Whether or not the attacks on the social media giant are justified, the fact is that the Obama campaign used Facebook data in the same way in 2012.
Consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which paid for the research, later worked with the Trump campaign to help them target advertising campaigns on Facebook, using the data they'd gathered on users.
At the time the Cambridge researcher collected the data, Facebook was promoting itself as a way to marry campaign voter data with Facebook's ocean of user-behavior data.
In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.
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.
More important, the campaign could deliver carefully targeted campaign messages disguised as messages from friends to millions of Facebook users.
The only difference, as far as we can discern, between the two campaigns' use of Facebook, is that in the case of Obama the users themselves agreed to share their data with the Obama campaign, as well as that of their friends.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/
Consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which paid for the research, later worked with the Trump campaign to help them target advertising campaigns on Facebook, using the data they'd gathered on users.
At the time the Cambridge researcher collected the data, Facebook was promoting itself as a way to marry campaign voter data with Facebook's ocean of user-behavior data.
In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.
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.
More important, the campaign could deliver carefully targeted campaign messages disguised as messages from friends to millions of Facebook users.
The only difference, as far as we can discern, between the two campaigns' use of Facebook, is that in the case of Obama the users themselves agreed to share their data with the Obama campaign, as well as that of their friends.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/
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