Their work was so “upfront” that FB internal monitoring alerts have fired from the spike in load, and FB assured them that this is OK and they are “on the same side”: https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/opinion/technology/37...

Bad optics, no matter how you slice it.

As sibling comment pointed they were about just as scummy on average but everyone decided to look away and pretend to not notice, even FB after they caught them siphoning all social graph data.

Well actually that's not quite accurate, some didn't look away, they were singing praises. His campaign won a major marketing award in 2008, beating Coke, Nike and Apple:

http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...

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I honestly look at Obama's campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers [...] to see what he's done, to be able to create a social network ...

Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, pointed to Mr. Obama's facility with engaging voters in social-media channels. "It's the fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said.

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(Sorry for repeated link, I know it has been posted many times but I think it perfectly illustrates the point well).

> His campaign won a major marketing award in 2008, beating Coke, Nike and Apple:

People are referencing 2012, not 2008. The data operations of both campaigns were very different.