Facebook’s friend-data scraping multiplied a small consented sample into millions of profiles

Evidence

Here’s where the controversy kicks in. What many of these people likely did not know is that the same information would also be automatically obtained from their friends – a feature Facebook technically allowed at the time before updating their developer policy in 2015. This seems like a clever, if highly unethical, trick from a data-gathering perspective: you pay 270,000 people – the ‘seeders’ – a few bucks ($3 or so each) to consent to sharing their data, and by automatically scraping the profiles of the friends of those individuals as well you can quickly turn this into a much larger data set. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to sociological work on network-based inference and Coleman’s social capital idea that relationships transmit data beyond individuals. — connects to: Friend scraping expanded 270,000 paid participants into data on 87 million people — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 496; A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872; Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114

Broader Connections

• A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872
• Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms #qualifies (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 114