Society (The US in particular) needs data privacy legislation

 

Unlike Europe’s GDPR, the United States has no general data privacy or ownership legislation. Organizations are subject to the privacy rights afforded to us by the constitution and whatever state/local laws hold sway in their area. Data has become the greatest commodity in the world, overtaking oil. As technology develops more uses for data, it will only grow more valuable. Currently, users are being taken advantage of as tech companies appropriate users’ data and its value. 

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The Great Hack goes in depth on the implications of data rights. Without them, any website that tracks users can sell that information and the uses of this data involves manipulating said user. Sites such as Google and Facebook base their entire business model on collecting and selling as much information as possible. The ability to mass manipulate people can have catastrophic consequences. As shown in the film, with just facebook data and targeted advertisements, Cambridge Analytica was able to alter the course of the democratic process.

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Owning one's data is unlike owning something material. Similar to intellectual property, owning your data is really the ability to control who knows your data. Further, once your data has been leaked, sold, published, etc, it is impossible to get back. David Caroll’s lawsuit showed that once someone has your data, they can do whatever they want and it is very difficult to hold them accountable. Many of the events of this movie could not have taken place if individuals had ownership of their data. Facebook’s business model is selling advertisements and their user’s information. The Cambridge Analytica “Hack” would have been prevented if Facebook was required to properly dispose of and secure their user’s data.

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[1] Stephen P. Mulligan et al, Data Protection Law: An Overview(Congressional Research Service, 2019, accessed on 4/22/2021 from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45631.pdf

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The Impact of Social Media on the Democratic procedure

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The internet has introduced a new age of information for everyone with access. Social Media(SM) platforms provide all people with a voice on the internet, where they can convey their opinions and concerns. However, SM can also be a valuable tool for manipulation and misinformation. One of the main issues is that SM can be used to target individuals based on their personality and political views. The targets are typically attempting to convince the individual to accomplish something. Typically, this tactic is used by corporations to convince specific susceptible people to purchase their product. However, a much more threatening use is to target individuals based on political views, in an attempt to convince the person to vote for a specific candidate. This strategy is dangerous, especially during election years, because it can ruin the democratic process, swaying an election [1]. Many major leaders in technology have advocated for a series of reforms by the government to prevent such manipulation. One advocate to note is facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has repeatedly called on the U.S. government to regulate election manipulation through social media [1]. For example, bot accounts are often used to flood social media networks with spam and fake news. They can also amplify a candidate's popularity by inflating the number of likes, shares, and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of momentum in the election, convincing others this candidate will win [2]. One case study is the 2016 election, and two recent studies commissioned by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee details Russian misinformation campaigns targeting hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens, possibly influencing opinions and voter turnout [1]. The film “The Great Hack” highlights these concerns with social media usage and advocates for some regulations and protections for citizens. Overall, the movie claims that while no protections are instituted the very essence of democracy is at risk due to misinformation and manipulation.

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[1] Aral, S., & Eckles, D. (2019). Protecting elections from social media manipulation. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 365(6456), 858–861. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw8243

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[2] Bradshaw, S., & Howard, P. (2017). Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation (Vol. 2017.12, pp. 1–37). Oxford Internet Institute.

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Work and Wealth at the Cost of Professional Ethics

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In a capitalist society, money is highly valued by many people. Sometimes it even holds precedence over one’s own morals. The Great Hack centers around Brittany Kaiser, who was the Cambridge Analytica Director of Program of Development from 2014 to 2018 and the Business Developer Director from 2017 to 2018 [2]. Kaiser had the responsibility of creating pitches for possible clients and was close with Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix. Looking at Kaiser’s previous jobs, such as working on the Obama campaign, and her political views, it is confusing why she joined a company that worked for Trump’s presidential campaign. In the documentary, Kaiser says that when Nix asked her to join Cambridge Analytica, she and her family were struggling financially. A well-paid job at a company that didn’t align with her political values seemed better at the time than the previously lower-salary jobs she had. Kaiser is one of many in the millennial generation who has valued money over morals for a job. Research done by Triplebyte found that “70% of those [millennials] who get two job offers choose the highest paying one” [1]. A survey done by Deloitte found that “63% of millennials consider the financial reward a very important factor in weighing up a job offer - the highest-ranking one” [1]. Capitalist society has ingrained in our brains that money is the most important thing, and it is needed to survive, so people are willing to compromise their values to earn enough money to provide for themselves and their families. Brittany Kaiser is a great example of this since she had to disassociate her political values from her professional life in order to make enough money. Companies like Cambridge Analytica can take advantage of this mindset by offering high enough salaries to get people to work for their controversial ideas and projects.

 

[1] José Luis Peñarredonda, Are we too broke to stick to our principles?, (BBC, Oct 19, 2018) https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181019-why-were-too-broke-to-stick-with-our-principles (Accessed April 28, 2021)

 

[2] Brittany Kaiser, Home [LinkedIn page]. LinkedIn. Accessed April 28, 2021, from https://www.linkedin.com/in/ownyourdata

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Giving More Importance to "Persuadables" for the Election

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Kaiser explains how Cambridge Analytics wouldn’t target all voters with their data during the election. They would only target people they believe they could persuade, which they conveniently call “persuadables.” The persuadables that mattered were in swing states. They would break these states into precincts. Kaiser explained that if they target enough persuadable people in the right precincts, the states they were in would change red instead of blue. The Cambridge Analytica team would design personalized content to trigger those individuals and bombard them with different content until they saw the world they wanted to. Ultimately, until they voted for their candidate. A study showed that  in the Netherlands, nearly half of the tweets for their election during the campaign period were aimed to convince others to either vote or not vote for a certain party or groups of parties [1]. Content analysis of these tweets have informed us that Twitter has become a network medium to promote parties by either directly or indirectly posting explicit suggestions for whom to vote or by sharing their own intentions, respectively.

 

Candidates have always campaigned for themselves and have a team to design strategies to influence voters to vote for them. However, with today’s technology, candidates are able to use companies to campaign on a much larger scale. People believe that they are in control of the content they see and their views, but there are many processes that are happening that are invisible to the average consumer. Their data is being collected and analyzed by companies so they have the power to control their content and view, which and in turn control a whole country.

 

[1] Chitan Amrit, et al., “How Do Online Citizens Persuade Fellow Voters? Using Twitter During the 2012 Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign” (Sage, November 11, 2014), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0894439314558200 (April 28, 2021)

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Social Media Use and Awareness of Information Misuse

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Individuals that grew up with social media are less aware of how information can be taken advantage of on the internet. Adolescence is an important period of rapid development, and too few people are taking notice of how teenagers’ use of technology is affecting them and in turn, affecting our whole society. 75% of teenagers report having at least one active social media profile. Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past. Generally speaking, older teen social media users are more likely to share certain types of information on the profile they are most active on compared to younger teens. 16% of teens social media users have set up their profile to automatically include their location in posts. This shows that the use of social media among teens has set a precedent of sharing a large amount of private information about yourself on the internet. The use of social media has completely changed the aspect of socializing and making new friends. Before social media, socializing didn’t collect and save personal information about people. The use of social media created the normalization among the future generations of using the internet to communicate. This poses a risk to every user’s privacy because using the internet to communicate allows the collection of private information. 

 

[1] Mary Madden, “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy”, August 17, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/teens-social-media-and-privacy/ (April 27, 2021)