The thing that seems really wrong here is that you weren't just granting access to your own information, but all of your friends as well, who had little say in the matter beyond their original grants of permission to Facebook.
It is this way that Cambridge Analytica was able to get 50 million profiles by just paying ~270k Amazon mechanical turkers [1].
It's true that everyone agreed to everything along the way: people allowed Facebook to have the information in question, and people allowed Cambridge Analytica to access that information. But it wasn't the same people agreeing to both. The set of people agreeing to the latter was much smaller than the former.
It may be true that technically neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong (at least in collecting this information, this seems to be by far the least shady part of CA's business), but, Facebook's business is built on trust, and this is a huge hit to that trust. Arguing technicalities doesn't help.
> The thing that seems really wrong here is that you weren't just granting access to your own information, but all of your friends as well, who had little say in the matter beyond their original grants of permission to Facebook.
Except that those users had granted that permission to the people who then granted it to CA. So, transitively (which is the only way to think about permissions), they had granted it to CA.
Not really.
You granted permission for your friends to access the information. You did not give your friends permission to grant permission in accessing your information or share it directly.
Now Facebook may make a different statement etc and the rules of service, privacy can allow for this. But it is not a property that is transitive in general. And it is bad publicity. (I hope.)
I can be told a secret, I do not necessarily have the permission to share, for instance, what happened in the bachelor party last Saturday right?
It is this way that Cambridge Analytica was able to get 50 million profiles by just paying ~270k Amazon mechanical turkers [1].
It's true that everyone agreed to everything along the way: people allowed Facebook to have the information in question, and people allowed Cambridge Analytica to access that information. But it wasn't the same people agreeing to both. The set of people agreeing to the latter was much smaller than the former.
It may be true that technically neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong (at least in collecting this information, this seems to be by far the least shady part of CA's business), but, Facebook's business is built on trust, and this is a huge hit to that trust. Arguing technicalities doesn't help.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridg...