Cambridge Analytica and Facebook

Nowadays, there is a big event that makes everyone shocked and start reflecting the relationship between social media and users’ private data. There was a report that “a political firm hired by the Trump campaign acquired access to private data on millions of Facebook users has sparked new questions about how the social media giant protects user information. The power of the company is so huge that could influence the consequence of the political election.
The firm is Cambridge Analytica, which is a political data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign. They could gain access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users. The firm offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior as well. The technique that could steal Facebook users’ data had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. Even though Facebook banned the company could sell the customer data, but this was exactly Cambridge Analytica did.
People also angry about Facebook too. In the days following the original reporting, one of the interesting things is the Twitter hashtag #DeleteFacebook began trending. Congress asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on what had happened. The social media giant’s share value took a dramatic dive, down $60bn at one point down. No matter what is the culpability of Facebook, the scandal has tapped into ongoing concerns about how careful the platform is with users’ data — and how the company has been used to influence political outcomes. Facebook has been under scrutiny over whether it did enough to stop Russian propaganda aimed at influencing the US election from spreading misinformation on users’ news feeds. Zuckerberg has since apologized for what he called a “breach of trust” in full-page newspaper ads in several UK and US newspapers.
If you’ve been the target of Facebook comments, it’s possible you’ve left your steps in your friend’s circle. Even though you try your best to maintain your privacy, you could not avoid leaving your own information on social media. When you post your life on social media or even you “like” other people’s post. Social media could know your preference and send the advertisements or passages according to your preference. Blocking this person seems like the obvious solution, but even as you do so, you’re left with questions and doubts about yourself.
Social media trolls are out there, lurking in the recesses of the thousands who have liked a particular page so that they can post to it, or in Facebook groups of people who don’t know each other but who share similar interests or live in the same community.
Social media is too close to our life. It is very dangerous to expose yourself to everyone’s eyes. It reminds me to think about the documentary that we watched, We live in public. If live in public means we will be controlled by other high-status people and lost ourselves, the price is too high and we need to consider it seriously. We do not only need to treat Facebook serious but other social media application.