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This looks like a strawman dressed in false dilemma. With Cambridge Analytica debacle, as I understand it, it was a facebook quiz hosted by facebook and the data collected from facebook directly and used for nefarious purposes.

This is a an extension developed by researchers asking users to install it on their machines and used exactly as advertised: scrapes advertisement data that facebook shows them.

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CA data was from a quiz, developed by a researcher at Cambridge University, hosted by that researcher, which scraped FB APIs after being authorized by a user.

This data is from a browser extension, developed by researchers at NYU, hosted by those researchers, which scrapes the FB site after being installed by a user.

IMO the situations are pretty analogous.

The situations are in no way analogous. CA gathered data on users who did not opt in. They paid 270k users to take a quiz, and gathered information on 87MM of their Facebook friends who never consented to sharing their information.

No kidding, the difference between opt-in and secret-opt-in is obvious.

In CA scandal the data collected was about users.

Here data is collected about what Facebook does, what a corporation does.

They don't seem similar.

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