How Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Other Privacy Abuses Could Have Been Prevented - Lawfare

A timely "whataboutism" reality check; also see Did the Obama Campaign Employ the Same Tactics as Cambridge Analytica? (Snopes)

"Respect for context does not mean shutting down all uses of personal data or shutting off innovative uses of the “social graph” (the data that represents users’ relationships in online platforms). Consider the difference between Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data and how information was used by the Obama 2012 reelection campaign app. Cambridge Analytica took social-graph data collected for research purposes and, without consent or even effective notice, repurposed Facebook users’ information for political profiling. By contrast, during the 2012 presidential campaign Barack Obama supporters were invited to install a Facebook app that was given access to the user’s friend list. Upon the app gaining access to the friend list,  users who installed the app were given the ability to send personalized messages to any or all of their friends, inviting them to events or sharing campaign literature. In other words, the individual, not the campaign, communicated with users’ friends. And the campaign itself never got a copy of the whole social graph; that information remained with users (and Facebook). While the same data access permissions were in place—both apps had access to the friend list of each app user—the uses were vastly different. Enabling one individual user to communicate directly with his or her friends was respectful of the context in which data was collected. Users expected that they would hear from their friends. Individuals understandably did not expect that their data would be gathered and assessed merely because they were friends with someone who agreed to be part of a research study, nor that all of their personal data would wind up with an unknown commercial entity to whom the researcher sold their information."

How Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Other Privacy Abuses Could Have Been Prevented - Lawfare