I am sitting in my living room, no longer able to concentrate on my studies. Turning on the television and aimlessly searching for something to catch my interest. There is nothing on that I am interested in watching, tonight. I wonder if there is anything on Netflix. As I scroll through the computer generated list, Netflix has presented me. I wonder, hmmmmm, what’s this? This seems interesting. A documentary…Carole Cadwalladr…US presidential election…Brexit… Facebook…Cambridge Analytica… 5,000 data points on every American voter… Wait a minute. What is this about? I have 5,000 what? I have no idea what a datapoint is, much less how I have 5,000 of them.
So I watched the Netflix special, The Great Hack. It is a documentary about the data scandal of the social network, Facebook and the data company, Cambridge Analytica. After viewing the 113 minute film, I still didn’t completely understand what a datapoint was, so I decided to do more research on the topic.
The Guardian newspaper and Carole Cadwalladr have published a series of articles about “The Cambridge Analytica Files”. In this series, I found an article that helped me understand who Cambridge Analytica was and how they mined personal data to influence voter behavior. This profile of former CA data consultant Christopher Wylie is aptly named ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower. Ummm, wow, that is a very scary title! Psychological warfare? Data war? But here is the really scary part… the part about Wylie and the use of data points: “…while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological make up.”
Essentially, my personal profile on Facebook is filled with details about my life, work, friends, relatives, religious view, political views, my past, my education. Was this information up for sale to the highest bidder? Every time I posted a picture, shared a quote or GIF or meme, commented on someone else’s post, or “checked in” somewhere, was I producing a data point for them to collect? I think I might throw up…. I’m sitting here, trying to think back to the year, 2016. During the last days before the US presidential election. Was I inundated with political ads, trying to sway my vote? I mean, I vaguely remember memes of Hillary Clinton with disparaging quotes. I think I might have even “fact checked” some of them. But, I wonder what they were and what I thought about them. Even if I can’t remember, I feel violated. If my datapoints were sold and used against me, how will I ever know? Am I allowed to know what datapoints were gathered about me? These are extremely scary questions that I never thought I would be asking.
Last week, in my Information Management and Policy lecture, we had a guest speaker. Professor Anthony Finkelstein spoke to us about “Information Governance”. One of my classmates asked about the government’s use of civilian personal information. His response, although logical, surprised me. He said, “For 99.999% of the population, Facebook knows much more about you than the government.”
The Economist has an article that claims: “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”. It seems to me, that my concern about the use of my personal data points lies with the giant corporations and not the government.
Kemberly Marley 