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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

What's scary is that Cambridge Analytica is probably only one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of companies that had access to this type of data from Facebook. This is just the one we know about.

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Cambridge Analytica didn't pay to access this data. They got users to give it to them for free though Facebook's developer platform.

Thanks for the correction, I thought CA paid for access to the data the test collected.

My understanding is the "quiz app" was more of a phishing scheme to get users to share their Facebook data with Cambridge Analytica (including data that user had access to about their friends).

I believe they also paid users a small fee to install the quiz app via Mechanical Turk.

As mwarkentin included, CA _did_ pay users via mechanical turk to install the quiz app. So they did pay the users directly for their data, but not facebook. It seems there is no way to completely stop this without facebook blocking people from exporting their own data. Since CA could just pay people to send them their exported facebook data.

Actually Cambridge Analytica licensed the data from GSR, according to their press release from earlier this week [1].

> A research company (GSR) licensed the data to us, which they legally obtained via a tool provided by Facebook. Hundreds of data firms have utilized Facebook data in a similar fashion.

[1] https://ca-commercial.com/news/time-facts-not-conjecture-say...

Agreed. I was a DoD contractor when much of the social graph stuff came out. We were all looking at it wondering why they let you access _so much data_. Our managers told us they were working on securing some contractors that would ultimately use Facebook's social graph but nothing ever came of it.

Considering we were a tiny defense contractor who didn't get a ton of contracts, I have to assume this happened in some way or form.

the first thing I checked after this CA debacle was which apps I have connected my FB profile to and are there any fishy apps there. Fortunately, none of such apps are linked. I'd suggest everyone check the apps they've connected and unlink the ones which seem fishy.

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