"But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences."
Last I checked, Farmville was not associated with OFA. So you need to back up your assertion "All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. " and explain why this also renders the entire dataset collected by CA to be completely harmless, in contrast to the current narrative. Because it's not that interesting if a relatively benign political organization got a little more data than another which used it to impose the will of a foreign enemy upon the US electorate.
It was somewhat possible to overcome this by spreading the collection out of a number of months or years, which is what I believe the Kogan app did. But even in that case, with the data collection spread out over a long period of time, they had nowhere near the data that the Obama campaign was allowed access to. Finally, the CA data was years old, while the Obama data was allowed to stay fresh right up to election day because they had no API limits.
So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was not allowed to be as ridiculously asymmetric as Obama’s was. They still had access to large amounts of data, but only because of their massive authorized install bases (which in all of the cases you mention were far larger than the OFA install base). But none had the entire US social graph - with the exception of OFA.
It certainly looks suspicious, but I don't think you can rule out the profit motive. Perhaps in 2012 Facebook's position was, "If you pay us enough money we'll remove the API limits"
Considering that at least half of them - ~100 million people - would have consciously objected to helping Obama do anything, much less get elected, that should have been earth shatteringly scandalous and probably should have buried Facebook right then and there. But instead, the press celebrated this technique, right up until it helped create a result other than the one it wanted.
(1) Was Facebook biased in favor of the Democratic party?
(2) Should the press have been more critical of the way personal data was used for political purposes?
My answer to (1) is 'probably', but maybe Facebook would have been willing to "manually shut those alarms off and open the floodgates to the data" for anyone who gave them a million dollars?
Great, what's your source for that data ?
> So these apps with much larger install bases than Obama could have ever dreamed of had access to less data than OFA did because their ratio was allowed to be so ridiculously asymmetric. They still had access to large amounts of data because of their massive authorized install bases. But none had the entire US social graph.
Nevertheless, they didn't seek to hoist a fascist leader apparently controlled by a foreign enemy on the US. It is perfectly fine that OFA and other organizations should not have this kind of access either. But this is whataboutism. Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.
Great, what's your source for that data ?
My source is that I can do math. The campaign admits it had “the entire US social graph”. With ~200 million US Facebook profiles, and less than 1 million people that actually authorized Obama’s app, we come out with a ratio of roughly 200:1.
Its truth or not does not mean the CA situation is not revealing of an enormous problem.
It revealed an enormous problem when Obama did it (and worse, with Facebook’s approval). It only became an issue for the press, though, when they failed to manipulate the election in the way they wanted. I’m actually not an advocate of Trump - I’m just saying that this was either wrong or it wasn’t, regardless of who did it. In truth, they both did it. Obama just did it on a vastly larger scale.
"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. "
is ridiculous. There are millions of voters who have never had a Facebook account, and lots more back in 2011. They are handwaving, and this is not data. You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more" and you also don't know what kinds of access Cambridge Analytica may have had that differs from the data limits you experienced in your own development.
Obama took data from ~200 million people ("the entire US social graph" is unambiguous). The CA incident involves ~50 million profiles. I think a difference of 150 million is "vastly more". That's not exaggeration, that's math. It was wrong in either case, but one did it on a vastly larger scale.
You can sit here splitting hairs and arguing with the specific wording of my comments and the articles backing this up, or you can say "yes, it was wrong in principle" which is what any objective person would do. Democrats and Republicans alike do bad things sometimes. Are you actually trying to defend the actions of any party involved in any of this?
The problem with that statement is that you believe it was a catastrophic outcome. For the first time in history, media and new technology is able to instantly tell you if the president has so much as sneezed while the sitting president is a (highly controversial) Republican. Obama was considered a nightmare scenario for the American right, and if you listened to the right outlets, you heard every single one of Obama's missteps. Every poor decision, embarrassing association, or undelivered promise was constantly paraded as grounds for impeachment, but social media and what many consider "neutral" news sources have a noticeable progressive bent, and the Obama administration got the benefit of the doubt more often than not.
The Obama administration deported more undocumented immigrants than every past president minus HW Bush combined. The Obama administration killed over 3700 people (over 300 of which were civilians) in drone strikes. In that regard, Obama reportedly said that it "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." Attorney General Eric Holder was the first US cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress, and Obama exercised executive privilege to support Holder's decision to withhold documents pertaining to Fast and Furious.
Most US citizens who actively use social media don't know those things (among many other controversies) happened, but they sure as shit know that "Donald Trump gets two scoops of ice cream", and constantly beat the dead "covfefe" horse; you can swipe right on Snapchat or Twitter to that social media company's curated news page and instantly hear every single slip-up and hot take that Trump has. This notion of a "catastrophic outcome" largely exists because for the first time, news outlets are at odds with the administration in the age of mass media.
It is of course a rote and entirely predictable exercise to take my statement that "this is a catastrophe", turn it around and say, "well Obama was a catastrophe for the right". I'm here to say that this is a false equivalency and the right has lost its mind. The conservative view of Obama is equivalent to the liberal view of Bush, that's a lot more reasonable. But the right has not has their "liberal Trump", and it is perfectly fine that they never will.
