Facebook Plays with the Data of Its 50 Million Users

The social media giant is currently embroiled in the largest data scandal of its history, following allegations that Cambridge Analytica tapped the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million people without their permission. The data may have been also used to influence the outcome of the United States election in 2016.

Facebook has a complicated track record on privacy. Its business model is built on gathering data. It knows your real name, which your friends are, your likes and interests, where you have been, what websites you have visited, what you look like and how you speak. It uses all the data to make it easy for its customers and advertisers to target you.

On the other hand, Facebook very much wants to keep that data, its competitive advantage to itself, and so guards it carefully. So protective is the site of its user data that it makes it difficult for scholars to study its impact on society. Unfortunately for researchers, the newly reported misappropriation of data is likely to make that even harder.

It all started in 2015, when Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested the personal data of 50 million Facebook profiles. A Cambridge psychology professor named Aleksandr Kogan created an app called “thisisyourdigitallife”.

The app was a personality quiz, described by Kogan as “a research app used by psychologists”. He had a deal to share the information with Cambridge Analytica. According to him nearly 270,000 Facebook users signed up for the quiz and they were paid to take personality tests, which was stored by the company later. Apart from the registered users, data of their Facebook friends too have been acquired and stored.

Let us first know about Cambridge Analytica. It is a British data analysis company, which provides services to business houses, corporates and groups, who wants to “change audience behavior”. Billionaire Robert Mercer is the owner the firm. Cambridge Analytica also worked for both President Donald Trump’s election campaign, and the campaign of Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower and analytics expert who worked with Cambridge Analytica revealed this. “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.”

Christopher Wylie, who served as a key source for detailed investigative reports on this issue published in The New York Times and The Guardian, said the firm was actually able to pull in data from roughly 50 million profiles by extending its tentacles to the unwitting friends of app users.

Christopher Wylie said he regrets the role he played for the full service propaganda machine. As Cambridge’s goal was to use the Facebook data to build detailed profiles that could be used to identify and then to target individual voters with personalized political messages calculated to sway their opinions.

He also acknowledged, “It was a grossly unethical experiment, because you are playing with an entire country. The psychology of an entire country without their consent or awareness.”

On the other hand, Cambridge Analytica has denied any wrongdoing and accused Wylie as a disgruntled former employee, but on the other hand it has accepted that it has obtained user data, which was a violation of Facebook policies, but has blamed a contractor for the problem. The company said it never used the data and deleted it all once it learned of the infraction an assertion contradicted by Wylie and now under investigation by Facebook.

This data breach episode marks the third such incident involving the largest social networking site in a year, where the company appears to have been outfoxed by crafty outsiders, this way. Earlier there was an issue where Russian agents were involved. They were running election propaganda campaigns in the Facebook through targeted ads and fake political events and before the Russians took center stage, there were purveyors of fake news who spread false stories in order to increase the number of partisan audiences and profit themselves from the ad revenue.

Every time such issues come up with the same enduring questions about Facebook’s conflicting priorities to protect its users, which has time and again exploited the personal details of its users to fuel its hugely lucrative, and precisely targeted, advertising business.

Facebook has now banned Cambridge Analytica; the organisation that had also helped Donald Trump during the Presidential election, saying the company improperly obtained information from 270,000 people who downloaded a purported research app described as a personality test. Facebook first learned of this breach of privacy more than two years ago, but hasn’t mentioned it publicly until now.

This incident also revealed what appear to be loopholes in Facebook’s privacy assurances, particularly regarding third-party apps. This incidents of data breach time and again proves that Facebook does not have any concrete technical way to enforce privacy promises made by such app developers, leaving users little choice but to simply trust them.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to defend itself by insisting that the Cambridge Analytica’s data collection technique was not a data breach because every user involved, gave their consent to share their data.