Cambridge Analytica and Facebook Data Scandal Essay

Cambridge Analytica, an electioneering firm based in London in 2014 extracted personal data belonging to over 50 million people who were using Facebook in the united states. The obtained data included the individuals ages, their email addresses, their physical addresses, their full names, their phone numbers, their relationship status, their photos, their liked pages, their political affiliations, their interests, the various groups they belonged to, their physical locations, their religious associations, and their interest (Williamson,2018). This is despite the fact that this kind of data is supposed to be private and safeguarded against disclosure according to fakebook's user and developer policies. However, Cambridge Analytica was at a position to access the series of unlimited data by use of the developer tools that were existing already in Facebook. This was an open secret that was only known to the Facebook developers.

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Masquerading as an academic researcher, Cambridge Analytica was able to locate the Facebook users in America through Mechanical Turk. This is a marketing place online where individuals all over the world associate with each other to carry out a variety of tasks. Cambridge Analytica volunteered to pay the individuals who could download and use thisisyuordigitallife. This was a personality questions app it had created on Facebook. A total of up to 270,000 voters in America downloaded the app and installed it in their gadgets. They also went further to take the personality quiz, and in return, they were paid between 1 to 2 dollars (Lin,2018). But as was the case, Cambridge Analytica was not interested in their answers only. On the contrary, what the company wanted and what it got, in the long run, was the capability of collecting the Facebook data belonging to the individuals who partook of their questions and all their friends on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain all this information by being a developer within the Facebook programme. Through that, Cambridge Analytica was successful in exploiting the 270,000 personality questions into a complete set of data of over 50million users of Facebook (Lin,2018).

Collection of such a voluminous data was allowed and encouraged by Facebook as it was aimed at making the developers continue building on Facebook. Facebook gave the companies that acted as its developers with all the tools they required for them to influence and manipulate the behaviors of the users. The fact that Facebook is not amongst the social media companies makes it the most extensive existing data mining campaign (Stepanovich,2018). For Facebook to be sure, they flagged and investigated the 50 million users' data grab by Cambridge Analytica in 2014. But when Facebook learned that the data collected were meant for building the personality profiles for academic use only, they permitted it to continue. However, after one year, Facebook uncovered that the data was being utilized for electioneering purposes. They discreetly requested Cambridge Analytica to delete all the data they have belonging to Facebook users. However, Facebook never confirmed that the data was removed and neither did they informed their users of the breach of privacy.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica engaged in data mining of the over 50 million Facebook users it had collected to develop psychographic profiles to be used in the 2016 presidential election in America. The profiles were made up of the users' names, their home dresses, their telephone numbers, their level of education, their birthdays, their voting records, and their political affiliations together with a highly developed personality analysis enabled Cambridge Analytica to sample the most convincible electorates thus targeting them with fake news using several platforms as well as Facebook (Stepanovich,2018). Combining misappropriated data, psychographic profiling, and false news enabled Cambridge Analytica to have a significant amount of impact on the results of the presidential elections that took place in 2016.

Facebook has condemned Cambridge Analytica for collecting the data of its users without the company's authority. However, the action of Cambridge Analytica is consistent with the mission of Facebook even though Facebook cannot admit that. Also, though Facebook commenced as a social media, its business model has over the years shifted and has as per today made Facebook one of the largest data mining company in the world. Today Facebook makes use of its platform which they have turned into a data gathering machine to influence its users to make those choices that Facebook in association with its business partners needs them to make (Scott,2018). The reason as to why Facebook shifted its business to this model was because it realized that it could profit more if it could exploit and put up for sale the capability to dependably influence the behaviors of its users for the third party. Facebook encouraged its developers and their researchers to proceed into collecting and analyzing the data of its users to study how it could manipulate the mood of its users' and decide on what they bought and how they voted too. To make sure that this was working, Facebook experimented using its users. The experiments conducted were aimed at influencing its users' moods and manipulation of the voting habits of its users.

