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by verst 225 days ago
As I recall it Cambridge Analytica was a ton of OAuth apps (mostly games and quizzes) requesting all or most account permissions and then sharing this account data (the access for which had been expressly (foolishly) granted by the user) with a third-party data aggregator, namely Cambridge Analytica. Only this re-sharing of data with a third party was against Facebook Terms of Service.

I would not classify Cambridge Analytica as research. They were a data broker that used the data for political polling.
1 comments
paxys 225 days ago
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

> The New York Times and The Observer reported that the company had acquired and used personal data about Facebook users from an external researcher who had told Facebook he was collecting it for academic purposes.

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tguvot 225 days ago
link from sentence that you copy pasted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013.[2] The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles

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pms 225 days ago
This "research" and data access wouldn't be allowed under the DSA, because (i) the researcher didn't provide any data protection safeguards, (ii) his university (and data protection officer) didn't assume legal liability for his research, (iii) his research isn't focused on systemic risks to society.
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tguvot 225 days ago
not sure what's the point that you are making. but under "common sense comments act of 2054" unclear comments are not allowed.
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brendoelfrendo 225 days ago
The article for this post is about the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). Since the original comment argues against research access to data by arguing that "Cambridge Analytica was research as well," another poster chimed in to rebut that assertion by arguing that Aleksandr Kogan's research would not have been allowed access to user data under the DSA and thus, that specific legal concern is moot.
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tguvot 225 days ago
kogan "research" harvested data through application and he was outside of eu.

so even it was happening today, whatever he did is irrelevant to EU/DSA unless they plan to chase everybody across the globe. somewhat like ofcom going after 4chan

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