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The Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data scandal


This is a famous quote given by Clive Humby, founder of Dunnhumby, a marketing analytics firm. When he was working on some data to provide insights to the firm he was working for, he realized that data can be as powerful a source as oil for business in coming future. And he was absolutely right. We can see nowadays how much Data Industry has grown. This is what we have witnessed in Facebook case.

Facebook has been all over the news due to Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign’s data firm, was involved in a data collection scheme. This allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the private information of over 50 million Facebook users. We discuss what you need to know about this recent scandal, and what it means for Facebook users

WHAT IS CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA?

Cambridge Analytica is a data firm that offers companies and political parties services to “change audience behavior”.  The purpose of CA is to come up with online political campaigns, reach out to potential voters online and it does this by combining data from multiple sources including online information. It is also the firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign as well as with the Leave EU camp during Brexit.The firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements.
my personality
MyPersonality was the application Cambridge Analytica used to harvest the information. It was a popular Facebook personality quiz that could be used to build psychological profiles of the people who took the quiz, and, due to a loophole in Facebook API, allowed it to collect data from the Facebook “friends” of the quiz takers as well. 
Who is Christopher Wylie and what are his allegations?

Christopher Wylie is the co-founder and former research lead at Cambridge Analytica, who blew the whistle on CA's unethical activities. Speaking to The Guardian, Wylie said that the company exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles and used that to build models to target these same people. According to Wylie, Facebook suspended his account for his act of blowing the whistle on something that Facebook knew privately for about two years.
What's Facebook's response?


"People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked," said Facebook. On the topic of the data of friends also being compromised, Facebook's 'platform policy' allows only the collection of friends' data to improve the in-app user experience and this data is not meant to be sold outside.  For now, Facebook has suspended the accounts of Cambridge Analytica, Dr. Alexsandr Kogan, and Christopher Wylie, till further investigations.
How is it related to the Trump election campaign?
CA was hired by the Trump campaign to help with data crunching during the 2016 election season. CA guided Trump's campaign team on how best to target voters using ads or speeches or making the strategic campaign stops. While this may look like any other service persuading voters to vote for their party, according to Wiley what CA did was manipulating voters into voting for Trump
Who is Facebook answerable to now?
Facebook is already facing the music in the US with regards to the involvement of Russian entities in gaming Facebook's ad platform. This revelation can only make things worse for Facebook. Even though Facebook says that there isn't a data breach
Cambridge Analytica eyeing India
According to a report in Hindustan Times, the UK-based firm has its eyes on South-Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as they approach elections. The report states that CA and its India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) have reached out to Congress and BJP for a possible collaboration for the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Facebook Users
It certainly sparks a larger debate for Facebook’s 2.2 billion active users—how safe is their personal data? And how is it being used? Facebook allowed a third-party to implement an application for the sole purpose of gathering user’s data. Furthermore, Facebook has known about this issue for more than two years, and only now that it has been made public are they acknowledging their mistake. Facebook has publicly touted their ability to accurately profile voters using the information they give to the site.
What happens now?
 The extent of the data breach is still not fully known. Whether Facebook and Cambridge Analytica will take the legal route is something that only time will tell.As it is, Facebook and a lot of social media websites have been facing the music from governments especially in the US, the UK as well as the EU. This data breach will only strengthen the voices of critics who are asking for more regulation of social media.




















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