Remember the last time you downloaded a phone application or created a new account on a website? Often it is too time consuming to sort through old emails, attempting to remember their passwords and then waiting to receive an email for verification. So instead, we click that blue button spelling out “Sign in with Facebook.” Seconds later, the app is signed in with seemingly no harm committed.
Often overlooked are the profile permissions given away with that single tap. These most commonly include information such as a user’s name, profile picture, age, gender, and other public info. The part to pay attention to is “other public info.” This includes, but is not limited to, information such as the pages and interests one “Likes” or “Follows.” Some applications will even go as far as accessing a user’s friends list.
In 2015, The Guardian informed Facebook that they had obtained evidence that a personality quiz app on Facebook was selling information obtained from at least 270,000 users. The now-defunct app, called “This is Your Digital Life,” gained access to a user’s interests, as well as their friends list, through seemingly innocent user-granted permissions. One of the data firms that bought this information was Cambridge Analytica. At the time, Facebook banned the app and requested that Cambridge Analytica sign a legal certification guaranteeing that they had deleted the data they had purchased. It has now been determined that they potentially did not delete this data and have continued to purchase other data, which has given them access to an estimated 87 million users.
Facebook has 1.8 billion monthly active users worldwide and despite only being used by 270,000 users, which is less than one-tenth of one percent of their total users, I was affected. However, I wasn’t affected because I used the app myself; rather, I was affected due to someone on my friends list using the app. What many people do not realize is that when access to your friends list is granted to apps, access to your friends’ public data is also provided.
By using the data to understand “Likes,” the data could target you with political ads. According to The Verge, this is known as “psychographic profiling.” At the Online Marketing Rockstars festival, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix said that, “We were able to use data to identify that there was [sic] very large quantities of persuadable voters there that could be influenced to vote for the Trump campaign.” An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, a popular news program in the United Kingdom, discovered the ways in which Cambridge Analytica uses this data.
During their investigation, someone posing as a potential client for Cambridge Analytica spoke with both the firm’s chief data officer, Dr. Alex Tayler, and its managing director, Mark Turnbull, in an undercover sting to see what information could be revealed. When asked about how Cambridge Analytica could help get candidates in Sri Lanka elected, Dr. Alex Tayler responded, “If you’re collecting data on people and you’re profiling them, that gives you more insight that you can use to know how to segment the population to give them messaging about issues they care about and language, and imagery that they’re likely to engage with, and we use that in America, and we use that in Africa, that’s what we do as a company.” Mark Turnbull agreed with his colleague, stating, “We’ve done it in Mexico, we’ve done it in Malaysia, and we’re now moving in to Brazil and Australia, China.” He then went on to say, “It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it’s all about emotion.”
Smaller countries can be particularly susceptible to influence. For instance, many users in developing countries gain their internet access from Free Basics, a partnership created by Facebook and other technology companies. Facebook is one of the limited number of websites they can access. Therefore, many of these individuals obtain their news from Facebook. Kenya is a perfect example of how Cambridge Analytica’s tactics can, at the very least, sway how the public views a particular party or candidate. Speaking on the firm’s influences during Channel 4’s sting, Turnbull seemingly revealed that the firm spearheaded current Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s respective campaigns in 2013 and 2017, who won both bids. Turnbull remarked, “We have rebranded the entire party [Kenyatta belongs to] twice, written the manifesto, done research, analysis, messaging…. I think we wrote all the speeches and we staged the whole thing – so just about every element of this candidate.”
Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in a two-day hearing. The hearings came about after lawmakers voiced their concerns that Facebook had now reached the scale with which it is unable to regulate itself properly. In an interview with CNN, Zuckerberg stated that Facebook will create a tool so that users can check to see if they were targeted by ads. Zuckerberg has also stated that Facebook will be performing an investigative forensic audit of app developers to determine how they are using data. Facebook has begun to implement tools of artificial intelligence to track and detect “bots” before they are able to be seen by users. They have also begun to change the layout and controls of the privacy settings on Facebook.
Many Facebook users have debated whether or not they should delete their account. However, deleting your account will not remove the access that permission-granted apps have to your account. To accomplish this, users need to go under their account settings, to the section called “Apps and Websites,” then click “Turn Off” under the subsection titled “Apps, Websites, and Games.” This will prevent you from signing into apps via your Facebook account and prevent them from further accessing your data.