Facebook has been dubbed by politicos like BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith as the soon-to-be “place where American elections are fought and won.”
In the last presidential election, the Obama campaign skillfully used this to its advantage—they realized that young voters often didn’t care for television ads, but would respond to targeted information given them by an enthusiastic friend.
They engineered an app that allowed Obama supporters to share their friend lists with the campaign. The Obama team could then cross reference those names with voting records, and tell the app owners which of their friends to target with campaign information–whether asking them to get to out to vote, watch a video, or donate.
Over 1 million people downloaded the Obama app in 2012. 600,000 users then shared suggested content with a staggering 5 million of their contacts.
The Romney campaign eventually got on board as well, but late in the game.
But some users weren’t all that pleased to have their personal information shared with an app without their consent. Facebook has now decided to tweak its privacy rules to shield users from this, Yahoo News reports.
“We’ve heard from people that they’re often surprised when a friend shares their information with an app,” Facebook’s Jeffrey Spehar wrote in an announcement. “So we’ve updated Facebook Login so that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list.”
This means the end of the campaign app’s most useful feature: the ability to find the names of friends not already using the app, and target new potential supporters.
Facebook made the change in April, but gave apps a year to use their existing systems until a permanent halt in April 2015.
Read the full report at Yahoo News.
