The Facebook Scandal

The most recent Facebook scandal has rocked the company to its core. In January Facebook released that the number of daily active users dropped from 185 million to 184 million -- although small, it is the first quarterly drop in company history. They are losing users, so they need to recover. What do they do? They leak user data.

The ironic aspect of this case is that it is not entirely about Facebook, and not entirely about leaking data. This case is about a company called Cambridge Analytica and the fact that the data was implemented to help Trump win the election.

This all started way back in 2014. Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at Cambridge University (the company and university are not affiliated) already had access to six million Facebook profiles from the school's research center. He approached Cambridge Analytica, a major data collection company focused on politics and attempted to create a relationship with them, but he was denied. Instead of conceding, Kogan alongside Joseph Chancellor, who once was a professor in the same department and now works at Facebook, created the company known as Global Science Research later that year. The focus of this company was to create a database that could be sold to companies such as Cambridge Analytica and would consist of Facebook profiles which would then be able to help target ads and influence people’s opinions.

In order to collect this data, he utilized a tool called Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk. Kogan signed into this website with his Amazon account as a “requester” and published a survey for people to complete, and a button to link their Facebook account. People around the country could then log into this website as a “worker” and complete this survey in exchange for money.

By accessing the Facebook accounts, Global Science Research was able to see way too much information from gathering the Facebook accounts. In the description, it said that it was collecting “some demographic data, your likes, your friends’ list, whether your friends know one another, and some of your private messages.” This violated Amazon’s regulations, yet Amazon continued to allow this survey to operate for more than a year after all of the complaints. Kogan was able to avoid protective measures originally since he was collecting the data for “academic” purposes due to his position at Cambridge University. But after he began collecting for the company, it was categorized as, “commercial” which is definitely not allowed. The only restrictions he faced, however, was that he had to write a legal letter to the University promising not to include any of the six million profiles in the University database for his company. He was able to collect over fifty million user profiles with this strategy.

Kogan was then able to sell the 50 million or so profiles to Cambridge Analytica for an incredible amount of $800,000 at $0.016 a profile, according to fastcompany.com. In December 2015, Kogan was banned from utilizing MTurk, but he continued to gather information on people from a Facebook application known as myPersonality.

Although Cambridge Analytica has claimed to not have included the Facebook profiles to help Trump in the election, it is still under review, and they have lied about many other claims, so their ethos is destroyed. Anyway, the implications of a scandal such as this one prove the prevalence of the importance of user data to companies and the quickly evolving advertisement world. Yes, Facebook allowed this to happen, but it was a combination of events and companies including Amazon and Cambridge University.

Since 2015, Facebook has begun to discontinue some of their services to further protect the users. They also had Cambridge Analytica to delete their databases, but just last month in March, Facebook realized that they did not delete it. Facebook never checked if they had complied.

We need to be more careful with our information. Whenever you fill out a survey, know who is going to be seeing it. Is it a company that you have researched and know how they will handle it? This scandal could have been avoided if people realized the unsafe origins of the surveys. With all of the data Cambridge Analytica has collected, they have Your data is important, please keep it safe.