[drag0nballz]

Agreed. In my understanding the CA data wasn't a friends list, which it what OFA got, but your friends Facebook data (their photos, posts, likes AND their friends data). That's how they got to 50M users. And how they used it sounds pretty different too.

[makomk]

The data OFA got wasn't just a list of your friends, it was their photos, posts and likes too. The Obama campaign's strategy revolved around using that information about your friends' social media - what photos they were tagged in, who interacted with who, etc - to figure out who was closest to which of their volunteers in order to work out who could best convince them to vote Obama. Which isn't what CA was offering, of course, but still seems rather creepy.

The other difference is that based on what we know, the Trump campaign didn't actually have any interest in using the CA data in question. The head of their campaign has quite consistently said he thinks CA's psychographics was worthless nonsense, and I'm not aware of anyone finding evidence contradicting this. It's quite possible that, in fact, the 2012 Obama campaign was the only US presidential campaign that systematically gathered information on people's Facebook friends to feed their campaign machine.