Facebook as an election weapon, from Obama to Trump

– Waking up to problem –

What remains unclear is whether the techniques made a difference in the 2016 US election.

Chirag Shah, a Rutgers University professor of information and computer science, said the data gleaned could have been instrumental to Trump’s campaign.

“We know from other applications, not just in the political domain, but also all kinds of marketing commercialization domains that these things are very, very instrumental,” Shah said.

“It is however speculative to say this really change the outcome of the election. All we can say is that, yes there were people who were influenced or targeted using this data.”

Experts also stress that neither the Obama nor the Trump campaign broke any laws on the protection of private data — or even Facebook’s internal rules — which were tightened in 2015 to prevent developers from collecting people’s data without explicit consent.

Shah noted the concerns about improper use of personal data are not new.

“The problem is once people access the data from Facebook, for which they often pay, that data is out of Facebook’s hands and out of Facebook’s users hands.

“And there’s no way that Facebook will be able to track all of the data being shared by third parties, fourth parties.”

Rayid Ghani, a University of Chicago researcher who was chief scientist for the 2012 Obama campaign, defended his team’s use of Facebook data while arguing for a need for better information that would allow users to know when and how their personal information is collected.

“The public needs to be aware of what data is being collected about them, what it is being used for, who it is shared/sold to, and what they’re doing with it,” Ghani said in a Medium blog post.

“We need to push corporations to make their privacy policies and terms of use more human-friendly, and less fine-print. “