By 2014, anything a user’s friends could see was also potentially visible to the developers of any app that they chose to download.
The source said that this group of 185,000 was recruited through a data company, not Mechanical Turk, and that it yielded 30 million usable profiles.
No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters.
Shortly after The Guardian published its 2015 article, Facebook contacted Global Science Research and requested that it delete the data it had taken from Facebook users.
Facebook’s policies give Facebook the right to delete data gathered by any app deemed to be “negatively impacting the Platform.”
It remains unclear what was ultimately done with the Facebook data, or whether any models or algorithms derived from it wound up being used by the Trump campaign.
Existing apps were given a full year to switch over to have Facebook review how they handled user data.
