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FTC Probing Facebook For Use of Personal Data: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook is under investigation by a U.S. privacy watchdog over the use of personal data of 50 million users by a data analytics firm to help elect President Donald Trump. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree of its handing of user data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge, according to a person familiar with the matter. Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time. If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation.
Here's an article from NYT discussing Obama's use of facebook data during his 2012 campaign.
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”
Also, this quote from [Obama’s former director for media analytics] Carol Davidsen:
[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
Two days later, CBS is now reporting that the Trump Campaign only used the CA data for a targeted online advertising and a single TV ad buy during the primaries, because they were playing the CA data off of the RNC, in case the RNC pulled a "resistance" and didn't want to share with the Trump campaign. They ended up not using the CA data for the general election because they didn't trust it coming from Facebook.