Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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