Facebook Scandal Explained in 4 minutes with a presentation. If you don't know about the recent Facebook's Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal, then you should watch this video.
Transcript:
Here we’re going to see how a single person mined the Facebook data and how the data been used in several campaigns.
All it started in 2014 by a person called Aleksandr Kogan who is an academic psychologist and data scientist, based at the University of Cambridge. He launched a Facebook App called ‘ThisIsMyDigitalLife’ which is a personality quiz application. As the sources stated that he paid around $3 to $5 to each person who downloads and install the application on their Facebook profile to take the quiz. Almost 2.7 million people downloaded this app and gave permission to the application from their personal Facebook profile to access the sensitive information like your biodata, status messages, pages that you like, interests, app data, some private chats, check-ins, emails, followers, groups you follow, location, political views, religious views etc.
But, it doesn’t end here. He used this 2.7 million profiles as a loophole to gain access to their friend's profiles too. That’s huge. Right!
Let’s say, I have around 1000 friends and I installed the application called ‘ThisIsMyDigitalLife’ and gave access to read my profile. He then scrapes the data of my friends through my profile by the API of Facebook. Actually, he didn’t violate the Facebook policies; he just took advantage of the loophole that Facebook has with their API key.
So what’s next.
He then sold the scraped data to a Cambridge Analytica which is a British political consulting firm which combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process.
What they did is, they took all the data and developed an Artificial Intelligence algorithm to analyze the person based on the interests, political views, religious views, what not, with everything that they have.
So, You may have this question like How do they do that?
Let me tell you with an example.
Let’s say; you are very much interested in Cats. You like every Cat, Kitten related pages and you regularly post your pet pictures on Facebook and you talk a lot about Cats.
With Cambridge Analytica AI algorithm, it combines all the data together and concludes that you are the Cat interested person.
Like the same, If a profile has an Interest on Dogs and he does also talk about Cats in their status messages, so then the AI combines the data together and concludes that this person is interested in both Cats and Dogs.
And finally, let’s assume that around 10 million people were interested in Cats then they will launch a campaign with the data they got with AI and If it is a political campaign, they will shoot an Advertisement like, ‘If I get into Power, I will do a Cat rescue campaign’ something like that. As they are precisely targeting, more people will surely influence with the Advertisement they see. Result! They win!
According to the sources, about 50 million users data was mined already by that time and with the recent Mark Zuckerberg interview with CNN, he said they are still investigating the issue.
The fact is, by the time you come online, the information you share is one-way. If you update the profile picture and later decided to take it down, already many of your friends see that. You have nothing to do. They know you already with the previous profile picture. All you can do is to stay private and understand the necessary privacy things before accessing the certain websites or application.
And to my surprise, Facebook stored all my phonebook contacts right from the day I created my profile. Of course, not only mine but yours too. I will tell you about it in my next video.
So, what do you do now? Do you delete your Facebook profile? Let me know in the comment section down below.
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