That is your opinion, and you're entitled to it. But do you not detect even a whiff of hypocrisy in this whole thing? It should have been portrayed as the terrible thing that it is today back when Obama did it. That is what I have an issue with.
Therefore, the left has no incentive to fight the bias of the press, because it favors their side on nearly every issue. The ironic part is that by making the misuse of Facebook data acceptable (even celebrated) when Obama did it, the press may have inadvertently helped Trump get elected years later. They’re upset now, but they’re just trying to put the genie that they unleashed back in the bottle. We reap what we sow.
Does yelling at your computer make it work better? (Perhaps an increasingly poor example in the age where voice commands are becoming popular.) Or figuring out what's wrong and doing what needs to be done to fix it? Gotta work with the facts on the ground, not how you think it should be. And maybe by doing so, you can move what is towards what should be.
In the case of working for user data privacy, we're working against companies that are benefiting from the data they collect and their lobbyists, as well as people who aren't aware of the situation and often only see the benefits of the apps they're using. And those people cross many demographic and political lines. I don't think user privacy is a partisan issue. It's going to be an uphill battle. You think pointing out all of the differences and disagreements of those who don't agree with you, all of the inconsistencies you see in their positions is going to help? I sincerely don't think so.
The point isn't that pointing out hypocrisy is wrong, it's that it gets in the way of your goals.
If it's more important to you to point out those inconsistencies than improve the user privacy situation, I think you have your priorities wrong. If you think you can only remedy the user privacy situation by first correcting their inconsistencies, I think that's wrong-headed and doomed to failure on both counts. But you're certainly entitled to your opinion and free to disregard mine.
Then of course terrorists from roughly the same organization tried again on the same building eight years later and it was the largest attack in US history by orders of magnitude. Terrorism proceeded to become the key societal and political issue pretty much for a whole generation.
The problem was there for a long time, the hazard was there for a long time, but it's only when we get the catastrophic outcome; e.g. the Uber car actually killed someone, the plane actually crashed, the WTC was actually destroyed, it's largely rational that that is when lots of people care. There's nothing unusual or hypocritical about it.
You might not think the outcome of this election was catastrophic but the reporters who cover the government and the white house do. They know the norms and customs that have been in place for many decades and they see that they've been ripped to shreds in just a little over a year. They know this is a catastrophe and they are rightfully trying to shine a light on every possible thing that we can get at to both patch the situation and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
[1] https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...
That of course doesn't conclude that liberals or what you prescribe to liberals is correct. But there were still significant differences between the reelection of Obama, a sitting president who won with a lesser margin than expected and Trump, an outsider not only to politics but the republican party, who won by a slim margin targeting certain fringe issues and key states.
Further, the "only angry because it's President Trump" narrative ignores the fact that there has been a rising tide of concern and pushback on data collection and customer surveillance business models. The fact that Trump's campaign was involved may have been a catalyst, but a catalyst cannot operate in a vacuum, it requires very specific preconditions, ready and primed for that spark. And the longer it builds, the smaller the spark needs to be.
Facebook should never have facilitated this level of data collection for any campaign, but characterizing the current anger at Facebook as media-driven favoritism is Internet Research Agency level trolling.
Why? Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.
And even after learning about CA's breach of trust, they chose to mostly remain inactive, even when they learnt that the company was working for Ted Cruz and Trump, two candidates you probably wouldn't want to help if you're making business decisions based on political sympathy.
That’s far different than the Obama situation. They accessed ~4 times the number of profiles, and were allowed to keep the data current because Facebook voluntarily removed the API limits for them. Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.
Precisely because everyone knows/thinks Facebook was sympathetic towards Obama, I believe it's not unthinkable that someone used that fact as an explanation when they were asked and did not actually know the specific reason.
Ruling out money as a reason seems a bit presumptuous.
Google is your friend.
Here’s one to get you started...
“The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ “
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-cam...
There are also enough stories from FarmVille and far smaller apps and the access they had. I wonder if anyone remembers running into API rate limits in the 2010-2012 timeframe?
I remember being as surprised by the API access as many of the testimonials we now hear. I had initially implemented rate limiting on my side. After never running into any problems, I gradually reduced the delays to 0 without ever hitting any limits. But I only ever accessed maybe a few dozen GB of data, not the 100+ million accounts others apparently got.
It may also have been important that CA saved all the data with no expiration policy. The API limits may have been set based on the usage pattern the ToS prescribed, namely never caching data for more than 24 hours. If you save and reuse the data instead, you save a lot of duplicate API calls and get new data instead.
That is a gross oversimplification of the issue. There were controls in place to stop excessive data collection. In fact, the only app in this situation that was allowed to "suck out" "vast amounts of data" was the Obama For America app. According to Carol Davidsen, Obama's Former Campaign Director "We ingested the entire U.S. social graph" [1], despite the fact that less than 1 million people actively authorized the app to access their data. Approximately 99.5% of the hundreds of millions of people whose data Obama took, with Facebook's blessings (actively allowing it to bypass its data collection limits for apps), never knew about or authorized Obama to have or use their data.
So only one app was "actively encouraged" to suck out vast amounts of data in the history of the existence of the API. All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect. The API was not a data free-for-all, except in one unique case with the explicit authorization of Facebook.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...