Comment by scottmf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottmf | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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