I subscribe to the view you should never put anything online you couldn’t stand to see on the newspaper’s front page. I’ve tried, anyway.
If some of us have shared information that produces cringe-worthy headlines, more of us have unwittingly or indifferently shared what we didn’t consider important – but truly was, at least to others who curate data to support a cause or commerce.
We came of age about this last week. The wake-up call rang.
To do so it took a British Columbia developer and researcher, Christopher Wylie, to whistle blow about his former company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), and about the activities of researcher Aleksandr Kogan.
Kogan developed a quiz, put it on Facebook in 2014 and sucked data out of participants – and much more cleverly, their network of unknowing friends. Rather than use this data only for academic purposes at Cambridge University, where he holds a position, he created a private database and supplied about 30 million user profiles to CA (unrelated to the university) for its exploitation.
There is little virtue in this escapade. CA’s investors included the Donald Trump-supporting Mercer family at the behest of former Breitbart News head Steve Bannon, and its executives boast their data mining was the difference in the 2016 U.S. election and the 2015 Brexit vote.
The B.C. connection doesn’t stop there: Elizabeth Denham, the former B.C. privacy commissioner, holds the same role in the United Kingdom. Her office obtained warrants to raid CA’s London headquarters last week. She suggests this matter is a turning point.
There should be little surprise in any of this. Data mining is not a new phenomenon, nor is developing psychographic profiles of consumers. From Day 1, social media’s positives – their connecting us with people and building our networks – have been underwritten by a mercenary business model of using data to direct an array of messages, mainly advertising, but also fake news, to granular targets.
We have been oh-so-willing participants as the technology evolved.
Kogan and CA didn’t breach rules, and Facebook closed the option of mining someone’s network’s data later. But Face
book accepted assurances that the data was discarded – a blunder CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits was naive.
That being said, what we don’t know can hurt us, and what we don’t know is how many others did what CA and Kogan did and what they have done or will do with the data. It is worrisome enough that technology might compel us to do something voluntarily, like vote for someone. What might it compel us to do involuntarily?
Even Zuckerberg, chastened and tens of billions poorer when the market caught wind of CA (yay, investigative journalism!), suggests his platform might need regulatory protection from itself. True enough, but not soon enough.
I’ve been on Facebook since 2006 (left early, came back amid the flock) and limit my engagement to about 73 times a day, never, ever interrupting anything important. While many in my network say they will delete their accounts in outrage about CA, I don’t think a social media divorce is the answer.
We are too deeply into the relationship – kids, mortgage, the dog – and collectively responsible for what ails and what can fix our problems.
But we need couples counselling and a mediator.
There are achievable objectives that limit the technology while providing its benefits – a framework, if you will, to keep us united.
There can be responsible restraints on how platforms can use our information, just as there are opportunities to help users understand the implications of what they are providing in the heat of the moment – a tool kit, if you will, for us to deal with one another in dopamine-induced pleasure or adrenaline-induced conflict.
There are few reasons to leave because, let’s face it, we love and need and can’t live without each other. (Insert emoji here.) That being said, if we can’t trust our partner to keep some things secret, we have to admit we shouldn’t be together.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
