Fairly sure that's not anywhere near the whole picture of what CA was accused of? I thought CA ran surveys and from that data could make implications based on the friends and friends if friends of the person who took the survey?
My understanding is the quizzes were just viral Facebook apps to get API authorizations which back then let you download a lot of friends' basic data.
Simple scraping would get you a lot of the same data back then but it would be more involved and less solid legally. CA just figured out an easy way to do a huge scrape of Facebook.
I'd be surprised if many other organizations out there aren't sitting on similar datasets.
Even without asking any psychometric questions you could easily seed this through the dataset based on just a few examples or ground truths. This part seems rather unspectacular. With all the likes you can already tell who's alike. You just need to label the clusters.
CA's sell was this data would allow them to target super precisely and send different messages to different groups. But there's a big bottleneck at message creation. If you have 10 ads you can only target 10 groups uniquely. I'd be much more impressed if CA actually had software to manage ad creation, placement and performance tracking.
