Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

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You're framing this improperly. Prior to 2014, anybody could create an app, and if people authorized it to, it could access some friend data. Your comment reads as if they went and made some special arrangement with Facebook and lied to them saying it was for "academic purposes". That just isn't the case. Every single Facebook user with the ability to write code could do this easily and automatically for the 7 years leading up to the change in 2014.

What Facebook did with the Obama campaign was far worse. No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph. Didn't like Obama and didn't authorize an app to access your and your friends' info? Too bad, your information was still given to them and used to help get him elected. That wasn't a problem for anyone in the press though, because of course, Obama was a Democrat.

edit: I misspoke. There was an app required, but the Obama campaign accessed 190 MILLION profiles, versus 50 million involved in CA. According to [1]:

"The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent...A former [Obama] campaign director, Carol Davidsen, tweeted that Facebook "was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.""

[1] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

> According to a Time magazine account just after Obama won re-election, "the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."

you are doing the old classic false equivalence... the deliberate use of an obama sanctioned facebook app that asks you to press a button to share the get out to vote (probably for obama) with their friends is 100% different than Cambridge University creating psyche profiles on people to ostensibly use as a fun way to find out your profile. then to sell that harvested data to a different campaigning firm Cambridge Analytica to use to micro target ads to them for political purposes unbeknownst to them is way different. It's about expectations: one expects it to be used in a political fashion because they opted into it and the other is not expecting it to be used to target themselves and their friends later.

The Obama app accessed the data of roughly 189 million friend profiles that didn't authorize the app (it only had about 1 million installs). About 95 million of those people would have consciously objected to helping the Obama campaign had they known about it. But all of their data was collected and used by the Obama campaign to target political ads and formulate campaign strategy anyway, even though none of those 189 million people expected or specifically authorized their data "to be used in political fashion".

So how is that a false equivalence?

I'm not taking sides here, and I could be very wrong – my assumption here is that Cambridge didn't have a "Trump Campaign App" they had some other app, then sold that data to a third party. Obama's campaign had a "campaign" app, and used the data collected from that app.

We can all argue about whether facebook should even allow apps the kind of data they do, but the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right? This is where the two aren't the same, as far as I'm aware, but like I said, I'm not super in the know.

the crux of what CA did was to re-sell data they collected from Facebook, right?

No. An independent developer had an app many years ago, recorded data from that app, and then sold that data to CA years after the fact. That developer did in fact violate Facebook's developer platform policies by selling the data, but CA had nothing to do with the app or what was represented to the people using it when they installed it.

Didn't CA report to fb that the data was deleted when in fact it was not?

koger did report that but ended up not deleting it and also ended up selling the data to CA.

Something is off here - not in the discussion but on the larger picture.

Why didn’t Hillary win? I’m sure she had access to similar tools?

I think someone needs to take a look at the Hillary campaign and contrast it to identify exactly how effective Facebook data is

Are you playing mental gymnastics here? CA bought the data. CA had nothing to do with the app. They did, they bought the data. I get that they aren’t responsible for the person violating facebook’s rules. I think we already established Facebook is the boogeyman here. But we were comparing the Obama campaign app to an app unrelated to a campaign. In this thread there was the implication “obama did the same thing” and I think we can hopefully agree that Obama’s campaign didn’t sell their data in violation of the fb tos as far as we know and the owner of the app who sold to CA did. Sorry I got the name mixed up. Yes CA didn’t sell. But neither did the Obama campaign. So there is not an equivalence.

Of course there's an equivalence. The exact same thing happened - Obama's campaign received the data of more than 100 million people - about 99.5% of whom didn't explicitly authorize them to receive it. They then used that data in violation of Facebook's Developer TOS. Specifically, the Developer TOS say that you aren't supposed to use the data you receive from the API for any purpose other than the functionality of your app. For example, taking that information and analyzing it to produce campaign strategies and/or using it for targeted political advertising is and was against the Facebook TOS.

How is that not exactly the same thing, just done on a much larger scale by Obama? I get it, this is mostly a lefty crowd here on HN. But I just can't stand hypocrisy on either side. The fact that hundreds of commenters in here want to defend one guy and castigate another for doing the exact same thing based solely on the political affiliation of each is disgusting to me.

