Ep. 142: Facebook & CA - Nothing New Here

The Facebook uproar - wow! I’m shocked that people are shocked. We put our lives online for the world to see – the temptation for nefarious actors to act is there. We can’t be surprised at the result. What happened? Facebook and UK-based Cambridge Analytica (“CA”) are at the eye of the storm. It was NOT a data breach. It was NOT a cyber-attack. It was a case of poor supervision on the part of Facebook with regard to how a 3rd party developer accessed and used Facebook member data. Who is Cambridge Analytica? Other than dead in the water, CA is a data mining/data analytics firm. There are thousands of companies like CA that aggregate and analyze data for various purposes. What did CA do wrong? CA’s sin was that the firm misrepresented itself and how it would access and use Facebook member data. CA positioned itself as a personality survey application. Approximately 300,000 Facebook members downloaded the app. CA designed the app to capture your data and that of your Facebook friends. So for every person that downloaded the application, CA captured data on not only the 3000,000 people that downloaded the app, but also on an additional 166 people for every one person – or 50 million people in total. While you may have provided consent, your Facebook friends did not. That’s strike one against CA and Facebook. Second, CA used this data to inform the Trump campaign’s political targeting effort. The Facebook members who gave their consent did so never knowing that their data would be used for a political campaign, much less their friends whom never consented to anything. By the way, the Obama campaign did something similar. It too created an app for political purposes. It too captured Facebook data not only for those members who provided consent, but also for Facebook members who were friends of those who consented but never provided content themselves. So CA and the Obama campaign had strike one in common. The Obama campaign however was “a bit” more upfront in that its application was clearly a political application. I say “a bit” because none of these apps ever spell out in detail the extent of data collection and analytics that will be applied so that the average non-techie can understand it. Thus, it pays to be tech-literate. One failsafe – if you don’t understand something – don’t provide your consent. You should assume that any time you download an application or browse a website that the app or Website will ingest your personal data. As a precaution, set your privacy settings to “closed” “or at the extreme – don’t download the darn application. CEORater: CEO & Company Profiles. Crowdsourced Reviews Website: https://www.ceorater.com/ Facebook & Twitter: @CEORater Instagram: @CEORaterOfficial LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/ceorater/ TEK2day: Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship Website: https://tek2day.com/ Facebook & Instagram: @TEK2day Twitter: @TEK2dayOfficial CEORater Founder & CEO Jon Maietta LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathanmaietta Twitter: @jonathanmaietta Medium: @jonathanmaietta