Funny, When Obama Harvested Facebook Data On Millions Of Users To Win In 2012, Everyone Cheered

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 3/20/2018 | IBD Editorial Board

[IBD editorial writer]

Privacy: Facebook faces what some are calling an "existential crisis" over revelations that its user data fell into the hands of the Trump campaign. Whether or not the attacks on the social media giant are justified, the fact is that the Obama campaign used Facebook (FB) data in the same way in 2012. But the reaction from the pundits and press back then was, shall we say, somewhat different.

According to various news accounts, a professor at Cambridge University built a Facebook app around 2014 that involved a personality quiz. About 270,000 users of the app agreed to share some of their Facebook information, as well as data from people on their friends list. As a result, tens of millions ended up part of this data-mining operation.

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.

But it's not entirely clear how the Trump campaign used the information. According to the New York Times, Cambridge Chief Executive Alexander Nix said that the data "helped shape Mr. Trump's strategy," but the article notes that other campaign officials dispute that.

It goes on to quote Nix saying that Cambridge "did not have enough time to comprehensively model Trump voters."

Since this involves the Trump campaign, the news accounts have been suffused with dark conspiratorial tones. The Times article talks about how Trump consultants "exploited" Facebook data, and quotes a source calling it a "scam." It has been widely described as a massive data breach.

But 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.

[Bryanw92]

I got on the MoveOn email list in the 2012 campaign and remember how proud they were that the Marxist Messiah, aided by MoveOn/Soros dollars, was using this new technology to “reach” millions of new voters. They called it the future and giggled at how the Republicans couldn’t harness the technology.

[euram]

it’s all in the effort to make every action by Trump abnormal. Just like Trump’s efforts to delegitimize Mueller’s probe, the NYT and others cheered Bill Clinton’s efforts to delegitimize Starr. I saw some woman on FOX yesterday who said that Trump’s action is different, because he’s “attacking institutions like the FBI, State Dept, Dept of Justice” but she never mentioned those fine institutions have been working against Trump long before he started fighting them.

[ClearCase_guy]

Everything is cool when Democrats do it.

[StAnDeliver]

I mean, Obama's lead gal on this came out and said it! 'We did it too!'

Facebook encouraged the 'take-it-all' data dump; it's not hard to store that kind of data, or purpose it as you please.

AGAIN, get off Facebook, drop it today, YOU are the product. You might say, 'oh, well, Trump has my data, that's cool' ... scroll up a bit - so did Bobo!

You cool with Bobo knowing your friends, your salary, your purchases, your rants, your likes, your habits, your location?

[Big Red Badger]

The “New” normal.

[MountainWalker]

Yeah, when Democrats get crafty, it’s being clever and forward thinking. When Republicans do it, it’s a national crisis.

It’s sort of like Gerrymandering. If you only leaned about it from them media, you’d have thought it was something that started in 2011, when in fact both parties have been using it as a partisan tool going back 200 years when a MA Democrat governor named Gerry drew a district like a salamander to help out his party.

[Elsie]

Doesn’t ANYONE read those 40 page disclaimers any more?

[glorgau]

When i go to the Open Data Science Conference, East in Boston next month, I think I’ll wear a MAGA hat just to piss off all the lefties that are there to do data science for “social good”.

[preacher]

L8r

[Elsie]

By clicking Create Account, you agree to our Terms

and confirm that you have read our Data Policy,

including our Cookie Use Policy.

You may receive SMS message notifications from Facebook and can opt out at any time.

from TERMS:

2. Sharing Your Content and Information
   
   You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)
   4. When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use your feedback or suggestions without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

 

---

From Data Policy:

Vendors, service providers and other partners.

We transfer information to vendors, service providers and other partners who globally support our business, such as providing technical infrastructure services, analysing how our Services are used, measuring the effectiveness of ads and services, providing customer service, facilitating payments or conducting academic research and surveys. These partners must adhere to strict confidentiality obligations in a way that is consistent with this Data Policy and the agreements that we enter into with them.

[Elsie]

 ...you agree to our Terms and confirm that you have read...

 

 

Ooops!

[Carlucci]

Great video showing the double-standard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK8jy6Wk_rk

[shelterguy]

I caught a minute of Morning Joke this morning.

Senator Klobuchar was on saying they will have hearings now and bring in the facebook execs to demand how this could happen.

They repeatedly said that the data was mined by a RUSSIAN professor.

So........it’s the Russans that did it.

[corlorde]

Great article, I’m posting it on FB right now.

[conservative_cyclist]

Not Everyone.......

[Pearls Before Swine]

Yes, there were many articles glorifying the superiority of Obama's data team re that used by the GOP (Romney's in 2012).

Here is a link to a particularly laudatory and detailed article from MIT's Technology Review (2012):

How Obama Used Big Data to Rally Voters

From what I've heard, if there is a problem with what Cambridge Analytica did, it was using "one-time" or specified use data over and over. That's a contractual problem separate from the invasiveness of using such data in the first place, which was encouraged by Facebook (and probably Google). We know it was encouraged, because they sold it to all comers!

[jerod]

‘Harvesting’ data doesn’t get anybody off their rear-end and into a voting booth. This analytic frenzy is purely hype brought to the forefront by greedy computer geeks. The same geeks that convinced everybody that Y2K would be the end of computers, unless they were given trillions to stop it.

If this sort of stuff works on anybody, it would be the weak minded and typically those voters who tend to be liberal and who are more likely to engage in social computing. It’s like guiding a lemming... Just tell them there’s a rally for something and they’ll be there in 10 minutes. Tell them the election day is on Monday and they will likely be too glued to their computer to actually bother getting off their butt and voting.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks IBD editorial writer.

[z3n]

This is the quintessence of the reasons why democrats in washington can get away with murder without causing a light ripple let alone consequences, and republicans (particularly those outside teh establishment, cough trump cough) have their every footstep criticized.

These people are fully mental. They don’t have a shred of integrity. They don’t even have any guile about it. It’s all about ‘our side versus theirs’ and absolutely nothing else.