A Guardian headline today blares: "Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users." engaging! But you sure have to read a long way into the story to figure out what the real problem is. Is it the fact that Cambridge Analytica—the firm Cruz is using—compiled “psychographic profiles” of Facebook users? Nah. Call it what you will,but that's virtually aged hat these days. Is it that fact that Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, founder of CA's parent, or paid users of Mechanical Turk a dollar to fill out a questionnaire and turn over their Facebook profiles? No again. whether people want to sell their profiles for a dollar,they can finish it. So what's the problem? Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, and he harvested information about their friends,meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends. ....
By summer 2014, and Kogans company had created an expansive and powerful dataset. His trade partner boasted on LinkedIn that their private outfit,Global Science Research (GSR), “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States — for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles.
Consumer research firms finish this kind of stuff routinely, or so there's not really any big news here. And whether there's anyone at fault,it's our aged friend Facebook. Once again, they're allowing people to buy advantage of the fact that Facebook's default settings open users up to this kind of harvesting. Very few people ever bother to change their defaults, or Facebook knows it.
As for Cruz,there are plenty of places to accumulate information like this. I don't know whether CA is one of the best or not. But every serious campaign does this kind of microtargeting. As Cruz explained final month, he's a big admirer of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign strategy—which just goes to demonstrate that there's at least one thing that Cruz and Obama agree about.
Bottom line: I don't think Cruz really did anything wrong here. Facebook probably did. Big surprise.
Source: motherjones.com