The allegations that Facebook had the data of their 50 million users collected without their awareness has taken the world by a storm. This is pushing the privacy watchdogs from the law enforcement boundaries into a political argument. The agencies mandated to protect data are under renewed pressure from all sides of the Atlantic. They are being pressurized to enforce the already constituted rules on privacy and ensure healthier monitoring of the digital space (Scott,2018). However, the data protection agencies are having doubts about whether they have adequate resources, power and the will to take on technological giants the size of Facebook and regulate their activities. To address these kinds of problems, the data protection agencies convened a meeting in Washington. This was after Zuckerberg had promised through filling a full page adds both in the British and the U.S newspapers to fix his company (Williamson,2018). The privacy bosses are however expected to engage in a discussion on whether Facebook was unable to protect the data of its users and how it can earn the trust of the public once more.

Amidst uproar for responses on how the London based Cambridge Analytica gained access to Facebook data of over 50 million people, and possibly used them in influencing the American presidential election held in 2016, the Americans will keep a close eye on the national privacy regulators on how adequate the organization can implement the rules already in existent (Williamson,2018). However, the existing pressure is bound to grow upon the unveiling of the refurbished set of privacy rules. Those rules are meant to become the global standards for privacy. The case of Cambridge Analytica demonstrates why it is essential to have a reliable data protection agency.

Since the Cambridge Analytica situation came into limelight, both the privacy authorities of the British and the Americans commenced the investigations into the usage of individuals Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica. The United States Federal Trade Commission responsible for managing the standards for data protection within the country held that its investigations into Facebook are to establish whether the company failed to comply with the decision reached at in 2011. This decision mandated Facebook not to share its users' data with the third parties' developers without the consent of their users (Williamson,2018). For Britain, the Information Commissioner's Office, the watchdog for data protection in the county, indicated that it was going to incorporate the accusations into Facebook in their investigations that was already ongoing. It was going to investigate for possible mishandling of digital information belonging to Facebook users which lead to the use of information in political campaigns. However, during the investigations, Facebook stated that it had observed all its privacy regulations. On its side, Cambridge Analytica denied doing any wrong. A lot of individuals are now worried if the data privacy agencies have the powers and the will to limit the mining of personal data by companies.

Both the British and the American agencies responsible for investigating Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have had their share of shortcomings. The Information Commissioner's Office, the British agency, was unable to get a warrant for searching the Cambridge Analytica properties. It had to take its appeals to the court which entailed waiting for days to get the warrant. The Federal Trade Commission is undergoing a significant overhaul. Its four commissioners are yet to be confirmed by the Senate in the U.S. Any information that is going to be collected by the agency is bound to be sensitive politically (Williamson,2018). This is because of the relations between the privacy allegations to Trump's presidential campaigns of 2016. Other people too are questioning if the data protection rules of the country which are often informal focused on other areas such as healthcare and financial services. This is because those industries also collect users' information.

The privacy authority of Ireland will also be put under scrutiny. This is because it oversees the Facebook data of 1.9 billion non-North American users. This is because the international headquarters for Facebook is based there. The new allegations that have been leveled against Facebook are why it permitted a third-party application associated with Cambridge Analytica to gather piles of users' private information even if those individuals did not download the application themselves. Max Schrems, a law student from Australia, for the most of last decade filed legal disputes against Facebook practices for data collection. He filled his claims with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, the agency in charge of regulating privacy in Australia (Lin,2018). Schrems interrogated why the online information for individuals could be easily accessed by application developers through Facebook. The data protection agency stated that it performed a total of two audits on the data collection procedures of Facebook. It indicated that Facebook should overhaul the settings of its privacy to enable its users to have a larger control over the sharing of their data with the third-party applications. The communication head at the privacy authority of Ireland Graham Doyle said that because of the discussions they had with Facebook it prompted them to upgrade their platform (Mirchandani,2018). Due to the changes, Facebook initiated, what took place with Cambridge Analytica cannot take place today. Facebook revealed that individuals now have the sole authority of sharing their information through the third parties' applications. Following the audit conducted by the audit regulators of Ireland, Facebook changed its standards of privacy to give a restriction of how the online details of the users are to be shared beyond the services provided by Facebook.

Conclusion

The growth of awareness by the public on privacy is bound to gain a higher power upon holding of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. The rules bestow the authorities to the regional regulators to issue fines of up to 20 million pounds or a total of 4% of the revenue of the company; this is in instances where the companies do not comply to the data protection standards of Europe. These rules are amongst the most robust privacy rules in the world. As per the privacy experts, the newly established powers will result in higher scrutiny of the officials in ch...