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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Cambridge Analytica was not the 1st time this was done.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

Also I'm curious why Correct the Record and Share Blue are nearly complete ignored when they did the exact same thing at the exact same time.

They took over the main politics subreddit in 2016, one of the worst things I’ve seen happen online. Crickets.

By all accounts it seems like there was a major reshuffling that took place on the night of the Democratic National Convention.

The entire mood of the subreddit changed overnight from posts that vilified Sec. Clinton to posts that glorified her - it was completely crazy. I read that subreddit quite frequently during US election season and the difference was staggering. People dismiss it as "everyone rallied behind the nominee" - as someone who was there practically every day. It definitely wasn't that. There is definitely something shady going on with that subreddit in particular.

Incidentally, the TV news media was also seemingly doing a blackout of the fairly heated protests taking place outside the building where all the disappointed Bernie folks were trying to get inside. I only found out of them much later from online videos.

Yeah I used to enjoy the sub too, some interesting discussions that were usually polite. You are 100% correct it was overnight, there was nothing organic about that.

Do you have more information on this?

From the same journalist that broke the Snowden story:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/963804731759038465

> they did the exact same thing at the exact same time.

They did not do the "exact same thing" at all. You are spreading lies using logical fallacies and that causes harm to the community here; please stop. Your false equivalence, presented without evidence, is harmful.

Because they didn’t. You’ve fully bought into one fantasy and now are suspicious of any reasoning that contradicts your preconceptions.

In those days it was common practice for folks to blindly accept permissions that apps asked for. If someone stole a database filled with access tokens, they'd in-turn have access to all of this data.

The sets to consider are:

- The cases where they did it. We know they did it. We're making a big deal out of it (CA, etc)

- The cases where they did it. We know they did it. We're not making a big deal out of it (Obama, given the sad state of much of western media)

- The cases where they did it and nobody knows, and nobody seems to care about.

I suspect the last case has the highest numbers. There were probably hacking operations that took whatever access tokens they could find, ate the user's entire social graph, and sold it off.

There are many similarities but I think the key difference is Cambridge Analytica as its own entity sold its data (including psychological profiles of users' Facebook friends) gathered from an apolitical survey app to multiple other entities such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Brexit. So essentially a service that I never signed up for is potentially selling my presumed psychological profile to political campaigns, for a profit. I'd argue that's a bit of a bamboozle. The Obama campaign was using a similar data set but it didn't breach Facebook's terms and its intrinsically political purpose wasn't really obfuscated.

Their campaign made use of friend's data as well (as I understand it).

That is a false equivalence. You are spreading lies by equating two very different things.

> Cambridge Analytica was not the 1st time this was done.

is not supported by the link you supplied. If you want to equate the two, then go ahead and do it, but you'll need much better sources than that.

CA/Trump is very different from what Obama's campaign did.

How about these tweets from Obama's campaign manager? https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760

Both campaigns abused Facebook to get the personal information of people who never downloaded the offending app. The Obama campaign collected information on a lot more people than CA did, so many that Facebook said they would have blocked anybody else requesting that much information.

I may be misunderstanding this, but it looks like the Obama campaign was able to access the entire social graph of people who knew that they were contributing information to the Obama campaign. So for example if we were Facebook friends and they got you from my social graph, it would be because I knowingly let them have access to my information knowing it was for political purposes.

According to the Wikipedia article on the CA scandal [1]:

> Cambridge Analytica in turn arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey only for academic use. However, Facebook's design allowed this app not only to collect the personal information of people who agreed to take the survey, but also the personal information of all the people in those users' Facebook social network. In this way Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users

So, both got more information than the sharers intended (namely, information from people in their social graphs), but in the Obama case the root nodes of any such information trees were people who knew they were sharing with the Obama campaign whereas in the CA case the root nodes were people who were told that they were sharing only for academic research.

That seems to me to be a pretty big difference. In the Obama case if I'm a root node, the abuse is that although they used the information for the purposes I intended when I gave it, they got more information than I may have intended to (or had a moral right to) give. In the CA case if I'm a root node the abuse is that plus them lying about why the information was being collected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

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