The Media’s Double Standard on Privacy and Cambridge Analytica
Your Facebook data was being used by countless organizations for years, including Obama’s 2012 campaign
Listening to most of the analysis of Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, one would think that our deepest, darkest secrets were pilfered from Facebook’s servers and hand-delivered to Trump Tower and the Kremlin, which skillfully used them to exploit our fears and manipulate our emotions. One could be forgiven for thinking this when Cambridge waged a brilliant marketing campaign to convince you that their mastery of the dark arts — honed through waging information war in the third world — was the secret ingredient behind Donald Trump’s shocking victory.
Further revelations that Cambridge was not completely on the straight and narrow in how it handled data has added fuel to the conflagration over social media, fake news, and the Russian influence campaign. This firestorm has put political data collection practices in the crosshairs of Robert Mueller’s investigation, a British parliamentary inquiry, and government regulators in the US and the European Union.
As with many stories associated with the trigger words “Trump,” “Russia,” and “fake news”, the story is so bound up in the political passions of the moment…
