A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent

Evidence

Kogan was well-known to Facebook. He had collaborated with its data scientists on a 2013 project in which the company provided data on 57 billion “friendships.” This time, he paid approximately 270,000 people to take a personality quiz. Unknown to these participants, Kogan’s app enabled him to access their Facebook profiles and, on average, the profiles of about 160 of each of the test takers’ friends, “none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect” this invasion. It was a massive rendition operation from which Kogan successfully produced psychological profiles of somewhere between 50 and 87 million Facebook users, data that he then sold to Cambridge Analytica. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872

Categorization

• XREF: Concretely instantiates the ‘rendition’ concept Zuboff develops throughout the book — the moment individual data extraction escalates to massive scale with no consent. — connects to: User consent does not extend to background data aggregation through app APIs — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 517; Even innocent-looking mobile apps are routinely infested with tracking programs. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 430; Tenant-screening firms scrape private social media data without contest or appeal. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 541 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Apps collect data beyond user control while framing collection as enhanced experience #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 517