Online privacy

[Commentary] A storm dubbed #DeleteFacebook is brewing in techie communities, on Twitter and — irony alert — on Facebook. The idea is this time is different from all the other times the social network has violated our trust. There have been many calls to boycott Facebook for past indiscretions. If we want the result to be any different this time, we need to address the broader problem. Aside from a dramatic change of heart from founder Mark Zuckerberg, getting Facebook to reform what data it collects and how it uses it requires destabilizing its business.

[Press release] This was a breach of trust between Cambridge University Researcher Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that. We already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll outline those steps here:

[Commentary] Over and over in the last 20 years we’ve watched low-cost or free internet communications platforms spring from the good intentions or social curiosity of tech folk. We’ve watched as these platforms expanded in power and significance, selling their influence to advertisers. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google—they grew so fast. One day they’re a lovable new way to see kid pix, next thing you know they’re reconfiguring democracy, governance, and business. This is an era of breaches and violations and stolen identities.

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you’ve told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star’s posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Kardashian to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat).

[Speech] As we have seen from data from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, big internet providers have been intentional about focusing their investments on deploying broadband technologies, in high-income urban, suburban and middle-income neighborhoods. And as you already know, there is a glaring correlation between areas of high poverty, and places where companies have not invested in new technologies, such as fiber. The impact here is severe. Those being left out, not only are less able to get ahead, but they are more likely to be left behind. 

In 2012 the Obama campaign was desperate to reach twentysomethings who were hard to access because they had only cell phones. So it sought to reach them on Facebook. Two GOP campaign analytics sources said the Obama camp used a common Facebook developer API – the same one used to access the data for Cambridge Analytica – to create a Facebook app that could capture the personal data not only of the app user, but also of all that person’s friends.

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Facebook following reports that a data analytics firm that had worked with the Trump campaign had improperly accessed names, “likes” and other personal information about tens of millions of the social site’s users without their knowledge. The FTC probe – confirmed by a source familiar with the agency's thinking and not authorized to speak on the record -- marks the most substantial political and legal threat yet to Facebook as it grapples with the fallout from Cambridge Analytica and its controversial tactics.

Consumers have long wondered just what Google and Facebook know about them, and who else can access their personal data. But internet giants have little incentive to give straight answers.  On May 25, however, the power balance will shift towards consumers, thanks to a European privacy law that restricts how personal data is collected and handled. The rule, called General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, focuses on ensuring that users know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them. Under GDPR, pages of fine print won’t suffice.

A former Cambridge Analytica employee said that the data firm met with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in 2015, before President Donald Trump declared his candidacy. Christopher Wylie, a self-described whistleblower on the company’s data harvesting practices said that he left Cambridge Analytica before it formally teamed up with the Trump campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign, harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.