This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 2, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How do we distinguish between the tactics of Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign and the actions of similar data gathering of previous campaigns?

And what might be the result of new congressional attention paid to our interactions on social media.

Cato's Walter Olson and Julian Sanchez comment.

How much worse is what Cambridge Analytica is accused of and by all rates appears to have done with respect

to making use of data that they scraped from Facebook then say the Clinton campaign or the Obama campaign and I can recall

very clearly people pointing out it's brilliant the way they're using quote unquote big data

to micro target voters.

Right.

Well, so the technical policy that was exploited to scrape data from friends of users who had installed an app is something that Facebook shut off in late

2014.

So it's not something the Clinton campaign would have been able to actively do at the time certainly is something the Obama campaign did and again

were as you noted sort of praise for their cleverness their digital gurus have said yeah we scraped everything we could. I do think

there are significant differences. The Obama campaign scraped data from an

Obama application.

So at least in that case, people understood that they were installing something and sharing

data with it for the purpose of helping a political campaign.

This is a case where the data Cambridge Analytica got was from a personality quiz app that was pitched as being something that was going to collect data purely for academic research,

and then sounds like... collect data

that data was then turned over to Cambridge,

which appears to have claims to have deleted it

...