March 2018 has brought about a media firestorm involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. While both deny that they have done anything wrong, that does not stop the flood of accusations regarding alleged harvesting and use of personal data.
This dispute came about due to an undercover sting operation catching senior executives of Cambridge Analytica bragging about things such as entrapment techniques, fake news campaigns and even psychological manipulation.
The CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, was one of those people, adding on that they could use sex workers, misinformation and bribes to try and assist political candidates by attempting to help them win votes all around the world.
However, Cambridge Analytica has since claimed that reporters tricked the company. They have said that reporters from Britain’s Channel 4 News sent a reporter to pose as a representative for a wealthy Sri Lankan family that was apparently looking to get some political standing.
While initially denying the notion of using “entrapment,” the company put forward multiple other tactics they might possibly use.
However, Channel 4 was not the first to report on this scandal. The weekend before the Monday the broadcast came out, The New York Times and U.K. newspaper The Observer published reports to outline how Cambridge Analytica ended up with the data of millions of Facebook profiles.
In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan created an app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” People with the app were paid to take a psychological test and it would collect the information. However, it also got data on the participant’s Facebook friends as well. Overall, at least 50 million profiles were mined for data using this app.
According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Kogan shared this information with Cambridge Analytica without permission. This would, allegedly, allow the firm to create software that would be able to help influence choices in elections.
In response to this, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, finally commented on the situation after five days of silence.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” wrote Zuckerberg on a Facebook post. “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Facebook states that the data was initially collected for academic purposes, well within the policy of the website. However, the information was transferred to third parties, which is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
Since this story broke, Facebook has seen a 50 billion dollar drop in its stock. Politicians from the United States as well as the U.K. have called for Zuckerberg to testify in court for this issue.
Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg describes the incident as “a major violation of peoples’ trust.”
Zuckerberg recognizes his part in this and has said since that “I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”
Erika Brandenburg
Staff Writer