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by ahupp 2066 days ago
From the Wired magazine explainer on CA:

"That data was acquired via “thisisyourdigitallife,” a third-party app created by a researcher at Cambridge University's Psychometrics Centre. Nearly 300,000 people downloaded it, thereby handing the researcher—and Cambridge Analytica—access to not just their own data, and their friends' as well."

https://www.wired.com/amp-stories/cambridge-analytica-explai...

re: "the exact opposite", you are putting a lot of weight on the intention behind this use. After the public response to CA you might appreciate why FB is going to strictly apply the rules.

But I generally agree that users running an extension in their own browser is a different situation than an app developer subject to the FB ToS and am not sure why FB would be allowed to block this.
2 comments
david_stillwell 2064 days ago
Hi, I am David Stillwell. I can confirm that Kogan's app "thisisyourdigitallife" was his own endeavour and unrelated to the Psychometrics Centre. I'm not sure why Wired has written this now. They actually already wrote an extensive article about the Psychometrics Centre here in June 2018 if you want the real story: https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-who-saw-the-dangers-of-c...
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ahupp 2064 days ago
Thank you for clarifying. Always nice to get first-hand information.
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bogomipz 2065 days ago
The "thisisyourdigitallife" was not developed by the Psychometrics Lab it was developed by Kogan(a lecturer at Cambridge University) who by then had formed his own company called Global Science Research Ltd (GSR.) GSR signed the contract with SCL Elections and sold the Kogan app to them. SCL Elections being the parent of Cambridge Analytica.

Kogan's app was based on the myPersonality app which was developed by Kosinski and Dr David Stillwell who did work at the Psychometrics Lab and denied Kogan access to their dataset. Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge University are not the same thing at all. So there is no comparison to NYU and Cambridge Analytica or Cambridge University for that matter.

Saying I'm "putting a lot of weight on the intention behind this use" is kind of a bizarre statement considering the data is literally available to everybody. See:

https://adobserver.org/ad-database/

The Project also clearly states:

">If you want, you can enter basic demographic information about yourself in the tool to help improve our understanding of why advertisers targeted you. However, we’ll never ask for information that could identify you"

And to that end the code for the plugin that the Ad Observatory project is used also freely available:

https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-...

How much more transparent can you get than that? The goal of the Ad Observatory project is literally to try to understand how we are being targeted and manipulated. How is this in anyway the same as the secret harvesting of data by a political consultancy that billed itself as providing "election management" services?

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