Are you playing mental gymnastics here? CA bought the data. CA had nothing to do with the app. They did, they bought the data. I get that they aren’t responsible for the person violating facebook’s rules. I think we already established Facebook is the boogeyman here. But we were comparing the Obama campaign app to an app unrelated to a campaign. In this thread there was the implication “obama did the same thing” and I think we can hopefully agree that Obama’s campaign didn’t sell their data in violation of the fb tos as far as we know and the owner of the app who sold to CA did. Sorry I got the name mixed up. Yes CA didn’t sell. But neither did the Obama campaign. So there is not an equivalence.
Of course there's an equivalence. The exact same thing happened - Obama's campaign received the data of more than 100 million people - about 99.5% of whom didn't explicitly authorize them to receive it. They then used that data in violation of Facebook's Developer TOS. Specifically, the Developer TOS say that you aren't supposed to use the data you receive from the API for any purpose other than the functionality of your app. For example, taking that information and analyzing it to produce campaign strategies and/or using it for targeted political advertising is and was against the Facebook TOS.
How is that not exactly the same thing, just done on a much larger scale by Obama? I get it, this is mostly a lefty crowd here on HN. But I just can't stand hypocrisy on either side. The fact that hundreds of commenters in here want to defend one guy and castigate another for doing the exact same thing based solely on the political affiliation of each is disgusting to me.
I can't really disagree with anything you've said here, but the only thing I can say is that your comments might not be received well because they are very firm – "the exact same thing" is a pretty assertive statement that I think several here disagree with, on merit or not, and being a bit more flexible in communicating this (which, by the way, thanks!) might help others receive it better, not that it's your job to do that or anything, just sharing my pov.
