This week was a huge week for both Facebook and a certain company called Cambridge Analytica.
Now if you've heard of that company before it's because during the 2016 US presidential
election they are the company that helped out with the social media end of the Trump
campaign. But it was revealed this week that they had a whole bunch of access to data
that maybe they shouldn't have. Now to explain exactly what that means for you and your data,
our panel this week is Matt Hopkins the technology editor of Pedestrian.TV and Claire Reilly from the
technology website CNET. Now Claire, break it down for me what does it mean that this company
had all this access and why exactly are people so upset?
This week we learnt that that nifty little app 'This is Your Digital Life' was actually mining swathes of data from you so it was an app that
was set up a couple of years ago by a researcher at Cambridge and it was a sort of a personality
profiling app and you just gave innocent little details about your deepest, darkest desires and fears
and expected it to go nowhere. Except it didn't go nowhere, the researcher passed it on to a
company called Cambridge Analytica and this is at a time when Facebook had settings that allowed me
to share information about my friends even if they didn't know it. So about a quarter of a million
people used this app and then Cambridge Analytica was able to glean a lot of really personal data
from about 50 million Facebook users and turn it into a profiling tool to say alright if you like
this kind of thing you're more likely to vote this way, if you like Kim Kardashian you're more likely
to vote for a libertarian, whatever the case may be.
Sure, why not. That makes sense. And so why is this actually bad?
There's two sides of the story, one saying that the way that the data was
gathered was not exactly above board, which I think there's two sides to that because Facebook
have come out and said the way that they did do it was was kind of okay but when that was passed on
to Cambridge Analytica for commercial use that's when it became dodgy.
Let's just start with the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign. Has there been anything new that
has come out of that relationship out of those revelations this week, Claire?
Well we know that Steven Bannon who is the chief strategist for the Trump campaign before being fired last
year - so many people have been fired - he was I think vice president of Cambridge Analytica (he's
on the board I think yeah) so he was saying well you know what I got this cheeky side interest
that's actually really good at profiling people so they were taking information we're exactly right
like the information was offered up by users voluntarily but the app creator then passed it
on it in a way that defied Facebook's Terms of Service. Obviously there's the whole Facebook
washing its hands 'well we didn't expect it to get this far you know' they are collecting this
kind of information and making that sort of login through Facebook app availability really easy for
app developers, so I think when people sign up for Facebook and they take a personality quiz
they don't expect that that is information that's then going to turn into a huge profiling tool that
is used by the Trump campaign to then do things really basic like okay how people going to vote,
where should we draw the line on certain issues, how should we adjust our campaign speeches based
on the profiling of the US public.
Everything you're describing sounds like the entire basis
of Facebook's advertising model. (Yes) So why is it not okay for Cambridge Analytica to use that data
but it is okay for Facebook to use their data to sell me so many shoes I don't need?
Because you signed up to Facebook and you agreed to share all that information with Facebook but you didn't
necessarily agree to share it with Cambridge Analytica and the big problem here is a lot
of people don't realize that when you sign up with an external third-party app you are sharing
that information and they get all of your Facebook information.
Matt we've started to say in the last couple of days quite a big movement of people wanting to delete Facebook.
I think every news outlet under the sun has written a 'how to delete your Facebook account' article. What is the likely
impact going to be on Facebook itself here do you think in the next couple of months?
Well, they've already I mean Mark Zuckerberg has lost I think was 9 billion dollars off his wealth.
The reality is people are still going to keep using it, people are still going to keep falling into the
same traps until something, I don't know whether there will be a point where something really big
needs to happen for people to wake up.
That's the problem. I don't think people want to so we can be
outraged and this is going to be a cycle that, it feels like a particularly deep outrage cycle, but
we've seen this happen before when we found out certain apps weren't encrypted and so our messages
could be easily read or we find out that Instagram is targeting ads to us or we find out that Twitter
works in a certain way and we get outraged but these tech companies are so baked into our lives
that it's very difficult to remove yourself and a lot of people don't want to, you know? I was
chatting to a producer this morning I'll lose my event invitations. I'll lose my ability to share
stuff with friends I don't want that. The problem is we got the fun parts of Facebook and all of the good
stuff before we realized its downsides and I think a lot of people don't want to get rid of the good stuff.
And Facebook knew about this for a while didn't they?
There are reports that they knew
for about two years and they didn't do anything, allegedly.
Why would they have done nothing?
If they call out hold on everyone I don't know if you knew this but this company is able to build up a
really accurate profile of you, shock and horror, be terrified, then suddenly they're telling their own
customers or users or "product" that they should be terrified of the way Facebook is targeting
ads, so I see there's a lot of vested interests in Facebook staying quiet about how its whole system
is built up and they don't want to lose users, they don't want to lose a massive valuation
of their stock dropping away, you know. It's the move fast and break things and just constantly
evolve and constantly get better and don't worry about those things that are in the past because we've
changed our privacy settings, that's not a feature anymore, it's okay, it's okay.
There is heaps more of this in the podcast of Download This Show. Yeah it's a podcast that's why we call it Download
This Show. You can find it in all of the good podcasting apps and some of the bad ones too.