Obama 2012 campaign used Facebook app to collect supporter data

Barack Obama’s campaign officials insist they used data in vastly different ways to Cambridge Analytica.

Former US president Barack Obama at Government House in Auckland. Picture: AFP

Barack Obama’s campaign officials insist they used data in vastly different ways to Cambridge Analytica, the firm accused of lifting information on 50 million Facebook users for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Obama advisers said they collected the data with their own app for his 2012 US presidential campaign, complied with the social-media platform’s terms of service and received permission from supporters. An estimated one million Obama supporters gave the campaign access to their Facebook data.

In most cases, supporters who signed on to the Democrats’ mailing list were asked to authorise the campaign’s Facebook app, allowing it to access certain aspects of their profile, including their posts, likes, photos, demographics and data from Facebook friends.

The Obama data was used in voter turnout efforts, with a focus on young voters in key battleground states, and former campaign officials said the data was kept secure and not sold to or acquired from third parties.

Former Obama aides said their practices did not mirror those of Cambridge Analytica, which has been accused of acquiring personal data in unauthorised ways. The British research firm has suspended CEO Alexander Nix.

“Cambridge Analytica obtained their data fraudulently, laundered through a researcher,” Jim Messina, Mr Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, wrote on Twitter.

Mr Messina said the re-election campaign “told voters what they were sharing and for what purpose. Conflating these two cases is misleading”.

Mr Trump’s campaign has denied using Cambridge’s data, and Cambridge has denied any wrongdoing. The incident has focused attention on whether the social-media platform did enough to protect users’ privacy and has prompted calls for Facebook’s leadership to testify before congress.

Carol Davidsen, the Obama campaign’s director of data integration and media analytics, tweeted that Facebook allowed the campaign to access the data “because they were on our side”.

She said she had worked on all “data integration projects” at the campaign. “This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data,” she wrote.

Facebook said that was inaccurate, adding “the Obama and Romney campaigns had access to the same tools, and no campaign received any special treatment from Facebook”.

Rayid Ghani, chief scientist on the Obama 2012 campaign, wrote in a Medium post that the campaign only contacted people who had provided them with access to their email address. “We did not get any contact information for their friends and did not (and could not) contact any of their friends directly,” he wrote, adding the campaign “did not scrape everything available on Facebook about everyone we could”.

“All we could do was ask our ‘primary’ supporters to contact their friends and we would recommend who those friends were based on the data they allowed us to access,” Mr Ghani said. Facebook “did not look the other way, because they did not need to,” he added.

The tech giant in 2015 shut down app developers’ ability to siphon off the data of Facebook users who used their apps.

Timothy Carone, a University of Notre Dame professor specialising in data science, said it was unclear the 2012 Obama campaign could have done what Cambridge Analytica did in 2016, adding that would require a deeper dive into the 2012 campaign practices.

“Four years is a long time in the analytics business and great strides have been made with how data is collected, analysed, and used to make decisions in between campaigns,” he said.

AP