A Murky Story


As Facebook got caught in (yet another) storm over privacy, this time over a firm called Cambridge Analytica, we have the usual polarized views being blared out:
-         Was the Facebook data leaked? Or misused?
-         Did it contribute to Trump’s win (and Brexit)?
-         How much is Facebook to blame?
To answer those questions, we should see what exactly happened.

Cambridge Analytica is a data analytics firm. Depending on your political views, writes Bryan Clark, it was:
“either integral to the Brexit leave campaign and Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory, or selling snake oil that both parties (and others) willfully swallowed.”
The firm was created by an American billionaire, Robert Mercer, a staunch Republican, to mine data for political purposes. If you are horrified, remember that Facebook, Google and Amazon target ads at you based on your preferences. So where does one draw a moral line? What should be the criteria?

How the firm got its data is shady. A psychology professor, Dr. Kogan asked Facebook for data for a “research app used by psychologists”. The app was downloaded just 0.27 million times. But where it gets shady is that the app got your permission (via that “I accept” button that we never read) to access your personal details and also that of your contacts.

And the firm offered $1 or $2 to each Amazon Turk worker if they’d be willing to download the app. You see where this is going? Offer money and the number of users will increase. And so the firm got access to the data of the new users and their contacts. Thus getting to a total of 50 million (American) users!

But wait, it gets worse. Kogan told Facebook he’d anonymize the data. He didn’t. In fact, he even shared the data with other entities.

Should Facebook’s policies for sharing data have been more stringent? Of course. Should Facebook have had better checks? Totally. Given past complaints on the same data sharing (and abuse) topic, should Facebook have improved its policy over the years? Absolutely.

To me though, the bad actor here is Cambridge Analytica who lied and abused the trust. But how much difference did any of this make to an election outcome? I think that’s the part where the answer can only be a guess. A guess that is inevitably based on your political leanings and personal views.

The amount of blame being laid at Facebook’s door seems excessive. Then again, is that inevitable because the media views Facebook as a competitor and threat? It’s hard to know since there are no neutral actors anywhere in this story.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarMarch 23, 2018 at 12:21 PM

    The finish line, "It’s hard to know since there are no neutral actors anywhere in this story", made me realize that a universal truth is here reduced to particular. I am inclined believe that neutral actors are actually nowhere in all stories! :-)

    There is a cliche "Nature abhors vacuum"; This could well be a cliche too: "The human mind abhors neutrality".

    ReplyDelete

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