Why (almost) everything reported about Cambridge Analytica is wrong

This story is wrong and misleading.

It claims that the new york times and guardian have reported CA's behavior as "hacking". Here's a thorough depiction of what CA did by the times and it does not use that term and basically describes what the story describes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

A critique of this type should cite specific sources and at least attempt to be more evidence based. It would NOT be difficult to be more careful and do so.

This story's approach is propaganda, not debate. [edited to add missing "NOT"]

I feel this author is basically making arguments about terminology to deflect attention away from the basic issues. He's also wrong in substance, because I've read many many other articles about this that describe the specifics. Anyone who pays a tiny amount of attention understands they didn't hack facebook, but instead took advantage of facebook's ridiculous ability to harvest someone's friend graph and their friends, and easily develop a giant network by doing nothing more than putting out a stupid survey app. But this is still a horrible invasion of people's privacy, and it demonstrated how badly facebook treat's people's information.

Will this guy next write an article titled "grindr is doing people a favor by selling heir hiv status"? Or they weren't "selling it"? In any case, it's not persuasive.

It was covered a bit in the article but I think it needs some additional visibility. Not only did plenty of developers have access to the same data, there were a number of parallel research projects investigating manipulation of online communities using very similar techniques. It was no secret amongst those in the field and in fact Chris Sumner had been speaking about it for a number of years at DEF CON. His DEF CON 25 presentation seems especially on-point upon reflection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hx86H3-mc