Michael Simon (@mbsimon) who ran the microtargeting team for Obama in 08:

>How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.

There’s more in the thread: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

There are parallel issues that muddy this debate where it concerns Facebook specifically (CA's self-reported extortion/blackmailing scheme) and issues that concern Facebook, but were/are standard practice, and widely requested by FB publishers, including media companies[0] (CA seeding the social graph with users of a non-election related app)

This tweet is sneaky. Users of the OFA app were voluntary; their friends weren't, and microtargeting of friends was of much greater value to a campaign (true believers are guaranteed, it's the undecided/uncaring who can move the needle) But that's speaking of ethics; under the terms of service all these actions were voluntary even for people who were never notified of what their friends had agreed to.

The one violation of FB terms may have been CA continuing to use the data after FB requested its deletion.

Still, as in parallel construction, once you have a good data set there are many ways in which you can reconstruct it and safely delete the original data.

Even if OFA did as FB asked and didn't keep data after the terms of service changed, they still had the knowledge, and it can be reconstructed (then that's another debate, which we may never get to until something flashy happens involving parallel construction)

[0]: Quiz time - if you wanted to collect as many third-party web trackers, what websites would you visit? To make it harder, you can only visit 5 sites - which ones?

I expect the fact that the OFA app was pulling friend data would be surprising to at least the friends. Which Facebook turned that feature off years ago.

Of course, they turned that feature off so that people looking to obtain microtargetting services will need to buy them from Facebook.

Which is funny. I've see some people talking about how the Clinton campaign relied on an in house data team for their Facebook work, and that the Trump campaign worked more closely with Facebook employees (the Facebook employees were on site at the campaign, working for free because the campaign was such a big customer).

> I expect the fact that the OFA app was pulling friend data would be surprising to at least the friends. Which Facebook turned that feature off years ago.

They did? I still see a "Apps others use" under the settings where I have to manually uncheck letting others share my information:

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

Facebook closed off the slurping of all your friends from the API with the app, and only shows those that have the same app.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

What did you expect them to say?

“Don’t be so hard on CA. We had more people and much better data.”

Well, both try to reach an audience with their message, but one side is practically (if not literally) boasting that they are manipulating an deceiving their targets and using what they know about their prey against them.