Facebook Data Breach: When People Become the Product
The social media is agog with discussions on the role of data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica in trying to influence how Americans voted in the recent US presidential elections in which Donald Trump won. Cambridge Analytica also worked to win the Brexit vote in UK. One of the tricks used by Cambridge Analytica was to gather information from millions of Facebook profiles, harvest millions of such profiles of US voters (in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches) and use them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot-box.
 
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Facebook gave permission (obviously, for money) to the psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan of the University of Cambridge to collect information from its users who downloaded his app—‘thisisyourdigitallife’. The app offered a personality test. But Facebook users, who downloaded the app, also gave the professor permission to collect data about their location, their friends and the content they had ‘liked’. Prof Kogan provided that data—which included information from over 50 million profiles—to Cambridge Analytica, a firm which was working to develop techniques that could be used to influence voters and thereby assisting Donald Trump to run its social media campaign.
 
Christopher Wylie, of Cambridge Analytica, who worked with Prof Kogan, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.” By late-2015, Facebook had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. At the time, it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
 
What does this mean to us? Mahendra Limaye, a Nagpur-based cyber crime lawyer, says that the sordid episode throws up many questions. It is an open secret that personal data of the users is extracted from the social media platforms and various apps and used for a purpose for which they have not given their consent; they don’t even suspect such intentions of these platforms. He asks whether Facebook is transparent enough with users about how their information would be used. Should it have done more to keep tabs on how third parties were using data? Could such a business model, which is based on selling user data to app developers and advertisers, be termed ethical and allowed to be used? Should governments across the world partner with Facebook or such companies in their various social media initiatives?
 
Facebook, or for that matter any social media platform or app, has a poor track record on privacy. Their business model is built only on gathering data, like your real name, who your friends are, your likes and interests, where you have been, what websites you have visited, what you look like and how you speak. They commercially exploit all this data to make it super easy for their customers—advertisers—to target you and thereby mint money, says Mr Limye. And we are very fond of the, so-called, free services rendered by these platforms. But, as they say in the tech world, nothing is free; when something is free, you, the user, are the product. You are being marketed to advertisers. 
 
Mr Limaye suggests that we should stop compelling people to use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Google. Interestingly, Brian Act, the founder of one of the most successful apps ever, WhatsApp, which was taken over by Facebook, himself has supported the move to delete our Facebook accounts. The government should stop use of social media platforms for promoting their welfare programmes and as well as other initiatives wherein registration of users is a must on those platforms. Besides, there has to be very strict data protection along with privacy laws with penal provisions for data breaches. 
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