neuronexmachina t1_j1dvgip wrote on December 23, 2022 at 4:08 PM

Reply to comment by culturedgoat in Meta settles Cambridge Analytica class-action lawsuit for $725 million / The company gained access to the personal information of millions of Facebook users by Sorin61

Part of the problem is that FB's API at the time not only allowed an app access to a user's data, but also a lot of the personal data for their FB friends as well. That's how CA got access to data for 50M users -- there certainly weren't 50M users of their app.

culturedgoat t1_j1e3ecb wrote on December 23, 2022 at 5:01 PM

You could pull a user’s friends list, yeah. You couldn’t actually get much more data on the friends themselves (unless they too went on to authorise the app…), other than the person’s name, and the user ID - which turned out to be enough for CA to be able to construct a shadow replica of the FB friend connections graph…

[deleted] t1_j1e5gdy wrote on December 23, 2022 at 5:15 PM

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