From the Left

/

Politics

Why nobody complained when Obama bought Facebook user data

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Remember the breathless speculation less than a year ago about whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would run for president? That was then.

Oh, how the mighty Zuck's image has fallen amid scandalous revelations about the social network's allowing consultants for Donald Trump's presidential campaign to gain access to the personal information on millions of us Facebook users.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told CNN Thursday that he doesn't remember purchasing personal information from Facebook while working for the data firm Cambridge Analytica, where he one served as a vice president.

But Bannon did express a novel version of an often-used Trumpian deflection that I call "BBOF," blame Barack Obama first.

"In 2008, it was Google and Facebook that went to Barack Obama and met him at San Francisco airport and told him all about the power of this personal data," he said. Yet, "the great opposition party -- media -- never went after the Obama campaign, never went after the progressive left as they've been doing this for years. And in 2013, when I thought a data company might be important, all the sudden it becomes global news."

Bannon's view already was going viral on the political right. "Liberal media," shouted a Fox News' website headline, "didn't think data mining was so bad when Obama's campaign did it."

 

"What's genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump," said a headline on a column by conservative Ben Shapiro in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

And numerous other developers, including the makers of such games as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, also used the same Facebook developer tool that Cambridge Analytica used.

However, as former Obama advisers point out, there are significant differences between the way Obama's campaign mined data from Facebook, compared to the activities of which Cambridge is accused: They collected data with their own Obama campaign app, they complied with Facebook's terms of service and, most important in my view, they received permission from users before using the data.

An estimated 1 million Obama supporters gave the campaign access to their Facebook data in order to spread the word about their campaign. Campaign officials say they kept the data secure and did not sell or give it to third parties, although there have been some allegations that Facebook released at least some of that data anyway, without permission.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Lee Judge Bill Bramhall A.F. Branco Dick Wright Darrin Bell David Fitzsimmons