StayAdmiral t1_j1cwerk wrote on December 23, 2022 at 10:47 AM

Given, they were given access to the personal data of millions of facefuck users.

culturedgoat t1_j1d76b2 wrote on December 23, 2022 at 12:56 PM

Eh, sort of… Each user consented to the CA app having access to some of their personal data, when accessing the app for the first time. The kicker is that the app was masquerading as a benign personality test, when in fact the data was being used for something else entirely. So I don’t think it’s right to blame the users for handing over their data in this case…

neuronexmachina t1_j1dvgip wrote on December 23, 2022 at 4:08 PM

Part of the problem is that FB's API at the time not only allowed an app access to a user's data, but also a lot of the personal data for their FB friends as well. That's how CA got access to data for 50M users -- there certainly weren't 50M users of their app.

culturedgoat t1_j1e3ecb wrote on December 23, 2022 at 5:01 PM

You could pull a user’s friends list, yeah. You couldn’t actually get much more data on the friends themselves (unless they too went on to authorise the app…), other than the person’s name, and the user ID - which turned out to be enough for CA to be able to construct a shadow replica of the FB friend connections graph…

[deleted] t1_j1e5gdy wrote on December 23, 2022 at 5:15 PM

[removed]

AutoModerator t1_j1e5ggk wrote on December 23, 2022 at 5:15 PM

Thank you for your submission, but due to the high volume of spam coming from Medium.com and similar self-publishing sites, /r/Technology has opted to filter all of those posts pending mod approval. You may [message the moderators](/message/compose?to=/r/technology&subject=Request for post review) to request a review/approval provided you are not the author or are not associated at all with the submission. Thank you for understanding.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.