Facebook Allegedly Offered Advertisers Special Access to Users Data, Activities | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Allegedly Offered Advertisers Special Access to Users Data, Activities

washingtonpost.com

47 pointsinfodocket8 comments

>Kramer’s company was the developer of Pikinis, an app that enabled people to find photos of Facebook users wearing bikinis.

This is after users OAuth'd the app granting access, right?

Also, when they say that FB gave select advertisers special access to 'full data', what level of data does that entail? Is it still aggregated, or are they getting raw data on individual users down at the click level (for example)?

Looks like full data, from the article:

"The data in question included people’s Facebook posts and photos, as well as their name, gender, educational and religious background and home town. It also consisted of user preferences as they surfed the web hitting Facebook’s familiar “like” button or downloaded an app. Such data, which Cambridge Analytica and tens of thousands of app developers gained access to over several years, offered key marketing insights for advertisers and political campaigns."

This is after the user seeking photos of people in bikinis granted the app access - but not the users whose bikini photos were being gawped at. At least that's how I understand apps like this using the friends API worked.

Surprise. A company whose raison d'être is selling user's data to advertisers, sells user's data to advertisers.

Surprise. The free market didn’t self regulate.

You're telling me Facebook is evil and does bad things with users' data?

I hope they give all my data to advertisers so the advertisers will know about my one friend, incomplete profile, and incorrect zipcode. Even still Facebook sometimes sends me friend requests. About 20% of the time the friends are people I actually vaguely know which is weird because that data clearly isn't coming from my Facebook profile.

It's pretty simple to construct that graph when you have over a billion people upload their contact lists. Sprinkle Facebook buying data that maps phone numbers to ip address etc. The list goes on, buy a pizza over the phone and provide your name - guess what the pizza company sells that data in bulk.

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