Corporations and governments alike have an insatiable appetite for our data. FILE 
Summary
Last week, in a statement from its newsroom, Facebook announced
the suspension of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), including
their political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from its
social networking platform.
In the statement, Facebook
gave an account of how in 2015, a psychology professor at the University
of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied and violated their Platform
Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to
SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and
military work around the globe.
It went ahead to state
that despite giving data integrity certifications to the firm, they
recently received reports that, not all data was deleted in violation of
trust and the commitments they made.
This risk lies
in the way we are wired. There are few secrets we don’t tell someone,
and we continue to believe something is private even after we’ve told
that person. We write intimate letters to lovers and friends, talk to
our doctors about things we wouldn’t tell anyone else, and say things in
business meetings we wouldn’t say in public.
We use pseudonyms to separate our professional selves from our personal selves, or to safely try out something new.
As
data scientists, we have previously pointed out Cambridge Analytica’s
work in mining data and Facebook’s move to suspend it was long overdue
and appears to be motivated by the ongoing investigations into voter
interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.
The
problem is, however, two- fold, the effects of their work will remain
undone and secondly that there are a myriad of other apps out there
still mining information from our phones and modeling nuanced targeted
advertising that influences our decisions subliminally.
The
psychological tool in question here is applymagicsauce.com which uses
Natural Language Processing to determine personalities. It uses the
OCEAN model to classify our personalities and has its algorithm in open
source for exploitation by app developers.
If
you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science fiction world,
look at your cell phone. Cell phones really are great, and they can’t
work unless the cell phone companies know where you are, which means
they keep you under their surveillance.
Your cell phone
tracks where you live and where you work. It tracks where you like to
spend your weekends and evenings. It tracks how often you go to church
(and which church), how much time you spend in a bar, and whether you
speed when you drive.
It tracks since it knows about
all the other phones in your area whom you spend your days with, whom
you meet for lunch. Data about our phone calls, e-mails, and text
messages, plus all the webpages we read, our financial transaction data,
and much more.
Most of us don’t realise the degree to
which computers are integrated into everything we do. Most of us also
underestimate just how easy it has become to identify us using data that
we consider anonymous.
Corporations and governments
alike have an insatiable appetite for our data. Private companies now
control the social media platforms on the Internet where we gather, and
they’re mining the information we leave there for their own benefit.
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