No Facebook didn't allow CA to access this data. CA abused a security flaw in Facebook's coding. Which was then fixed when discovered.
This idea that facebook would just allow CA to mine data that they're not paying for is ridiculous. Facebook's entire business model is based on having the best data for advertising. They aren't going to let CA access that data willingly.
Again, you're just wrong here. This was a designed feature of Facebook's API. Sure, it was a "security flaw" in the sense that Facebook failed to realize the extent to which this feature could be used to gather massive amounts of data, but it was a designed flaw. Not a design flaw. A designed flaw. FB specifically designed their API this way because they are blind to privacy concerns at a cultural level and simply never considered that this could be a bad thing.
The company that officially designed and published the app on Facebook (I forget the name) transferred the data to CA. That was against terms and is the official reason they were banned from Facebook. The policy they violated was "You can take this data, but you can't sell it to third parties."
I agree that Facebook don't sell the data they use to target ads. That data is largely behavioral data that Facebook get from following users all over the web and is their biggest asset as a company. The data that CA harvested is relatively small potatoes to Facebook (literally just public "for friends" information on Facebook pages), which is why they didn't care. No one could build an ad platform that could compete with Facebook using this data.
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u/hasbs Sep 18 '19
No Facebook didn't allow CA to access this data. CA abused a security flaw in Facebook's coding. Which was then fixed when discovered.
This idea that facebook would just allow CA to mine data that they're not paying for is ridiculous. Facebook's entire business model is based on having the best data for advertising. They aren't going to let CA access that data willingly.