Besides leveraging a browser plugin for scraping rather than FB's official APIs, how is this different from Cambridge Analytica? And didn't most people want Facebook to fight back harder against that behavior?
>The personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users were acquired via the 270,000 Facebook users who used a Facebook app called "This Is Your Digital Life." By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data, back in 2015, this also gave the app access to information on the user's friends network; this resulted in the data of about 87 million users, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge Analytica permission to access their data, being collected."[1]
>When Facebook said Ad Observer was collecting data from users who had not authorized her to do so, the company wasn't referring to private users' accounts. It was referring to advertisers' accounts, including the names and profile pictures of public Pages that run political ads and the contents of those ads.[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...
2. https://www.protocol.com/nyu-facebook-researchers-scraping
For example, the Pentagon Papers can be a good thing while not being super happy with sneaking classified documents to China for pay.
I'd say what Cambridge Analytica did was worse than that: they weren't transparent about their purposes, which was to manipulate people. AdObserver seems like they're being transparent, not trying to manipulate anyone, and working for the public interest.
FB got a $5 billion fine for being duped in 2015. It doesn't surprise me they are trying to prevent that again
The other salient factor is Cambridge Analytica's Facebook data was on individuals, AdObserver's data is on ads. There's no privacy issues with it at all, and there are serous public policy issues with giving advertisers "privacy" like individuals have.
> FB got a $5 billion fine for being duped in 2015. It doesn't surprise me they are trying to prevent that again
I highly doubt that's the actual reason they're doing this, though that might be their PR rationalization for these actions. It's far more likely they're really doing this because they hate outside scrutiny that they can't stage manage. They want to be able to tell the story that they're effectively combating problems X, Y, and Z; and they don't want anyone to have the data to refute them if they're not actually doing that.
Once the data is scraped and stored someplace, you lose control of its purpose. An unscrupulous employee, accidental leak, lax data security practices or a targeted attack will some day enable more nefarious uses of it.
Just like when the Obama campaign got literally every FB users in the US's data, it was not materially different from Cambridge Analytica (the deception was lacking, but other than that it was the same data, except more of it).
>"However, as former Obama advisers point out, there are significant differences between the way Obama’s campaign mined data from Facebook, and the activities of which Cambridge is accused: The Obama campaign collected data with its own campaign app, complied with Facebook’s terms of service and, most important in my view, received permission from users before using the data."
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-pers...
Cambridge Analytica made a personality quiz app and in the terms stated the data would be used only for academic purposes. The creator, the app, the theme of the app, the name of the app, and the purported use of the data wouldn't have indicated any kind of political purpose to any users, while the Obama campaign app was clearly attributed to the Obama campaign and the purpose was evident.
There was some potentially questionable behavior due to the app's ability to scrape info about all of the app users' friends, but the app did request permission to see users' friends lists beforehand. I don't know the exact details of the nature of that scraping or how it was presented to users, but even if ones assumes they also did something shady, Cambridge Analytica was definitely sneakier and behaving more like a private intelligence agency than a campaign contractor/advisor.
edit: I don't know enough about the facts of the use of users' friends' data to judge how ethical or consensual it was. I just think that either way, the Cambridge Analytica one is definitely less defensible.
They Obama app didn't have to ask for this, as it was the default permission given to all apps till 2014 or 15.
Like, CA were selling snake oil, as none of their data was actually useful for the purposes they claimed it was. Speaking as someone who's collected personality data and worked in advertising.
Their real service was catching political opponents in compromising positions, which is why they actually got shut down.
I think my major point is that the same tools can be used for either good or less good purposes, and we should aim to either prevent or allow these based on better standards than our liking or disliking of the people involved.