On March 17, 2018, Cambridge Analytica came under fire and amassed international attention as news broke of the company’s role in harvesting data from over 50 million Facebook profiles [1]. While the unfolding story has outraged many, it has also presented numerous questions: how did this happen? How much trust are we putting in our social media platforms, and how do we hold them accountable? What is our individual responsibility in this situation? And what does this data breach mean for Canadians? In a two part series, we will investigate these questions to create a better understanding of the event and why it reminds us how imperative it is to care about our personal data.
How did this happen?
In 2014, Global Science Research (GSR) developed the app thisisyourdigitallife, which paid users to take a personality quiz under the condition that their data would be collected for academic use. Users were informed that this would allow the company to access their Facebook profiles, but were not made aware that they were also providing access to the data of their entire friends list. This practice is known as data seeding. Data seeding allows one ‘seeder’ (in this case, the Facebook user taking the personality quiz), to act as a gateway to information from other sources connected to the seeder (such as the Facebook user’s friend list) [2]. At the time, Facebook’s terms of service were not as strict in the protection of user data, which GSR’s app was able to exploit. By doing this, GSR was able to collect information on millions of Facebook users, without informed consent, from only a few hundred thousand seeders. This information was then sold to Cambridge Analytica. But for what purpose?
As a data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica thrives on collected data, which they use to analyze, understand, and predict audience behaviour for their respective clients. In this case, the company harvested the information to profile American voters prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Voter profiles were created by measuring where users fell on the OCEAN model of five major personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism [4]. From there, these scores were used to influence voter and consumer behaviour through microtargeting advertisements specifically tailored to manipulate what had been determined to be impressionable personality types. This tactic, which has been speculated to have been used to sway the vote in both the U.S. election as well as the Brexit referendum, is not only accused of being an amoral strategy, but also one that undermines the system of democracy.
Who is to blame?
While GSR’s app used unethical and exploitative practices, many have wondered the extent of Facebook’s role, and how this could have happened without the social media site’s knowledge or interception. After all, the platform is responsible for protecting its users privacy, or at the very least ensuring that their data will not be used without their consent. While it has been speculated that Facebook became aware of the breach in 2015 and remained quiet [5], the company maintains their innocence and places the responsibility on both GSR and Cambridge Analytica for exploiting their policies. Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, has since appeared before the United States Congress to defend his company’s actions [6]. As well, he has made a public apology via the social media site, listing actions the company plans on taking in order to prevent a similar violation from happening again. He adamantly professed that Facebook as a platform has “a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you” [7]. But, as Kevin Roose of the New York Times bluntly states, companies like Facebook have grown to such grand proportions within a market-based system that they “can’t stop monetizing our personal data for the same reason that Starbucks can’t stop selling coffee – it’s the heart of the enterprise.” So how do we as users ensure our data does not fall into the wrong hands? Should we expect more accountability from our social media platforms, or should we abandon sites like Facebook altogether?
Check out part 2 of the series, where we investigate our individual responsibility and the implications for Canadians.
People said…