Even if today’s subject is centered around the abuse of social networks for political gain, I am not going to talk about politics. By now we all know about Cambridge Analytica’s hand in
using -without authorization- the data of over 50 million Facebook users to sell the ability to sway voters during the electoral and presidential campaigns these past few years, including the Brexit vote and U.S. presidential elections. You only have to put their name on Google to get the thousands of articles explaining how they did it.
I’m going to talk about the practical abstractions that led to this happening, how big data works and why it’s such an important concept. I am also going to show you how to enter your Facebook page to learn who is compiling data about you, so that you can remove those permissions if you so wish.
What is Big Data?
Like their name indicates, they are huge conglomerations of many types of data relating to a specific subject or subjects. In the online world, it’s data about internet users’ habits. The best example is a cookie, those things you get asked about every time you visit a new webpage. There are cookies that only track things like from where you’re connected, what language you speak, or what links you follow on their pages. More advanced cookies follow your searches in detail: how long you spend reading a certain section of a specific page, what elements you scroll over with your mouse, etc. All that tracking becomes part of big data.
Private big data is a boon to many companies, as they can use it to improve the quality of
their services and of their products. Others use their data to cross-sell you related products. For example, if you go into Amazon to look for organic green tea with pomegranate but you end up not buying it, next time you’re on Facebook or other webpages, you’re like to see ads for green tea with pomegranate. That’s because a cookie tracked your search, your lack of purchase, and extrapolated that maybe others might be interested in selling you pomegranate green tea. So now you see tea everywhere. It may seem pointless but this activity is a multimillion-dollar industry that’s highly successful sales because it’s simple, cheap and automatic.
Other types of big data are subtler. For instance, if you have an exercise wristband, that wearable is constantly gathering data. My Fitbit tracks my daily steps, the floors I climb, my heart rate, etc.
Other utilities: Open Data
It’s obvious all this data is very useful. There are other types of gathered data known as open data in that it’s freely shared. They don’t contain personal information and they enable others (others with expertise) to obtain complex demographic reports on social behavior. For many open data is an invaluable resource because it’s free and highly specific, allowing for a range of statistical study never known before.
The misuse of data
What happens when someone uses data, be it private or public, for goals that are not as
clean cut as advertising or scientific study? A good example: when Fitbit published its open data about the thousands of Fitbit wristband users around the globe just to show how cool it was to see what healthy habits people had worldwide, they never imagined that by careful examination of that seemingly-inane data, a military expert was able to guess the location of many secret U.S: military bases around the globe, just by tracking the running routes of the soldiers who wore Fitbit wearables. This specialist published his findings in good faith, but there are companies, as we are now learning, who are getting paid to make inappropriate use of our public and private data.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, this company used data compiled illegally to effectively -and also illegally- sway the voters of thousands of voters in several countries. They used very subtle influencing models, such tracking voter searches and reading habits in certain areas to decide on the content of certain political candidates’ speeches when they visited those areas. In other instances, those searches were used to alter paid content viewed subsequently, so that progressively they could sway undecided voters towards the candidate paying them.
The key issue: the privacy policies
The Right to Privacy is law in the United States. There are many laws that protect our right
to privacy online and in person. When you buy something online and you have to select that box that says that you’ve read the terms of use and company policies, one of those legal advisories is the company’s Privacy Notice. That notice tells you what data they gather about you, how they’ll store them, how they’ll use them, with whom they’ll share them and for what purposes. By law you have a right to opt-out of having them share your data with third parties.
“What scary movie character are you?”
If you’re on Facebook, you’ve surely seen at some point a friend who posts something like this on his or her wall: “I’m Freddie Krueger. What horror film character are you? Take the quiz to find out”. The moment you click to take the test, you will get a notice that says “XYZ Company wants to have access to your Facebook profile” and, if you let them, you just authorized XYZ to track you. That’s how Cambridge Analytica got the data of 50 million Facebook users.
Cambridge Analytica’s abuse and the consequences for Facebook
The key of this scandal is that Cambridge Analytica informed Facebook that its data compilation was for academic purposes only, and then went ahead and sold it for political
profit purposes. With that, they performed over 50 million individual violations of Facebook’s Privacy Notice to its users. With that Facebook violated its own Privacy Policy, and they did so with economic gains. All these companies that have been running surveys and cute quizzes on Facebook pay the social media giant for running each and every one of those instances; that is how Facebook makes money.
What will happen to Facebook?
If there’s something we learnt from the banking crisis last decade is that national governments are now trying to make examples of the giants who abuse their powers. The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has been called to testify in person in front of the government of many nations and the European Union to answer for what it allowed to happen and how they allowed it to happen. The department of Justice has an open investigation and many European and Asian Justice systems have opened inquiries. Considering that in two months-time the new EU General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect, Facebook is likely going to have to answer to many different courts and pay exemplary fines.
I don’t think it will end at that. Facebook has just shown the world how the sale of big data for profit can be abused, and that even the large social media are getting scammed. That the sale of data has been used for large-scale social engineering is the worst kind of sophism, and I would be very surprised if global governments put their foot down on tracking, saving and selling data about their citizens. I foresee that within the next five years we will see changes to privacy laws, changes to make them far more restrictive. Whether that will help consumers or not is another story. But the reputation of big data, open data
and Facebook have been severely marred by this scandal.
Do you know who tracks you on Facebook?
I’ve created a specific page with instructions on how to see who is tracking and compiling data about you on Facebook, and how to remove their authorizations if you wish. This is particularly important as you likely didn't know that apps that you have never used, but your friends and/or family have, are likely also tracking you on Facebook right. now. Don’t hesitate to share it with friends and family, as you will also be helping yourself in the process.
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