Obama aide: We didn’t break rules of Facebook
WASHINGTON – Former president Barack Obama’s top campaign aide rejected comparisons Tuesday between Obama’s extensive use of Facebook data to turn out voters in the 2012 election and the actions of Cambridge Analytica, a data and political intelligence firm ejected last week by Facebook in a growing controversy over privacy on social media.
“Cambridge Analytica obtained their data fraudulently, laundered through a researcher who paid people to install an app,” Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, wrote on Twitter.
By contrast, Obama campaign officials say, they did not collect information without users’ consent or in violation of the rules Facebook had in place at the time.
“The ’12 campaign told voters what they were sharing and for what purpose,” Messina wrote.
The revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a firm tied to President Trump’s
campaign, harvested private information of tens of millions users without their permission has thrown a spotlight on how the social-network company controls access to the personal information of its 2 billion users. It also has prompted comparisons to the ways in which data scientists on Obama’s campaign mined Facebook information to build a massive voteroutreach operation.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook says a researcher from Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan, used a personality quiz app in 2014 to gain access to the data of 270,000 Facebook users, including their friends and “likes.” That potentially gave Kogan access to the information of more than 50 million users.
Kogan then shared that information with Cambridge Analytica, according to Facebook.
Facebook said the researcher’s unauthorized transfer of the data to Cambridge Analytica broke the socialnetwork company’s rules and on Friday, suspended Cambridge Analytica from the platform.
Tech experts say Facebook helped build its business by deciding in 2007 to allow third parties who created apps on its platforms to gain access to the personal information of Facebook users, including information about their “friends.”
In 2015, in the face of privacy concerns, the company limited thirdparty access to information about friends. But in the years in between, developers of everything from dating apps to voter-outreach tools used by the Obama campaign, capitalized on Facebook’s rules to extract massive amounts of data about Facebook users and their friends.
Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign used the information to build what it called a “targeted sharing” tool. More than 1 million Obama supporters signed up for a Facebook app, giving the campaign permission to look at their lists of friends.
Under the theory that voters are more likely respond to calls to action from their friends instead of a generic political ad, the campaign then used the data it harvested to promote “friend-to-friend” communication.
For instance, the Obama campaign could use the data to glean the identities of a Facebook user’s friends in a swing state such as Ohio, and then send messages to that Facebook user, urging her to encourage those friends to go vote early in the state.
Obama aides say they strictly complied with Facebook’s rules and never shared the data they gained from the app with a third party.
Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder Echelon Insights, a Republican-leaning digital analytics and research firm, said the public outrage this week over the disclosures about Cambridge Analytica “feels like a double standard” against the backdrop of how the Obama campaign and other Democratic and Republican political operatives sought to use Facebook data during the 2012 and 2014 election cycles.
“This is not some breach where some sort of secret data was let out in the wild for the first time,” Ruffini said of the data Cambridge Analytica collected. “The information they had wasn’t all that different from what the Obama campaign had in its database.”
Cambridge Analytica’s first and most basic misstep with Facebook, he said: Not collecting the data on its own, directly through the company’s platform. In 2014, “had Cambridge Analytica just put out the app themselves, they would have been playing by the rules,” Ruffini said.