This Bloomberg article summarizes the scandal succinctly:
Here, in a nutshell, is the CA scandal. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, an academic of Russian origin at Cambridge University in the U.K., built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands of users to take a psychological test. Apart from their test results, the users also shared the data of their Facebook friends with the app. Kogan sold the resulting database to CA, which Facebook considers a violation of its policies: The app was not allowed to use the data for commercial purposes. Carol Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, writing for the U.K. publication Observer, quoted former CA employee Christopher Wylie as saying the firm “broke Facebook” on behalf of Stephen Bannon, the ideologue and manager behind the Trump campaign.
I have several internally conflicting thoughts on this. The one that bothers me the most is the political bias of Facebook executives towards Democrats. I’m NOT a Republican. I’m an Independent. I want to see fairness. But when you read things like: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/facebook-executive-sheryl-sandberg-podesta-want-hillary-win-badly/ …it’s really disturbing.
I am a privacy advocate and I’m not. I mean, I’m sure this kind of profiling is being done anyway. Facebook just has a plethora of data on so many people that it just makes it easier. And these campaigns are using it to create targeted messages. It’s the same thing that marketers do. It’s still my vote to cast.
I suppose the big deal is that I give permission to FB by giving my info. And I give permissions to any app I install from FB. But I don’t give permission to apps that my friends install. And I know there are “friends” that install some garbage apps. But again, it’s my wallet and my vote and my decisions.
In light of all this, though, it was known that Mark Zuckerberg has been taking steps to explore a Presidential run in the future. Does this stop that in its tracks? Or does this all blow-over by the time that happens?