Difference between revisions of "Cambridge Analytica"

Revision as of 20:35, 17 April 2019

Cambridge Analytica (CA), which started in 2013 and consequently closed in 2018, was a political consulting firm specializing in strategic data analysis techniques used to influence the behavior of targeted audiences. By combining extensive personal consumer data records with human behavioral methods, CA offered extremely valuable data to their prospective clients, businesses and political campaigns looking to utilize customized microtargeting.^[1] Microtargeting is a marketing term that leverages a consumer's demographic and behavioral data to drive strategy. Most notably, Cambridge Analytica is known for their association to President Trump’s 2016 campaign and invasion of personal privacy through their exploitation of Facebook’s platform. Nearly 87 million users of social media giant, Facebook, had their personal data exposed and sold to CA - the consulting firm hired by the Trump campaign.^[2] Since March of 2018, when the news of CA’s dealings and practices first broke, there has been a drastic increase in mention of online data privacy and security, questions surrounding such ethics, and how our personal data is being accessed and used to influence our behaviors and actions.

Origin & Timeline

Connection to SCL

In 2005, the Strategic Communication Laboratories Group (SCL), was founded by Nigel Oakes. Oakes, with his significant background in human behavioral studies, sought to create a means of manipulating personal behavior aimed at influencing the results of political campaigns. SCL group served as the parent company to Cambridge Analytica, performing data mining and analysis on its audience, in order to generate communications to target key audience groups according to client-specific goals. The company described itself as a "global election management agency." After success in the advertising space, SCL expanded into military and political industries, with intent to approximate the "thinking" of their "target audience." SCL influenced many elections across many countries, and fomented coups around the world, while claiming that their methodologies were approved by the Government of the United Kingdom and the US government. The purpose of forming Cambridge Analytica was specifically in order to influence the election process in the United States, and the group successfully participated in 44 U.S. congressional, U.S. Senate, and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections. In addition, CA's support of Ted Cruz, funded by hedge-fund billionaire, Robert Mercer and Donald Trump, is widely documented.

Cambridge Analytica Founding

In mid 2013, Christopher Wylie, who would become one of CA’s co-founders, was investigating the British Liberal Democratic party and the lack of election success among their party’s candidates. After some research, Wylie decided to look into using humans’ personality traits as tools for influencing their voting behaviors. Soon after, Wylie was introduced to Alexander Nix, the current CEO of SCL Elections - which morphed into Cambridge Analytica. Later that very year, after hearing about SCL’s (and CA’s) powerful methods, Steve Bannon, a senior strategist to Trump, partnered with Robert Mercer, an elite Republican donor, and his daughter Rebekah, reached out to Nix and Wylie to propose their idea of hiring CA to aid in Trump’s campaign efforts through exploiting personal data through Facebook applications. That summer, Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher behind developing these applications to obtain Facebook users’ personal data, entered into a deal with SCL group. Seeing the potential for success, Bannon and the Mercers invested millions. Later than year, Wylie decided to leave Cambridge Analytica. In the beginning of 2016, Nix reported that CA was responsible for Ted Cruz’ Iowa primary victory against Trump. That summer, the Trump campaign hired CA.^[3]

In March of 2018, Wylie became a whistleblower against his former company, and spoke out against what he admitted was the unethical and wrongful invasion of privacy and personal data used by CA to help the Trump presidential campaign. Now, cue the backlash against CA, Facebook, and the widespread news coverage and debates surrounding personal privacy and data ethics and their connection through this political campaign.^[2]

Although Cambridge Analytica shut down after the news broke of their illegal actions, it doesn’t seem that Trump’s campaign has lost contact with them. An Associated Press article from June of this past summer broke the news that a new “data and behavioral science company” is teaming up with the Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. That new company, Data Propia, is being run by former employees of Cambridge Analytica.^[3]

The Facebook App & How the Data was Obtained

Facebook, like the majority of large, data-driven organizations, has supplementary software infrastructure known as an application programming interface, referred to colloquially as an API. Within the context of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's API and consequent definitions and communication protocols allow for third parties like Kogan to interact with Facebook's databases or users. Having formal APIs is a standard practice and helps organizations prescribe an expected behavior protocol for other organizations.There are many different types of APIs, including those that interact with operating systems, libraries and frameworks, remote APIs, and Web APIs. Facebook's API falls under the category of Web APIs, as it serves as an architectural approach to define interfaces and resulting interactions that occur between Facebook and other enterprises that serve different types of consumers.^[4]

Kogan’s application resulted in nearly 87 million Facebook users’ personal data being obtained. The application, “This Is Your Digital Life”, once granted third party permissions, commonplace of almost all apps, was able to acquire not only the user’s data who approved the app, but that of all of their friends on the platform.^[4] Thus, thanks to this costly bug in Facebook’s backend, although “only” 270,000 unique users granted access to the application, nearly 87 million users were affected. After collecting this data, about 99% of which contained data of users who didn’t even grant access to the app, Kogan sold it to Cambridge Analytica, directing violating Facebook’s terms & conditions.^[4]

The goal behind the quiz-like application was to create a physiographic sketch of each user’s personal data. Some of the information that was obtained included a person’s birthday, page likes, hometown location, and in some cases, even access to a user’s personal messages and timeline. All of these traits and data were combined by CA to curate a unique profile for each user and, accordingly, target them with specific advertisements to influence their opinions and voting behavior.

