Prediction: Facebook's goal for this investigation will be to make sure the public doesn't learn that Cambridge Analytica was only one of countless political actors that "somehow gained access" the pool of user information.
I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".
In Australia the Liberal party did basically what CA was doing - in 2013. There's a pastebin dump floating around containing the JS code; notably, it flags any of the user's friends who lived in specific electorates (I think they were opposition-held swing seats at the time)
The Obama campaign was very proud of doing something at least as bad, but I don't think we'll see that on the news, which offers a glimpse into what the motives are here.
For instance, before this, some of the most ethically questionable censorship stories I have heard from Facebook have had to do with minority groups or various activists in more repressive regimes around the world being blocked or censored.
Likewise, with Cambridge Analytica claiming to have worked with more than 200 elections around the world [1], and Channel 4 not painting an exactly flattering picture of their ethics, it's very possible that some of the most disturbing details that will emerge from this scandal have zilch to do with Donald Trump.
The extent to which the HN consensus is simultaneously exuberant about EU regulatory enforcement because "you should follow the law" and angry about other forms of regulatory compliance is astounding.
Repressive laws under authoritarian regimes are laws too. At the very least, we should admit that we're evaluating the specific rules (or the people making them) under some other rubric before deciding whether they ought to be obeyed. The sentiment you express here is exactly why "companies should obey the laws where their users live" and "countries should make laws according to their values and enforce them against websites accessible by their citizens" are too simplistic.
At least as bad seems a bit strong. The impression I'm getting is that they gave out an app explicitly from the campaign that also collected some info. There's a major difference between that and putting out an app and getting info under false pretenses
Both used Facebook data, but the comparison doesn't go further. The Obama campaign did something very different - as different as legal, ethical medical experiments using informed consent and the tests on the Tuskegee Airmen. I won't repeat what was said elsewhere:
I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".