Hello YouTube.
This is Praveen for TechEmpty.
Here in this video, I will be telling you about the Facebook data leak by a person called
Aleksandr Kogan and by a company called Cambridge Analytica.
And please hit the like button and subscribe to this channel if you find this video useful.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
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.
That’s it for this quick video.
I hope you find this video useful.
If you do, please hit the like button and consider sharing this video with your friends.
Also, don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more awesome videos.
Your contribution is more to us.
This is Praveen signing off.
I hope to see you in my next video.
Thank you!