More specifically, based on the NYT story that you linked to, Obama's campaign did things like match the mined user and user-friends' data with voter registration and donor lists, and also attempt to calculate who a user's "real-life friends" were, versus their casual FB acquaintances, which involved an analysis of photo-tagging, among other things:
> Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall”
In the next paragraph, FB said it was "satisfied" that this met their data and privacy standards. Which is a bit curious because IIRC, it was not kosher to cache data scraped from FB for any reason beyond having a reasonable cache (to prevent unneeded API requests), nevermind for independent data collation and analysis. I would bet that the users who did knowingly sign up for the Obama app did not think the app would be scraping the walls and photo albums of their friends and attempting to do friendship-strength analyses.
CA still has an extra level of subterfuge, but I agree, what the Obama campaign is reported to have done is definitely not as innocent as the Obama campaign staffer claims in the aforementioned tweet.
> Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall”
In the next paragraph, FB said it was "satisfied" that this met their data and privacy standards. Which is a bit curious because IIRC, it was not kosher to cache data scraped from FB for any reason beyond having a reasonable cache (to prevent unneeded API requests), nevermind for independent data collation and analysis. I would bet that the users who did knowingly sign up for the Obama app did not think the app would be scraping the walls and photo albums of their friends and attempting to do friendship-strength analyses.
CA still has an extra level of subterfuge, but I agree, what the Obama campaign is reported to have done is definitely not as innocent as the Obama campaign staffer claims in the aforementioned tweet.