualified to run the most powerful, largest, and most expensive institution in human history?

How is someone who is a US senator exactly similar to Oprah? Nixon was in Congress for 6 years and VP for 8. Was that not enough or too much? And the idea Obama was less prepared that George W. Bush seems hard to swallow.

Look, you can take issue with Harris's positions, but before she was Senator she was CA's Attorney General before that.

Not exactly inexperienced.

> Who will not have even served out her term when she runs for president.

So, she’ll have a couple fewer years in the Senate and a lot more in elected executive positions than Kennedy when he was elected President.

> These are the type of people we feel are well qualified to run the most powerful, largest, and most expensive institution in human history?

Harris isn't necessarily my first choice, but she's certainly qualified; Oprah and Zuck are unqualified, though less so than the current incumbent (which, admittedly, is a low bar to clear.)

Of course. The people that would elect them are decidedly and unabashedly anti-technorati. It is a good thing we have the bureaucrat firewall in place, frustrating though it is.

Interestingly, from a game theory perspective, the purpose of leadership is to coordinate people, and charisma is absolutely a valid way to accomplish that. From game theory it doesn't actually matter very much how the coordination is arrived at, just that it happens, check out http://www.dustingetz.com/:myerson c-f "charisma"

In short, yes. I think a sitting US Senator has met the basic credibility and resume qualifications to be a US President, and is not accurately described as a "celebrity" candidate.

Reagan, GWB, and Clinton were all Governor before President.

GHWB was founder/CEO of an oil company, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Director of the CIA, and Vice President.

Zuck is the Chief Executive Officer of a $400bn+ company ( not that I think he is qualified, mind you ).

For one tech company with no other experience. A one hit wonder, in other words.

He might be a great executive, but then, Donald Trump might be a great real estate developer, investor, and business man. Just a few factors aligning correctly and you can be successful, even if you aren't particularly skilled.

Here's NPR.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/25/596805347/how-does-cambridge-...

Relevant quotes from Betsy Hoover the Obama 2012 online organizing director:

"So the app that everyone's referring to in this moment was an app called Targeted Sharing. It was an app that we created on Facebook that fully followed Facebook's terms of service. And any individual could decide to use the app. When they clicked on the app, a screen would pop up that would say what data they're authorizing the app was giving us access to and exactly how we were going to use that data. And so at that time, it was totally legitimate on Facebook to say you're giving us access to your social network. You're giving us access to your friends on Facebook."

"...So, you know, we got your list of friends. And then we matched it to our model, our list of voters that we didn't build with Facebook data. We built with voter history and, you know, all of the other data points that Democratic campaigns use to build models. But we matched the data of your friends to that model and then reflected it back to the person who had authorized the app..."

Sounds very similar to Cambrdige Analytica imho. In addition I don't really think that exploring how deep the rabbit hole goes is deflection, rather showing how much more pervasive this practice is than people think.

>The people signing up knew the data they were handing over would be used to support a political campaign. Their friends, however, did not.

>Facebook friends lists, tags and photos allowed Obama operatives to identify a person’s close friends, which they then matched with offline public records. (Was this person likely to vote for Obama, but unlikely to get out to vote?) They then told the app users which of their friends they should send campaign messages to.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/...

They seem pretty different. Not just in how the data was collected, but how it was then used.

The research into Facebook likes and personality and the manipulation of those psychological profiles, which CA based their entire operation on, didn’t even exist in 2008.

Comparing the two is absolutely a false equivalency.

And the CA scandal goes way beyond the Facebook stuff. The company is allegedly involved in various illegal and anti-democratic activities around the world. Are people really downplaying this simply because they support Trump and CA has a Trump connection?

Agreed. In my understanding the CA data wasn't a friends list, which it what OFA got, but your friends Facebook data (their photos, posts, likes AND their friends data). That's how they got to 50M users. And how they used it sounds pretty different too.

The data OFA got wasn't just a list of your friends, it was their photos, posts and likes too. The Obama campaign's strategy revolved around using that information about your friends' social media - what photos they were tagged in, who interacted with who, etc - to figure out who was closest to which of their volunteers in order to work out who could best convince them to vote Obama. Which isn't what CA was offering, of course, but still seems rather creepy.

The other difference is that based on what we know, the Trump campaign didn't actually have any interest in using the CA data in question. The head of their campaign has quite consistently said he thinks CA's psychographics was worthless nonsense, and I'm not aware of anyone finding evidence contradicting this. It's quite possible that, in fact, the 2012 Obama campaign was the only US presidential campaign that systematically gathered information on people's Facebook friends to feed their campaign machine.

'False equivalency!' seems to be a popular new phrase to prevent self-reflection. If the CA situation is only bad insofar as it helped the GOP, then that's fine, but if you're interested in broader change regarding privacy then a knee-jerk partisan supremacy won't benefit anyone.

It’s not a new phrase. Perhaps you’re seeing it more due to the flood of textbook false equivalencies from people trying to defend the president’s behavior.

On the one hand you have FB users actively campaigning for Obama coordinating and voluntarily sharing their friend data with the campaign for the purpose of campaign, and on the other hand you have a goofy quiz app author secretly using the friend data for the Trump campaign.

> > Facebook themselves allowed the Obama campagin to pull demographic information in violation of their own polices, which was arguably impacted far more people (https://www.investors.com/... && http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/...).

> Neither of those citations say that what the Obama campaign did violated Facebook's policies.

The text you quoted does not claim that the Obama campaign violated FB's policies. It says that FB allowed the Obama campaign to do things that would -without FB's approval- have violated FB's policies.

> (Further, both of those citations - a right-leaning source[0] and a tabloid, respectively - are articles written about some tweets. Which is not to say that they're wrong, but without further confirmation, one might want to take them with a grain of salt.)

The tweets were from Obama's own Campaign Director, saying that OFA were allowed to violate FB's TOS in a way that others weren't.

> both of those citations - a right-leaning source[0] and a tabloid, respectively

The Daily Mail is a tabloid, and is so bad that it has been banned from being used as source in Wikipedia.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...

> Neither of those citations say that what the Obama campaign did violated Facebook's policies.

So?

I can see why Facebook would care about that, because owning/selling/managing the data is their model.

But that doesn't matter to me a Facebook user when the end result is the same (my FB info provided to political campaign.)