Is anyone in jail?
Are there any pending legal cases against them?
There have been multiple fines related to this scandal from multiple governments. There have been Congressional hearings on it in the US. There have been numerous lawsuits. I did say "potentially" in that first comment because I can't say definitively that they acted illegally, but there is a lot of smoke here. If people are going to make the accusation that it is a double standard, where is the smoke surrounding Obama's use of data?
I can claim that your comment is "potentially illegal" ..means nothing.
> There have been Congressional hearings on it in the US. There have been numerous lawsuits.
doesn't mean its illegal. Its just politics to discredit opposition's election victory.
This is equivalent to "hillary's emails" which also had lawsuits and congressional hearings. Now no one cares about it. Same with CA, no one will hear about it once democrats win.
> where is the smoke surrounding Obama's use of data?
There isn't because republicans didn't think it would be politically useful like "hillary's emails".
Sounds like a dog whistle
EDIT: This was a few spots down in the search results and explains how Obama's data collection was different than CA.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...
The issue was never that CA did this with "false pretences" (they didn't sign up users directly, that was done by an academic who then sold the data) or that by signing users up on your own website, you were doing some above board. The issue was that Facebook allowed access to not only your account but your friend network. That was what Obama used, that is what CA used, that is why both tried to get the Facebook login, and, btw, the end goal was exactly the same: microtargeting of ads.
Btw, there are probably hundreds of other companies who are doing the same thing. A lot of the "data science" startups are using this data in their products, there was an Israeli startup (mentioned here recently) that somehow had click data from Google, individual search data from Google...this isn't just politics, this personalised, identifying data that is somehow everywhere.
Yes the methods of data collection were slightly different between Obama's campaign and what Cambridge Analytica did and sold to conservative candidates. Obama's campaign claimed they didn't do as much with the data and it was within the FB ToS, but these claims don't change the ethics and since 2004 both parties have been building their data infrastructure out to sway voters (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/obamas-secret-we...).
Both parties are nefarious in their use of data and attempt to persuade voters through micro-targeted outrage, and it makes me wary of ever voting for either of the two parties' candidate.
It is interesting to think of campaign efficiency (or propaganda efficiency lol) as CPV (cost per vote) to make it parallel to advertising metrics like CPC and CPI.
I think things like hard cap campaign contribution limits (as in overall campaign fundraising cap rather than by donor type) could do more good to even the playing field. And it should reduce the web of "IOUs" that elected officials come into office with.
i.e. if you are campaigning for Governor of NY, you can target New York state, but you can't target Manhattan, or Long Island, or men over 50, or people who liked the NRA.
Nearly everything else will generally only reach a subset of the voters, and that subset will have known demographic differences from the overall voter demographics for the jurisdiction.
Run an ad at in the 8-8:30 PM Sunday slot on every FOX TV station in a state, for example, and you'll get quite a different demographic than if you ran an ad on those same stations on Sunday afternoon. The first ad would be during "The Simpsons" and the second would probably be during an NFL football game.
Which was harvest private data (including messages and news feed) from Facebook users and their friends via an app that was ostensibly non-political, and then in turn sell it to a super PAC that for microtargeting. I'll note that the super PAC involved was likely coordinating with a campaign in violation of FEC campaign finance laws.
The CA scandal resulted in a $5 billion fine to Facebook by the FTC.
I think it's disingenuous to say what the Obama campaign and Trump/Cambridge did were close to the same.
Cambridge Analytica were accused of taking data mainly on what pages users 'Liked' - not private messages or news feed. (Unless you have a source?)
Obama campaign boasted about having access to the entire friends network. In other words, they know who each person was and what the connections between them were. Facebook openly said that they helped the Obama campaign get and utilise 100% of the friends network data on Facebook.
Simple scraping would get you a lot of the same data back then but it would be more involved and less solid legally. CA just figured out an easy way to do a huge scrape of Facebook.
I'd be surprised if many other organizations out there aren't sitting on similar datasets.
Even without asking any psychometric questions you could easily seed this through the dataset based on just a few examples or ground truths. This part seems rather unspectacular. With all the likes you can already tell who's alike. You just need to label the clusters.
CA's sell was this data would allow them to target super precisely and send different messages to different groups. But there's a big bottleneck at message creation. If you have 10 ads you can only target 10 groups uniquely. I'd be much more impressed if CA actually had software to manage ad creation, placement and performance tracking.
But if you actually want a refresher, and for anyone else,
Usually, even the generally available facts are a lot better than most people's understandings of the situation. For example, most people seem to think that this scandal proved that Facebook sell their user data, whereas it actually is alleged that CA took advantage of the well-documented public API that Facebook used to have, where any app vendor could download data on friends of friends who had given permissions to the app.
If you have specific questions, I would be happy to point you in the right direction.