Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

From the article you link:

"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.

There’s a massive difference between Farmville et al and the OFA app. Facebook had limits in place that constrained the ratio between the number of friend profiles that were allowed to be accessed and the number of people that had explicitly authorized the app. They were a black box on this issue, but for example I had apps that were stopped from accessing deep profile information of friends (likes, occupation, etc.) when I reached 10:1. OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood.

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.

> OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio.

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.

OFA’s ratio was in the 200:1 neighborhood ratio

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.

lol. so your answer is you have no proof. people exaggerate all the time when they say things like "entire social graph". Do you have any data that in 2012, 200 million unique americans were using facebook? And that obama had specific permission to bypass facebook's limit and get the 200:1 ratio?

The data speaks for itself. Read it. As for proof that they got special permissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16669576

The statement made in the article:

"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.

You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more"

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?

Are you sure that Farmville didn't have a 200:1 ratio?

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"

Farmville had a massive install base. So they weren’t accessing that much data relative to the number of people that had directly authorized their app. The difference between it and the Obama app was the leverage that was allowed: less than 1 million people gave them access to their data, and they were able to use that to get deep profile data on nearly every US Facebook user - ~200 million accounts. Their attempts to do this set off all kinds of alarms, but Facebook went in and manually shut those alarms off and opened the floodgates to the data. Our data.

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.

There are two questions here:

(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?

FarmVille had the benefit of being owned by an early Facebook investor, Mark Pincus. It was favoritism all around.

And Peter Thiel, who was a funder of Cambridge Analytica [1], sits on the board of Facebook, and he also worked directly on the Trump campaign. So there's some extremely fertile ground for favoritism there as well.

[1] https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com