Monday, March 19, 2018

Digital Data and The Donald

Until this past week, few people knew who Cambridge Analytica was or what work the company did. Founded in 2013, Cambridge Analytica is a data company that offers service to change customer behavior. Their primary customers - and the ones that have gotten them in the news recently - have been political parties, and they claim to take huge amounts of consumer data and combine it with behavioral science to identify individuals organizations can target with marketing material. The main place they retrieve this data? Social media networks. And the main prize? Facebook.

Late last week, Facebook made an announcement last Friday that they were suspending the company from their platform after two major investigative stories were released that claimed over 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by the company. And that data was used to build a program designed to influence Americans casting their ballots.

What does this have to do with President Trump? Cambridge Analytica was funded - over $15 million - by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon oversaw the board until 2016, and the company worked on the Trump campaign. The problem with some of the data harvested is that it was done, supposedly, illegally.

Harvesting data is nothing new, and utilization of this data to influence is also not new. And personally, I doubt this online campaign had more influence than others. But the issue that stands is that when other campaigns, such as President Obama's for example, utilized similar data, it was known to the user that it was being gathered. And that's a huge difference.

Going forward, how is Facebook going to ensure it protects the personal information of its users? I firmly believe that we should continue to use information available to influence... but those participating need to know that they are giving up the information.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/what-is-cambridge-analytica-and-who-is-christopher-wylie.html

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