"used stolen Facebook data"
Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.
Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...
They can call it that sure, but if they didn’t restrict access it’s hard to take this as anything but Facebook covering the entire point of their api—to get user data. Hell, if this is theft I should add “master burglar” to my resume—scraping in spite of being an obvious TOS violation is common in the industry. It’s certainly not a crime.
It was against the Facebook ToS, but the data was still provided easily via the API. That's what allowed them to quickly build a database of most eligible voters with very little direct outreach.
Back in the mid-'00s, we started implementing something against FB's API and I was more than a bit shocked to discover that their solution for preventing someone from building a parallel network of friend relationships out of the available dataset was "Please don't do that, and anyway if you try to do it at scale we'll probably detect the bandwidth consumption and shut you down." Not great.