Obama Campaign’s “Targeted Share” App Also Used Facebook Data From Millions Of Unknowing Users

In 2012 the Obama campaign was desperate to reach twentysomethings who were hard to access because they had only cell phones. So it sought to reach them on Facebook. Two GOP campaign analytics sources said the Obama camp used a common Facebook developer API – the same one used to access the data for Cambridge Analytica – to create a Facebook app that could capture the personal data not only of the app user, but also of all that person’s friends. The tactic, which the campaign called “targeted share,” was based on research showing that social friends usually share more than cat pictures – they share political beliefs. So the campaign’s app searched out potential Obama voters within the friend lists of current supporters. The Obama campaign’s director of integration and media analytics Carol Davidsen said on Twitter that Facebook was surprised to learn how much user data could be pulled out through its graph API. “We were actually able to download the entire social network of the US,” Davidsen said during a Personal Democracy Forum speech in 2015. “Facebook in 2011 had the ability for people to opt in, and the Obama campaign rocked this,” she said. “We got people to opt in, and the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in, they [Facebook] could tell us who all their friends were.”