Importance & Implications

Cambridge Analytica’s use of Kogan’s application and exploitation of personal privacy through Facebook has stimulated the conversion how our data is being accessed, revealed various consequences that may ensue, and brought to light the unethical practices being taken to manipulate public opinion and influence human behaviors. Social media platforms, consulting firms, and now politicians, were now being criticized and taken more seriously for the ethical standards they may have not been meeting or data collection methods they may not have been transparent enough about.

The primary concern among the public involved how and why their data was being obtained and the need for more transparency by the platforms being granted access to such data. Everyone has a right to personal privacy and protection online, and personal data was being used in a plethora of ways unbeknownst to the source of said data. Not only was it being collected, which was not nearly as transparent as it should have been, but the data was being used in correlation with bots and algorithms as a means to retarget the user and influence their personal voting behavior.

Ethical Dilemmas & Consequences

As technology and the internet increase in their pervasiveness or modern society, users are providing, most of the time, without even knowing, unbelievable amounts of private, personal details. Online advertising and retargeting have proven to be some of the most effective means of marketing to a desired demographic of subset. The CA scandal has exposed the reality that political campaigns are changing with the times, and are now taking advantage of very similar techniques and strategies to influence a user’s behavior and actions they take.

Cheating

One can also find that new technologies like this are extremely vulnerable to manipulation. Mia Consalvo conducted an analysis of those who cheat in multiplayer video games and found people will exploit many points of vulnerability like social engineering, creating hacks, exploiting a bug in the implementation, or creating bots^[5]. Her piece gives a sense of the levels people will go to in order to manipulate a system, and in this case just video games. If one was to extend this idea to much broader and more essential technologies, like the data held by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the consequences become far more serious. This manipulation of Cambridge offers a much more pressing role for politicians and lawmakers to take when designing regulations for these technologies that control such vital and important data. Everyone who engages online has a curated profile comprised of their personal interests, hobbies, and basic personal data, at least. Clearly, politicians have finally realized that election campaigns could benefit largely from modernizing and using technological resources to customize and optimize their campaign efforts, just like online companies have been doing for years through digital marketing tactics. It is this type of manipulation when expanded from video games to national elections, where the practical consequences of cheating are seen.

Transparency

This scandal has awoken the public to the lack of transparency, how easy so much of their information is being exposed to, and accessed by the everyday services they interact with. Floridi and Turilli’s “The ethics of information transparency” offers a unique perspective on the transparency enabling or impairing ethics, and when applied to Cambridge Analytica one can see that the transparency that is not offered only served to impair values like accountability, privacy, and welfare^[6]. In many cases too, this data is being sold to firms, organizations, and politicians in an effort to manipulate the subject’s behaviors and influence their personal actions. This case has opened the ethical questions of how companies should disclose what data they are collecting and how it is going to be used.

Privacy

Data mining and data laundering present serious threats to our personal privacy. Namely, the patterning process of aggregated personal data produced through data mining is part of someone's personal identity, therefore becoming a real threat to their private data and personal privacy. In Professor Conway's lecture on February 14th, 2019, he made use of an important quote which read, “Breaches of informational privacy take away a key element of self-determination” – the ability to expose details of my identity as I see fit.”^[7] This definitely applies to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and proves that we really only have a degree of personal privacy when we have individual control over such data. Data mining in this case was used with clearly evil intentions to influence the outcome of a presidential election.

Privacy in Public

Numerous questions regarding how individual's information that has been publicly been made available should be treated have risen following the Cambridge Analytica event. In general, we define privacy as being any infringement on people's personal lives, however the ethics of how the information we chose post to websites such as Facebook should be made available remains unclear. ^[8] Many proponents of personal data distribution argue that by making one's information publicly available, one is forfeiting their ownership over that data to the hands of the platforms and corporations who they have chosen to provide it to. ^[9] The debate of who may take ownership of this data and how can be shared among different parties continues to be disputed.

References

1. ↑ Cambridge Analytica. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} Chang, A. (2018, May 02). The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, explained with a simple diagram. Retrieved March 11, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-diagram
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} Lewis, P., & Hilder, P. (2018, March 23). Leaked: Cambridge Analytica's blueprint for Trump victory. Retrieved March 12, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1 4.2} Kang, C., & Frenkel, S. (2018, April 04). Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of Up to 87 Million Users. Retrieved March 11, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/mark-zuckerberg-testify-congress.html
5. ↑ Consalvo, Mia. “Cheaters.” Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, by Mia Consalvo, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 107–128.
6. ↑ Turilli, Matteo, and Luciano Floridi. “The Ethics of Information Transparency.” SpringerLink, Springer Netherlands, 10 Mar. 2009, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-009-9187-9.
7. ↑ Conway, P. (2019, February 14). Cambridge Analytica and Personal Data Aggregation: A case study. Lecture presented at Week 5b Lecture Presentation in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
8. ↑ Patton, Jason W. "Protecting privacy in public? Surveillance technologies and the value of public places" Ethics and Information technology 10.3 (2000)2:81-187
9. ↑ Floridi, Luciano "The Fourth Revolution" Ethics and Information technology 5, Privacy