"Barred" isn't exactly the right word, in that it implies that Facebook actively took steps to prevent other candidates from doing so. Instead, Facebook had standard data collection limits in place that were enforced automatically by the platform for all apps. When the Obama For America app hit these limits, Facebook explicitly removed them for that app. It is the only publicly known case where this was allowed for a political campaign.

Do you have a source on the exemption of the data:permission limit being lifted for them? Given the soft run at quote mining in your earlier post, I’d feel more comfortable if your core assertion was verifiable.

Umm..wut? Read the thread. Read the direct quote from his campaign director saying that they had special treatment. There are a hundred articles saying alarm bells went off over OFA’s data collection activities, and Facebook reacted by shutting them off.

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...

When you say removed "them" I'm assuming you mean removed the collection limits and not the Obama campaign, correct? Thanks for the info by the way!

Yes, by "them" I meant that they removed the collection limits.

No, it's known that Facebook did not take any meaningful action even after learning that this sort of data had been retained against their developer ToS, and was being used by the Trump campaign.

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.

Yes, I did all the time. Even the Obama campaign itself ran into them, and then Facebook explicitly removed them for their app to help them along.