Information is powerful. Historically, empires with higher technological advancements were the ones who conquered. We live in a day and age where our information is like bacteria: scattered everywhere and ripe for cultivation. The people who reap our data operate in the shadows, as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
In that scandal, companies targeted voter biases using data aggregation, the gathering and summarizing of information for a specific purpose. The data were extrapolated from 270,000 people who downloaded an app designed by a Cambridge professor that gave permissions to access their information and that of their friends under the guise of academic use. In total, this scandal involved 50 million Facebook users, most of whom did not consent to the use of their information.
The data were then passed to the company, Cambridge Analytica, which used it to serve up highly personalized and curated political advertisements dictated by personality or by microtargeting.
Consent and transparency are at stake here. Consumers need a clear picture of what their data will be used for.
This information was acquired and misused through a completely legitimate route of data acquisition at the time. This scandal puts into question the restrictions that we have in place surrounding our data protection and look toward solutions for data misuse.
The European Union already has a robust data protection law in the pipeline called the General Data Protection Regulation that goes into effect on May 25, 2018. This insightful regulation essentially hands the control of data to the people by giving consumers more power to opt-out of directed marketing, giving consumers the right to retrieve their data and sell it, and prevents the collection of data from children under 16 years old without parental approval.
In order to give this law teeth, the European Union is fining violators of the law up to 4 percent of their annual revenue depending on the particular statute that they violate. For the tech behemoths that we know, this number could be in the billions of dollars.
This law is not solely directed toward the tech giants, but also the mixture of smaller ad companies that stalk people across the web.
This progressive regulation is empowering for European consumers because it gives them the wheels to the very lucrative car that is their data. The Honest Ads Act, a bill in the U.S. Congress that seeks information disclosure about the purchasing of ads on social media networks, does not even scrape the surface of how user data could and should be protected.
What makes the Cambridge Analytica scandal matter is not the seedy and shady way that this particular company has claimed to influence elections — similar situations have been happening abroad for years.
The core of the scandal is the control of our data, the information that makes up the people that we are and how that information can be acquired and disseminated.
We have allowed companies to freewheel with our data for too long, and stricter regulation is the only way we can take control of our identities.
Senior staff columnist Perren Wright is a computer science junior and can be reached at opinion@thedailycougar.com.
—
“Cambridge Analytica scandal shows how companies abuse our data” was originally posted on The Daily Cougar