To add a bit of perspective to this debate, it is worth looking back at two key ways in which the Obama campaign pioneered the modern data-driven campaign that is at the center of the Cambridge Analytica debate. Yet, perhaps of greatest relevance to the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica is how the Obama campaign leveraged Facebook. As the Times describes it, the campaign “started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. Indeed, the claims that Facebook data was collected for academic research and then made available to a commercial enterprise are hardly unsurprising for anyone familiar with the processes and procedures at most top US research universities, especially their corporate funded research and their licensing and commercialization programs.

Source: Forbes March 19, 2018 21:22 UTC