> 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.
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.
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.