Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose. Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade. at 5. The full extent of Facebook’s surveillance capitalism remains secret. “The Great Hack”: the documentary on the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook collusion, plus surveillance capitalism Post author By Niklas Post date 2019-07-25 Hence the pogroms in Myanmar. Peering into the Future of Digital Advertising, Cognizant 4 (2014). The Cambridge Analytica scandal. Its [sic] time to release the files. BOB GARFIELD And hence Brexit, hence the Trump victory in 2016. He described the limitations placed on the accessing of user information by data apps connected to Facebook friends. It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level. In the last year, data privacy has become a significant issue of public interest. This process of psychographic profiling is problematic across all industries. The answer is surveillance capitalism. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Why We’re Not Calling the Cambridge Analytica Story a ‘Data Breach,’ Vice (Mar. But in the US, where money and political information are oft confused as matters of freedom, movement on this will be slow. It did not have to be this way. Having only hopped on board in June, “we focused on the core elements of a core political data science program.”. Surveillance capitalism describes a market driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data, … cambridge-analytica-and-facebook/ April. These entail “data extraction and analysis,” various “new contractual forms” arising from “better monitoring”, “personalisation and customisation” and “continuous experiments”. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism, The Nashville Bombing, More Than Meets the Eye, On The Green New Deal, Nationalization, & Class Politics, Alexander Hamilton Meets RBG and the Supremes, Fatou Bensouda: A Daring Prosecutor Who Challenged the US, Israeli Impunity. Over the past three decades, society has had to adapt to the fast-paced evolution of technology. A broader data set of profiles were thereby created and quarried. On the latter, it is boastful, claiming to have supported over 100 campaigns across five continents. So why is Cambridge Analytica the only villain in the eyes of the media? at 7. at 4. Hopefully, the re-opening of Cambridge Analytica’s tomb will help shift the discussion from one of blame to one of remediation and targeted regulation. Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has been singled out for special interest, keen on what he terms, in truly benign fashion, “computer-mediated transactions”. at 4. And the Cambridge Analytica scandal? The argument that Silicon Valley engineers are behaviorists is made most explicitly in Chapter 12 of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism… The best way to fight election disinformation is to fight surveillance capitalism. at 7. The likes of Cambridge Analytica and similar information mercenaries will continue thriving. In re Cambridge Analytica, LLC, FTC 1, 3 (Nov. 25, 2019). Peering into the Future of Digital Advertising, Cognizant 4 (2014). Further, this type of consent and data collection is similar to that which is currently used by ad targeting companies in a process called Real Time Bidding (“RTB”). While other companies’ tactics seem to have less dramatic consequences, such as inducing a consumer to purchase a car, surveillance capitalism is slowly eroding our concept of democracy and free will. His work would allow the company to expand their services to voter-profiling, microtargeting, and similar marketing support for political campaigns and other clients based in the United States. Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon. SF Giants Owner Rakes in $815 Million During the pandemic, Impeachment: Why the Senate Will Acquit Trump, To Conspiracy Theory or to Not Conspiracy Theory (That is the Question). Smith, ... but are imbricated with surveillance capitalism. The monetizing of human data has been coined as surveillance capitalism. However, it’s wrong to view Zuboff as the originator and sole owner of the concept. 19, 2018). Certifications were duly provided that such data had been deleted, though the crew at Facebook evidently took these at unverified face value. This is already occurring through the use of subliminal cues (dark patterns) and heuristics. But what these news reports have consistently failed to recognize is that this type of psychographic profiling was, and still is considered an industry standard in advertising technology. There are discussions that political data mining designed to manipulate and sway elections be considered in the same way political donations are. Id. Novels such as Dave Eggers' The Circle illustrate the culture of surveillance. Be that as it may, the spoliations of Cambridge Analytica are embedded in a broader undertaking: the evisceration of privacy, and the generation of … The company’s weasel wording has certainly been extensive. Two services are provided suggesting that people are not, in the minds of its bewitchers, that intelligent: the arm of data-driven marketing designed to “improve your brand’s marketing effectiveness by changing consumer behaviour” and that of “data-driven campaigns” where “greater influence” is attained through “knowing your electorate better”. Surveillance Capitalism is the term used to describe this new market which claims human experience as a free source of raw material for hidden commercial practice of extraction, prediction, and sales,’ as defined by Dr. Shoshanna Zuboff. The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal has launched surveillance capitalism into the global consciousness. Such damning media coverage continues to this day. The networked sphere, as it is termed in with jargon-heavy fondness by some academics, has seen the accumulation of data all set and readied for the “information civilisation”. Surveillance capitalism is a yet unregulated market driving companies to amass large amounts of data. The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) issued Cambridge Analytica’s epitaph in late November 2019, when it published its settlement opinion. The research suggested that individual personality traits could be predicted through Facebook profile information using “the ‘OCEAN’ scale, a psychometric model that measures an individual’s openness to experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.”  Id. Kogan claims to have been approached by Cambridge Analytica, rather than the other way around, regarding “terms of usage of Facebook data”. It rejects notions that it peddles fake news. Are We Ready For Vaccinating With Sputnik V? Published August 1, 2018. Plaintiff Patricia King is among the reportedly 87 million persons in the United States whose Facebook data Cambridge Analytica obtained in order to build psychographic profiles for voter micro-targeting. While other companies’ tactics seem to have less dramatic consequences, such as inducing a consumer to purchase a car, surveillance capitalism is slowly eroding our concept of democracy and free will. What has been exposed here is not some unforceeable aberration, but an ordinary consequence of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”. Fast forward to 2018 when the headlines broke on the data collection that occurred, and news sources vilified Cambridge Analytica. Brittany Kaiser, former Cambridge Analytica business development director, blew the whistle on the company back in 2018 and now has begun leaking internal documents on Twitter under the username @HindsightFiles, stating that “democracy has been hacked.” @HindsightFiles, Twitter (Jan. 1, 2020). The Fire Next Time: Climate Change, the Bomb, or the Flame of Hope? Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption. Id. A Death on the Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, China, Papua New Guinea and Australia’s Backyard Blues, When It Seemed as If the World Took Notice, Why I Wrote “Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones”, On the Relative Vileness of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene, The Drive for a Wealth Tax in Washington State, Hidden in Plain Sight: The “Unimpeachable” Offenses, Loujain al-Hathloul Released After Over 1000 Days in Prison, Rich Farmers, Global Plots, Local Stupidity, The Clash Between the UK and EU Over Northern Ireland is a Precursor to Confrontations That will Last Decades. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state. To avoid document confiscation, SCL went bankrupt. ), In other respects, Cambridge Analytica also rejected using Facebook data in its political models, despite having obtained that same data. Mark Zuckerberg’s response has entailed vigorous hand washing. Fight for the Future. “We can set up fake IDs and Web sites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university; we can be tourists.”, The company has also attempted to debunk a set of what it sees as flourishing myths. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Facebook, for its part, has been modestly contrite. Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centred around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making.The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely. As Cambridge Analytica resurfaces from the dead, consumers, regulators, and the media owe the company some respect in how conversations about the company are framed—because Cambridge Analytica, alone, is not the villain. But make no mistake, every tactic employed by Cambridge Analytica was part of surveillance capitalism’s routine operations of behavioural influence. By Amy Goodman & Juan González, Democracy Now! The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal concerned the obtaining of the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Id. Cambridge Analytica, for its part, sets itself up as an apotheosis of the information civilisation, a benevolent, professionally driven information hitman. Ultimately, Cambridge Analytica collected all of the following Facebook profile data from app users: “Facebook User ID; gender; birthdate; location (“current city”): friends list; and ‘likes’ of public Facebook pages.” Id. In 2018, Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have obtained data of up to 87 million Americans to psychographically target voters. In other words, Cambridge Analytica was the … Cambridge Analytica … In 2017, the Equifax breach compromised credit information for 143 million Americans. 4, 2019). Not so, as matters transpired, leading to the claim that trust had not only been breached between Facebook, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, but with the users themselves. The researchers developed an algorithm which they applied to an individual’s “likes” of public Facebook pages. And when products and companies begin to interfere with human behavior, they erode at consumers’ autonomy and agency. at 7. “Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behaviour.”, This sounds rather different to the company’s stance on Saturday, when it claimed that, “Advertising is not coercive; people are smarter than that.”  With cold show insistence, it insisted that, “This isn’t a spy movie.”. Zuboff defines this market concept as “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” John Laidler, High Tech is Watching You, Harv. So, it came as a surprise to many Twitter users on January 1, 2020 as they scrolled through their feeds and read: “Data analytics firm #SCLGroup shut down amidst scandal when extensive data work in the shadows of elections globally was called into question via subsidiary #CambridgeAnalytica. See, e.g., Garett Sloane, Facebook Exec Says Cambridge Analytica Sold ‘Snake Oil, and We Knew It’ in Leaked Memo, AdAge (Jan. 7, 2020); The Great Hack (Netflix 2019). It walked into the space created when social media … The United States has spent three decades avoiding regulating the Internet, allowing the online ecosystem to get out of control, and keeping consumers in the dark regarding the deceptive and misleading practices of many companies, of which Cambridge Analytica is only one example. To explain why Cambridge Analytica deserves defending, it is important to understand precisely what happened with the company back in 2014. While the app requested consent to Facebook user data, it stated that it did not download the user’s name or any other personal information, even though “the GSRApp collected the Facebook User ID of those App Users who authorized it.” Id. ... What we should have learned from Cambridge Analytica, but didn’t. POSTPONED- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Id. The Facebook - Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal was another disturbing example. Cambridge Analytica’s real innovation was to pivot the whole undertaking from commercial to political objectives. So it’s really easy to look at Cambridge Analytica and think of it as this dramatic story, this one-off. Id. Political campaigns adopt surveillance capitalism at their own peril ... the harvesting of data popularly associated with Cambridge Analytica wasn’t an aberration so … Be that as it may, the spoliations of Cambridge Analytica are embedded in a broader undertaking: the evisceration of privacy, and the generation of user profiles gathered through modern humanity’s most remarkable surveillance machine. The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Companies use these data points, which may include users’ “friends” network, to “capture, analyze and determine the ‘audience’ arriving on the Web site and serve targeted advertisements and communication” in real-time. Its Board of Directors has suspended CEO Alexander Nix, claiming that “recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”, The comments in question, caught in an undercover video, show Nix offering a range of services to the Channel 4 undercover reporter: Ukrainian sex workers posing as “honey-traps”; a video evidencing corruption that might be uploaded to the Internet; and operations with former spies. at 5. It has not, for instance, been uncooperative with the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, having engaged it since February 2017. Id. Kogan created a corporation, Global Science Research, Ltd. (“GSR”), to enter into an agreement with SCL Elections to carry out the project and separate it from his role at the University of Cambridge. “We ran a standard political data science program with the same kind of political preference models used by other presidential campaigns.”  Nor did it use personality profiles for the 2016 US Presidential election. And while the severity of its practices should not be minimized, this is not a burden Cambridge Analytica should carry alone—the data collection that the company engaged in was, and still is, considered an industry standard. The clincher here is the link with Facebook, though the company insists that it “received data from a contractor, which we deleted after Facebook told us the contractor had breached their terms of service.”. Ultimately, RTB allows companies to go deeper into the minds of consumers than ever before. SCL Elections entered into this agreement with GSR while acting for and on behalf of Cambridge Analytica.