The Facebook — Cambridge Analytica affair
We’ve been hearing a lot lately in the news about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Mark Zuckerberg. But what is really the story behind all of this?
It all started when a whistleblower called Christopher Wylie, came out to the press on May 11th and exposed Cambridge Analytica’s illegal and unethical work. Cambridge Analytica is a British consultant firm based in London which has been accused of taking people’s personal data without their awareness of the matter. It has been said that this information has been used to influence the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign in 2016. But how did they manage to gather all this Data? Apparently, the University of Cambridge in accordance with the Psychometric center, managed to create a personality test on Facebook based on psychological studies on happiness and longevity and based on “The Big Five” factors which were initially identified in the 1960s. The Big Five are five broad factors of personality traits that are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Experience. What Facebook users who were taking the test did not know was the fact that while taking the test through Facebook, Cambridge Analytica received access to all their information on Facebook and all of their Facebook friends’ information. The New York Times first estimated 50 million users were affected. Facebook still hasn’t come up with an exact count but said that 87 million users either had a friend using the app or downloaded the app themselves, so the network is saying the highest number of users that could have been affected is 87 million. Cambridge Analytica claims the app gathered information on “no more than” 30 million people (Grigonis 2018). This scandal caused a lot of problems for Facebook and let Mark Zuckerberg to stand trial at congress on April 11th. He then publicly announced his apology and posted on Facebook “we have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” He then explained the measures the company will take in order to deal with the situation. He stated that “Facebook is going to audit apps that had “access to large amounts of information” prior to 2014”. He also added that “The company is going to “restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.” Additionally, he specified that “Facebook will try to make users “understand which apps you’ve allowed access to this data.” (Price, 2018).
In my opinion, this scandal was not truly a shock to me because people always tend to share their private information online which can be very easily accessed by many people, not by Facebook only. I just think people should be more careful about what they post on the internet and what they share on social media because the internet is a scary place and it can spread your information very easily.
References
Grigonis, H. (2018). “9 things to know about Facebook privacy and Cambridge Analytica” Retrieved from https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-facebook-users-should-know-about-cambridge-analytica-and-privacy/
Price, R. (2018). “The 3 steps Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will take to avoid a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica scandal”. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-3-steps-facebook-cambridge-analytica-scandal-2018-3
