CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA BLOWS UP
It’s easy to beat up on Facebook. It’s not the only social
network with questionable data-collection policies, but
it is the biggest. Facebook lets you build a personal
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via messages, posts, and responses to others’ posts,
photos, and videos. It’s free to use, and the company
makes its money by selling ads, which you see as you
browse your pages. What could go wrong?
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developed an app version of a personality quiz called
“thisisyourdigitallife” and started sharing it on
Facebook. He paid users to take the test, ostensibly for
the purposes of psychological research. This was
acceptable under Facebook policy at the time. What
wasn’t acceptable (according to Facebook, although it
may have given its tacit approval according to
whistleblowers in the documentary The Great Hack)
was that the quiz didn’t just record your answers—it
also scraped all your data, including your likes, posts,
and even private messages. Worse, it collected data
from all your Facebook friends, whether or not they
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people were harvested.
Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University, as
well as St. Petersburg State University, but he shared
that data with Cambridge Analytica. The company used
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and target some of them with the kinds of political ads
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who was Cambridge Analytica’s vice president, brought
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which leveraged it to sway swing voters, often on the
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“Brexit” referendum.
Facebook is
free to use,
and the
company
makes its
money by
selling ads.
What could go
wrong?