You are being sold unknowingly.

Browsing Facebook, Instagram, scrolling up photos, watching YouTube videos, liking, commenting, reacting to different posts, has become favorite past-time of most of us nowadays. According to the latest Global-Web-Index Social Media Trends 2019 report, digital consumers spend nearly 2.5 hours a day on social networks and messaging.
This is an Internet era. A lot of ‘Data’ is being generated and processed every second. Your each& every activity on the internet is being monitored and stored in the form of data-sets. Our every single action is logged and monitored by sites and platform like Facebook. What we like, what we hate, which sort of post we engage, how we react; every, everything. You’d have possibly noticed sometime when you see an ad popping in on your Facebook of exactly those shoes, bag or mobile which you were browsing on Flipkart or Amazon or any browser. This is Artificial Intelligence. Sites exchange the data and remind you to shop for that through the news feed. This is generally to serve the user in a better way. Every platform is trying to improve the user experience with AI. But, this is not the full story. There’s another side of the coin as well which many of us do not know exactly. Let’s understand what it is.

The generated data-sets aren’t only getting used to improve user experience but also to influence the thinking of the user through the targeted posts and messages. Indeed, you read the right. You’ve been presented with the personalized content which is based on your profile to form an impact on your thoughts in such a way that you begin thinking that way. There are many forms of such content. It might be a product to buy or a political post, maybe any history-related information or a Fake-News video. This is widely used by ideological groups these days to spread their content and fake news. You should think about what I am talking about. Here is the reference to this article.

You may have heard about the Facebook Data Leak scandal. Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company that worked for the Trump campaign, mined raw data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles for the campaign. Here is the very simple diagram used by Alvin Chang, Senior Columnist at VOX in his blog, for your better understanding.

[PC- Alvin Chang, VOX]

This was done through the SCL group, a British PR firm that does work for governments, politicians, and militaries worldwide. Cambridge Analytica purchased Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans without their knowledge to build a ‘psychological warfare tool’ which it unleashed on US voters to help elect Donald Trump as president.

[Whistleblower Christopher Wylie]

Academic Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research created an application called ‘thisisyoourdigitallife’ in 2014. Users were paid to take a psychological test and the app collected the data. Additionally, it gathered data on a person’s Facebook friends, according to reports. In this way, 50 million Facebook profiles were mined and the data was imparted with Cambridge Analytica which then built a software solution to help influence choices in elections. Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower has uncovered this scandal in 2018 and people knew how it ended with the appointment of Donald Trump.

[Mark Zuckerberg at US Congress, PC: CNBC]

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before the US Congress in the wake up of this privacy scandal. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said in his issued statement later. He had made numerous promises after this Data-Breach story broke in 2018. But, they have our behavioral data, there are chances of another act like this in the future, who knows.

Data has become one of the greatest assets nowadays. Mine, your own personal data. And we don’t even know what happens to that in the back-stage. There has been numerous amount of scams, Scandal I’ll rather say, has happened in the past. The Misuse of the data was the main input to those.

Now the question arises if this can happen in a country like the USA, can’t it happen in India? The answer is Yes, why not. It may be ongoing already, who knows until the story breaks up. What we need to do if this is the darker side of today’s data-driven world. I’ll strongly suggest not interacting or share any data with third-party applications, surveys on the social-media. But, there will always be some pros and cons of technology. No doubt these giants are working very hard on the Data-Privacy and trying to make it more secure. In any case, humans are there who have the steering. Boycotting technology will never be an option. If it is like that, there is no meaning to these technological advancements. However, it’s absolutely upon us to which level we are engaged to it. Are we verifying the content or blindly believing on it, the question needs to be asked to ourselves.

I don’t want to make this much longer but if you are more curious to know how the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook Data Scandal was shaped, a Netflix documentary ‘The Great Hack’ can be the must-watch on the upcoming weekend.

I’m open to accept your hello and would love to hear your feedback and viewpoints in the comment section.

Stay Healthy, Stay Connected.

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References:

nytimes.com, vox.com, cnbc.com, theguardian.com, Netflix