Cambridge Analytica, political data firm founded by Stephen
Bannon and Robert Mercer, and with ties to U.S. President Trump’s 2016 campaign,
“was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles without the social network’s alerting users.”[1]
The firm had purchased the data from a developer (a psychology professor at
Cambridge University in the E.U.) who had developed a personality test that
Facebook users could take, and whose purpose was supposedly academic. The developer
violated Facebook’s policy on how user data could be used by third parties. The
data firm “used the Facebook data to develop methods that [the firm] claimed
could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence
their behavior.”[2]
In other words, Cambridge Analytica used the purchased data to manipulate users
to vote for Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 by sending pro-Trump messages.
Although Facebook had not known of the sale of the data to Cambridge Analytica
at the time, the social network, upon learning Cambridge Analytica’s political use
of the data in 2015, failed to notify its users whose data had been
compromised. Although 270,000 Facebook users took the developer’s personality
test, “the data of some 50 million users
. . . was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.”[3]
It bears noting here that those of the 50 million users who had not taken the
personality test should definitely have been informed. At the very least,
Facebook’s management could not be trusted to not only keep users informed, but also protect users in
the first place by adequately enforcing the third-party-use policy. So it is
ironic that Facebook’s untrustworthy management
could be unduly distrustful of
ordinary users.
The full essay is at "Facebook: A Distrustful Company."
1. Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Role In Data Misuse Sets Off
Storm,” The New York Times, March 19,
2018.
2, Ibid.
3. “Cambridge Analytica:
Facebook ‘being investigated by FTC,’” BBC News ( accessed March 20, 2018).