The scandal in which Cambridge Analytica gathered data from millions of Facebook users to build and target advertising for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has reasoned broad outrage.
Cambridge Analytica did not create this crisis on its own. As I argue in my forthcoming book, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America,” big corporations like Facebook and political interest, in this case, right-wing parties and campaigns but also ordinary Americans all had an equal part in it. The mystery of aggregate data Businesses and governments have led the way for the destined purposes.
Police forces and national security analysts collected fingerprints and other data in the name of social control. Today, they employ some of the same methods of making ever-tighter nets of detection as commercial data miners to profile criminals or terrorists do always. State-of-the-art public safety tools include access to social media accounts, online photographs, Geo-location information and cell tower data. Probing the personal, they identified effective ways to reach specific customers and voters – and often, to influence their behaviors.
E-Z Passes, Fit-bits or Instagram posts, opens the proof that the Facebook scandal bloomed from a personality test app, “This is your digital life.” For decades, human relations departments and popular magazines have urged Americans to yield private details, and harness the power of aggregate data, to better understand them. But in most situations, people weren’t consciously trading privacy for that knowledge. Individual responses from 270,000 people on this particular test became a gateway to more data, including that belonging to another 87 million of their friends.
Today, data mining corporations, political operatives and others seek data everywhere, hoping to turn that information to their own advantage. As Cambridge Analytica’s actions revealed, those groups will use data for startling purposes – such as targeting very specific groups of voters with highly customized messages – even if it means violating the policies and professed intentions of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.
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