Facebook — Cambridge Analytical Data Fiasco versus Dataeum democracy
In the space of two decades, personal data, the body of information left behind by individuals online, has become the black gold of modern times. With the rise of digital, an immense amount of information is recorded every day by the websites on which surfers surf. Companies that leverage this data, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are getting billions of dollars from real-time reselling to third parties to enable advertisers to deliver targeted advertising.
In 2006, the Council of Europe launched the Personal Data Protection Day to raise awareness of Internet users about their rights and the importance of protecting their privacy online. Celebrated worldwide since January 2007 under the name of “Data privacy day”, this day echoes the 28 January 1981, the date of the signing in Strasbourg of European Treaty №108, the legal instrument of reference for data protection in Europe for over thirty years now.
According to Article 2 of the Data Protection Act, “constitutes personal data any information relating to a natural person identified or which can be identified, directly or indirectly, by reference to an identification number or several elements of its own “.
When a user surfs the Internet, he is always identified by an “IP” address and is associated with this address by the sites it visits, such as its location, name, connection time, phone number, or even its age, gender or fingerprint.
Any traces left behind by a computer or a telephone that are likely to allow identification directly or indirectly are considered personal data.
A large number of Internet users still underestimate the value of their personal data while it is very difficult today to know precisely who has data about them, what types of data it is and how they are the object. Some information may be used without their knowledge. For example, credit or housing may be refused on the basis of data collected without their knowledge, and did you know that you get data collected everytime you walk around with your phone in your pocket?
Data firms like CA buy data from multiple such data generators and aggregate it to generate targeted ‘ads’ or in this case ‘political campaigns’ to people using the web, whether logged in on Facebook or not. They used Facebook data to identify political inclinations of people, based on “likes, dislikes and comments”, using the OCEAN model. This was applied for Trump’s Presidential campaign as well as in the early stages of “Brexit” campaign.
In DATAEUM context we are trying to reinstate the privacy of users in the digital world. Using crowdsourcing, DATAEUM is offering the first collaborative and decentralized platform for Data Generation.
Our team is striving hard to become the guarantor of the world’s first decentralized collaborative network for data generation and bring about a huge revolution in today’s digital age’s data economy, thus democratizing its accessibility and allowing the users to be retributed.
For further details you may get in touch with our team in Dataeum Telegram-group!
