Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign app asked users for permission to access data on their Facebook friends and contacts, Fox News reports.
The Hillary 2016 smartphone app asked users when they signed up to link their Facebook friends list with their phone contacts, a way to work around accessing Facebook user data without user consent.
The news comes after a firm hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, improperly obtained Facebook user data to target voters. (RELATED: Cambridge Analytica Is Not The Problem. Google And Facebook ARE The Problem)
A spokesperson for the Clinton campaign told Fox News that Clinton’s app merely “let users contact their friends about the campaign,” whereas Trump and Cambridge Analytica used “‘stolen’ data ‘for a purpose that was entirely misrepresented to Facebook.'” (RELATED: Are Dems Blowing The Cambridge Analytica Story Way Out Of Proportion?)
The app asked for permission to link Facebook friend lists with phone contacts, so that way even people without the app downloaded onto their phones could have been paired with the phone numbers of friends who did have the app downloaded (more than 150,000 people).
“Once the friends list was paired with the app, people had to swipe through their Facebook friends and dismiss those who, in their view, would never vote for Clinton,” Fox explains. “Once that was done, the remaining friends were sorted by location and the users could send a pre-written text message to convince them to back Clinton in numerous ways.”