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Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was super interesting to me because it reflected an entirely standard and unremarkable data-collection process that I'd seen several times. And yet it filled international headlines. Congress was interested.

It's easy to do. You create some app that has "login with Facebook". That's great for users, right? One less password for them to remember. Then as soon as they log in you make a quick call to the Facebook API, get all their friends, and dump it in some database table.

Even if only a few people log in to your app, you can get a database of thousands of real people.

I don't work for that type of company anymore, but I've been many places where that was bog standard, the very first code you write for a new product.

Does anyone know if the Facebook API has changed now?

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Tangent: This is a side-effect to how Facebook exposes Facebook ids. They expose system-wide identifiers. LinkedIn's API exposes user ids that are transformed based on whoever is interacting with the API. My network graph could overlap with your network graph, but the overlapping people would have different ids.

this has been changed for facebook to use app-specific IDs for many years now

Weren't you able to also pull infos like birthday, posts, likes and the online-status of friends of the one who used Facebook to log-in into a 3rd-party site? I think they then limited this to just the list of friends.

It became a massive "scandal" because it was part of the ongoing Facebook-scapegoating campaign that began the day after Trump won the election. There have been like 7 separate episodes in that scapegoating saga over the oas 2 years, and Zuckerberg has had to go public a bunch of times with some new vow to do something to get Facebook under control so that something so heinous doesn't happen again, lol... CNN and MSNBC viewers cannot understand how someone can support Trump unless than person is a white supremacist Nazi or whatever. All I know is that I have a nice $1,500 wager with a relative (who bet me last time as well) that if Trump is IN the election, he will win again. The only thing that could stop him is if he is simply not a candidate on Election Day. I think the main thing that could stop him is his own cholesterol; celebrity physician Dr. Oz said, in a show WITH Trump in September 2016, that Trump has too much of the "bad cholesterol."

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/18/opinion/sunday/18...

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