I can't really disagree with anything you've said here, but the only thing I can say is that your comments might not be received well because they are very firm – "the exact same thing" is a pretty assertive statement that I think several here disagree with, on merit or not, and being a bit more flexible in communicating this (which, by the way, thanks!) might help others receive it better, not that it's your job to do that or anything, just sharing my pov.

> That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists.

permission for one.

> The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind.

intent and deliberate action up front by the user of the facebook app for two not some shady psych profile that gets sold later and used behind the scenes to target them without any link to the campaign. that's absolutely a false equivalence.

Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit. Say I have 190 friends with a significant overlap with say 50 friends who all know each other and are likely also friends with each other. it simply doesn't follow that every single friend has 190 unique friends to get a graph of that size even though the average across all users might be 190 friends. have a few more of those for different groups (business, whatever) and you have a much lower number. coupled with the fact that you have no idea what the average number of friends the people that opt into that app have if you are just comparing it to the overall average number of friends for the entire set of facebook users you possibly have a lower number still.

permission for one.

Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people.

Also, that number 189 million is absolutely likely to be way too high and is likely bullshit

According to their own campaign manager, they obtained the entire US social graph, and Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. The 190 million number may actually be low.

> Which were the same permissions that the users of the Kogan app gave. Remember that the issue here revolves around the fact that friends of the users of either app never gave permission for their data to be used. The only difference is that Obama did this to about 4X as many people.

you're still wrong but at this point, with all the evidence showing just how different the situation is, i suspect you want to be for whatever reason.

What exactly am I wrong about?

It's an agency issue. If I use an attributed channel it's like meeting you and saying "hey remember your friend the CS guy? Our company is looking for someone like that. Could you pass the word along?" vs pretending to be chatting with you when all I'm looking for is relevant recruiting leads which I will then use unbeknownst to you.

For hiring this isn't as touchy a subject, but surely there's a qualitative difference in these two interactions. One is based in an above-biard interaction. The other in subterfuge and hidden motives.

The end result for the friends, which comprise 99.5% of the victims in both the Obama and Kogan cases, is precisely the same. Nothing was represented to them, their data was just used because someone they were friends with installed the app.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-campaign-use-tactics...

You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

> You're missing the point.

I think you are the one missing the point.

> The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models.

Yes, this was a political app, downloaded by people motivated to get obama to be the president. They shared that info willingly to the obama campaign. The obama campaign used that information to suggest "hey man, we need help in texas and you know someone that might be able to help us. Can you do us a solid and send them some of this info?" Nothing I have seen suggests that they did anything untoward with the information voluntarily and directly shared with the campaign. They used it to suggest people to share the message to. And they did any action with the direct permission of the people using the political app.

> It's identical, except, for "the good guys".

Not even a little bit. The Koger fellow used the data he harvested from those psych profiles and also got the friends information that the people taking those "tests" doubtfully wanted them to have. If I take a silly test that is a facebook app I would not expect them to datamine my friends to later sell that information off to a political campaigning firm to later use for a political campaign that they may not have wanted it to have. If trump had used an app that did the same as obama I would have had no issue with it. he didn't, and I do.

Again, you're missing the point. The people who SIGNED UP for the Cambridge Analytica app, or the Obama For America app agreed to share their own information with the app. In doing so, they ALSO agreed to share data on their entire friends list with the app -- Facebook had no restrictions in place on this at the time.

Those people who were opted-in by proxy, i.e. the friends you sold out, may not have wanted the Obama campaign or Cambridge Analytica to get that info, but they never had a choice!

Both apps (well, OFA for sure, CA allegedly) took data legitimately provided to them, used it to feed predictive models, and then actioned marketing around exploiting those learnings.

>We released this tool for the Obama Campaign in August 2012. Over the next 3 months, we had over a million supporters authorize our app, giving us potential access to over 200 million unique people in their social network. For each campaign activity (persuasion, volunteering, voter registration, get-out-the-vote), we ran predictive models on this friend network to determine who to target. We then constructed an “influence graph” that matched existing supporters with potential targets. For each supporter, we provided a customized list of key friends with whom to share different types of content. [0]

Literally the ONLY difference, other than the political leanings, is Koger's app was then "acquired" by CA, in breach of Facebook's TOS. Which again, is something that happened probably ALL THE TIME in the pre-2014 wild west of Facebook app mining.

