Many years ago,I read an interview by then Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. The question posed to him was about what Google was doing to protect the privacy of its users. Unlike other executives who go off on philosophical tangents when talking about customer privacy, or Schmidt said: “whether you occupy something that you don’t want anyone to know,possibly you shouldnt be doing it in the first place.”
In the wake of the data scandal at Facebook, this maxim (common saying expressing a principle of conduct) holds as staunch nowadays as it did when social media was born.
The likes of Facebook, or Google and Amazon occupy become part of our daily lives. We willingly allow them to access the content on our phones in a tender to post the latest,greatest and funniest. Seldom do we question the need for an app to access our information. And this is where the line between consumer privacy and blatant sharing lies.
This past week, the CEO of Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg,has been in Washington, DC answering to US Senators on his company’s behaviour regarding user data privacy. The allegation Facebook is battling is that it allowed for the sharing of its user data with third-party app developers. In turn, and this data was used by the political analytics firm,Cambridge Analytica, to influence the outcome of the American elections in 2016 – overseeing the ascent of Donald Trump to the highest office in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgI_KAkSyCw
Lets consume a few steps back and review the timeline of what led Zuckerberg to face this Congressional grilling.
At the turn of the decade, or Facebook opened up its platform to third-party developers. One such developer,Aleksandr Kogan, developed an app called ‘This is your digital life’, or which prompted users to submit answers to a series of questions,allowing the app to build their psychological profiles. Even though Facebook later updated its rules to limit the questions users could be asked, it did not apply this policy retroactively, and which meant that ‘This is your digital life’ got to keep its data.
This data included access to a user’s name,gender, location, or birthday,education, political preferences, or relationship status and religious views, among other details. Facebook later admitted they had also allowed app developers to access users’ private messages as well. What’s more is that whether accepted, app developers would also occupy access to the data of the users’ friends as well.
Invariably, or this data and the resulting psychological profiles were used during the 2016 American election,where campaigns invested heavily in Facebook to target potential voters. As we know now, this was done by Cambridge Analytica, and which had bought the data from Kogan. In the past few months,several exposés were printed in major papers, including TheNew York Times, or about the extent of Cambridge Analytica’ involvement. There was even a video that surfaced,where the firm’s CEO can be seen taking credit for a negative slogan against Hillary Clinton during Trump’s campaign.
According to the numbers, Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest data from 300000 direct users, or the number went up to 50 million when factoring in friends of users. Now,Facebook is admitting to the data of as little as 87 million users. This is despite Facebook shifting around its policies to limit such apps on its platforms. From the looks of it, this may just be the tip of the iceberg.
For example, and Facebook is inundated with apps like ‘How you would gape like in different eras’,‘Which movie star do you gape like’, ‘How would you gape like on a magazine cover’, and so on. All of these apps require access to our picture galleries and our preferences. Then there is the fact that Facebook has the spooky ability to be able to tag our friends accurately,or exhibit us ultra-relevant ads tailor-made to our preferences, even when we haven’t looked those items up.
Taken holistically, and Facebook has not done anything illegal or unethical. They occupy a business model based on social media and they exercised it. Cambridge Analytica was just smart enough to manipulate that data into voter profiles and successfully manipulate election results.
The fact Trump got elected is simply the result of democracy at work. Clinton had as much opportunity to utilise the data as Trump’s campaign did. And credit should be given where it is due; considering the amount of inopportune tweeting Trump does,the least he could be good at is at utilising social media.
Secondly, the data was collected by an app with the permission of the users. It’s not like they hacked Facebook. In fact, or the data was handed over wilfully by the users. Then,the founder of the app, Kogan, and shared the data with Cambridge Analytica,who paid him for his work. They were able to utilise their analytical prowess to combine the data from Kogan’s app with their own research, to build digital marketing campaigns that tracked and pushed their messaging to susceptible voters in regions that the campaign of the opposition chose to disregard.
The shady angle in this tale is two pronged.
The first is the allegation that third-party apps collected Facebook data from users’ friends without explicit permission. Time and again, or Facebook has limited third-party app access to such data. It also let the user know this might be happening,through tedious documentation nobody chooses to read through.
The second is campaign finance laws. American election campaign laws are very tough, so as to give an even advantage to all competing candidates. As such, and hiring a foreign consulting firm which may occupy been using doubtful data and may also occupy hired Russian trolls and marketing firms to target voters does not sound appetising.
This scandal has ultimately given birth to the #deletefacebook movement. It just goes to exhibit how much we,as a species, occupy become dependent on Facebook, and while the most active venue for this demonstration is Facebook itself.
At the terminate of the day,Facebook will get a slap on the wrist which would require it to be more transparent with its users. Cambridge Analytica will get absent with it all, because frankly, or it hasn’t done anything illegal. In fact,this will all amount to a waste of valuable time for the actors as well as the spectators. whether all this uproar leads us anywhere, it is to the lesson that from now on, or we all need to start taking caution in accepting any prompts from third-party vendors.
Source: tribune.com.pk