A whistleblower has revealed to Observer Cambridge Analytica the misuse of data and the harvest of 50M profiles without authorization. The company aim was to build a system that can profile Facebook users to be targeted or resold during political campaigns. The data was collected through an application called thisisyourdigitallife and hundreds of thousands of Facebook users were paid to take a personality test for academic purposes. The application didn’t only gather users information but also pulled the data of 50M users or more. The application used a profiling algorithm to define mental vulnerabilities of people and then to inject information in different content around users to change their perception about different matters and issues. The announced aim of taking the test is to improve user experience but unfortunately, it was sold for advertising purposes according to Christopher Wylie who worked for Cambridge Analytica as Director of Research The Gurdian. The issue here is that most of Facebook users log into many services without thinking of how their data can be used.
The breach that happened is not a breach of App, it’s a breach of trust between Facebook and its users. Since 2007 Facebook has started to build its community which reached 2.2 billion users. Maintaining this number needed trust along with the presented services.
Can we still trust social media platforms? and what are the right practices users should put into their considerations? If the whistleblower did not reveal it, no one could know about it.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said he had a “responsibility to protect your data” he also admitted “we also made mistakes” and said that the company took series of actions to prevent the sharing of personal information.
Does this rebuild trust after they made people feel that they are the product and they have been used for commercial purposes?
Should we place the blame on Facebook or we must blame ourselves for not being cautious in our daily practices on social media platforms?
I think there should be always a common sense. People share everything on social media and don’t pay attention to security and privacy issues. We need to be careful starting from connecting with people and moving to security and privacy issues related to applications. People need to have a look at the apps they have on Facebook and check if they gave access to their information. This can be done by going to desktop and clicking on setting and taping “Apps” to see if they authorized these applications or some of them to access their information. Still, if we are not sure about these apps, we can remove them.
Eli Pariser, CEO of viral content website Upworthy has warned against personalization tools since 2011. His point is that using algorithms to profile people to show them information tailored to personal taste is bad for democracy. He emphasized that we get trapped in online “filter bubbles”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
The impact of this issue might be big on researchers who work on psychological and humanities-related researches to find solutions to many social and psychological issues caused by new technology. Cambridge Analytica scandal will make social media companies think millions time before sharing any information related to users for researching purposes. This will cause a delay in finding solutions to some serious social issues.
When we don’t have a control on the social media platforms, we don’t have control over our lives. We need to think million times before sharing personal content in order to protect our life.