[0] http://www.rayidghani.com/what-can-non-profits-learn-from-so...

The point you are missing is that there was no cambridge analytica app and nobody opted into it an app that doesn't and didn't exist. They opted into a completely different app that datamined it for completely unrelated purposes and then, much later, sold off to CA which used it to target people. one was on the up and up and one was CA. Again, if trump did what obama did on the level it would have been fair game. they were shady and used shady tactics and shadily acquired data. Not a single person that opted into the koger app thinking it was a political app but people that used the obama app knew what they were getting into.

The point you're missing is most affected users didn't download anything, and were simply friends of someone who did. (OFA or Krogers app) The distinction you make of OFA being on the up and up and CA not is valid, but doesn't mean suddenly OFA is on a completely different level. There still was a massive amount of data sucked up without consent.

> The distinction you make of OFA being on the up and up and CA not is valid

bullshit. plain and simple. you are falsely making those two equivalent.

If my Facebook friend installed the Obama app, their campaign had access to and collected my information.

Do I have a right to be upset about this or not?

You're completely wrong about this:

https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

"I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. 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."

See above quote from their own campaign manager. Here's a link to her own tweet on this issue if you don't believe me or the publication I linked to above:

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

> No authorization was required - they gave them free, full access to the entire social graph

Source? All I can find is a scheme where they prompted people to sign in to a campaign site and grabbed the friend data that way. Icky as hell, but it's not obvious why that's "even worse" than CA.

For starters, they accessed 4X the number of profiles that CA did. I have edited my comment, however, because it appears that they did (just like CA) have an app that they used. Except they used it, as one Obama campaign manager put it, to "suck out the whole social graph" of voters in the US, and Facebook "was surprised, but didn't stop [them] once they realized they were doing it".

By the way, this is something that would have been stopped on any other app long before they ever accessed 190 million profiles. So Facebook essentially gave them the entire US social graph, that they wouldn't have allowed any other app with only 1 million users to have.

It does seem like the Obama campaigns got preferential access to Facebook data. Data for even more people than CA got. And perhaps the Clinton campaign did as well, or at least got access to the older data.

What distinguishes CA and the Trump campaign is how well the data was used. CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people. Their canvassing app. Using bots on Facebook and Twitter. Plus entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe or whatever. And maybe they went further, discouraging potential Clinton and Sanders supporters fron voting.

But anyway, the key point isn't whether CA or Obama/Clinton got more data from Facebook, or whether Facebook willingly helped Obama/Clinton. The key point is how well voters can now be manipulated. It's another level in the problem that money buys political power. And it's arguably how AI could do the same.

CA staff apparently just did a better job at using the data to manipulate people.

I've seen no hard data showing that any of this did Trump any good. Apparently not a single study has been done as to whether people either failed to vote or changed their vote based upon fake news or the use of this data.

I haven't either. My opinion is based on my own anecdotal observations, and news coverage, both of which may be biased.

I do follow fringes of online anarchism and anomie, and I was surprised to see so much support for Trump, when the polls were showing him so far down. And much of that support was so odd that I thought it ironic. But whatever.

I'd like to see such a study, for sure. But I'm not optimistic. Arguably, many who voted for Trump would be no more forthcoming to researchers than they were to those doing the election polling. There's just too much polarization, I suspect.

There's a lot of bad information in this thread.

https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

"I ran the Obama 2008 data-driven microtargeting team. 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."

It's actually not such bad info [1] (from Carol Davidsen, Obama's former campaign manager). The guy you quote certainly has the opinion that it was OK to access and use the data of 190 MILLION people for political purposes, only 1 million of whom explicitly authorized him to do so, but I'm guessing that the majority of those 190 million people would vehemently disagree with him.

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

Here's Obama's 2012 campaign manager discussing this. They did it different four years later, and Facebook had four more years of data and tens of millions more users at that point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZmcyHpG31A

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