The developer of the app "thisisyourdigitallife" handed over data collected from that app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook claims this violates their TOS. Based on that, the data can be called stolen.
> Facebook claims this violates their TOS. Based on that, the data can be called stolen.
They can call it that sure, but if they didn’t restrict access it’s hard to take this as anything but Facebook covering the entire point of their api—to get user data. Hell, if this is theft I should add “master burglar” to my resume—scraping in spite of being an obvious TOS violation is common in the industry. It’s certainly not a crime.
They were getting a small number of users to fill out quizzes on Facebook. Unfortunately, the Facebook API gave them information not just about the user who filled out the quiz, but of all of that user's friends.
It was against the Facebook ToS, but the data was still provided easily via the API. That's what allowed them to quickly build a database of most eligible voters with very little direct outreach.
Essentially. The root failure mode of FB's API solution is that it's an API for accessing private data and their only protection against clients abusing that access was a terms of service.
Back in the mid-'00s, we started implementing something against FB's API and I was more than a bit shocked to discover that their solution for preventing someone from building a parallel network of friend relationships out of the available dataset was "Please don't do that, and anyway if you try to do it at scale we'll probably detect the bandwidth consumption and shut you down." Not great.
Is that factually correct? I was under the impression that facebook gave them API access.