By Deepa Seetharaman
More than a year after Cambridge Analytica's mining of Facebook
Inc. user data triggered regulatory probes of the social-media
giant -- leading to this week's $5 billion fine -- a new Netflix
documentary highlights how poorly understood the impact of that
data mining still is on American politics and society.
Netflix Inc.'s "The Great Hack" could reinvigorate debate about
Cambridge Analytica's tactics and their implications for social
media, data privacy and democracy, just as the U.S. enters the 2020
election cycle. The nearly two-hour film was released on Netflix
Wednesday, the same day Facebook reported second-quarter earnings
and finalized settlements with two regulatory agencies.
The settlements result from lengthy investigations that followed
March 2018 reports that Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British
consulting firm backed by the family of New York-based hedge-fund
billionaire Robert Mercer, had improperly obtained and exploited
Facebook user data. As part of Wednesday's agreement with the
Federal Trade Commission, Facebook will pay a $5 billion fine and
introduce new layers of oversight around its privacy practices.
Facebook, which didn't admit or deny wrongdoing, will also pay the
Securities and Exchange Commission a $100 million fine. Cambridge
Analytica has denied wrongdoing in the Facebook incident.
The Cambridge Analytica controversy sparked an uproar and
investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. It also made many
people think more deeply about data privacy and surveillance --
issues that will attract more scrutiny in the 2020 election, said
Shannon McGregor, assistant professor of communications at the
University of Utah. "What really upset a lot of regular Americans
was the extent that they could be targeted." Regarding privacy
protections and political discourse, "we're likely to hear more
hiccups before, if at all, we see things running smoothly," she
said.
Despite the intense scrutiny, however, some questions remain.
One is: Did Cambridge Analytica help Donald Trump win the
presidency? Another is: What is to stop another company from
exploiting Facebook and social media to influence the 2020
election?
"The Great Hack" doesn't provide many answers. Rather, it sounds
an alarm about the vast amount of user data that companies such as
Facebook and Google have, and the potential for its misuse.
The film charts the evolution of the data-analytics firm
primarily through the lens of Brittany Kaiser, a former business
development director for Cambridge Analytica, and David Carroll, an
associate professor of media design at the New School's Parsons
School of Design who filed a legal claim against the firm seeking
to secure a copy of his personal information in its possession.
It is undisputed that Cambridge Analytica bought personal data
on tens of millions of Facebook users that a psychology professor,
Aleksandr Kogan, had gleaned through a personality quiz, and that
Facebook failed to detect that Dr. Kogan sold the data in violation
of its rules. And no one contests that Cambridge Analytica worked
on behalf of the Trump campaign as well as other conservative
causes.
Dr. Kogan, in an April 2018 interview, said he didn't know his
work for Cambridge Analytica violated Facebook's policies, adding
that the social-media company had made him a scapegoat.
The husband-and-wife team behind the film appears divided on the
company's imprint on the U.S. election. Jehane Noujaim said in an
interview it was "impossible to say" whether the firm effectively
helped Mr. Trump win the vote. Her husband, Karim Amer, said he is
more convinced that it did, pointing to past comments made by
Cambridge Analytica's CEO about the company's deep well of
information on voters and the firm's alleged involvement in
elections where the underdog won despite long odds, including the
U.S. presidential race.
Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of the British company SCL
Group, filed for bankruptcy in May 2018. Its former CEO, Alexander
Nix, who previously said it used widely accepted practices for data
analytics, couldn't be reached for comment. Mr. Nix told Britian's
Parliament last year that he was being "subjected to frankly
ridiculous accusations based on the most tenuous connections."
On Wednesday, the FTC alleged that Cambridge Analytica, along
with Messrs. Nix and Kogan, deceived consumers by claiming not to
have collected any personally identifiable information about
Facebook users.
At the time Mr. Kogan gathered the data, he was working within
Facebook's rules. After Facebook tightened its policies and learned
that he shared the data with Cambridge Analytica, the social-media
giant asked the company and Mr. Kogan to delete it. Cambridge
Analytica said it previously deleted all the Facebook data, but
federal regulators Wednesday said some individuals "still possess
this data and/or data models based on this data."
Facebook didn't participate in the film. Mr. Amer said the
filmmakers asked Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and other
Facebook executives if the company would discuss their documentary,
but their request was declined.
"This documentary is a snapshot in time and doesn't reflect what
happened next," said a Facebook spokeswoman. "After this episode,
we set out on a course of radical change, introducing new practices
across our platform to safeguard people's privacy. We're not the
same company today."
Several former Cambridge Analytica employees say their company
has been demonized in the media and that the common narrative about
how the firm operated gets several details wrong. For instance, two
former employees in interviews for this article said the firm
didn't use the purchased Facebook data in its analytics work with
the Trump campaign.
The Netflix documentary argues that Mr. Trump and other
right-leaning candidates were helped by Cambridge's data work and
ability to psychologically target voters. A British watchdog
agency, the Information Commissioner's Office, said in a report
last year that some Facebook data was "used by Cambridge Analytica
to target voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign
process," but it didn't specify how that data was deployed.
Facebook says it is conducting its own investigation into how
Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook platform for its work.
The SEC's complaint Wednesday offers fresh information about
when Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analytica. In
September 2015, the SEC says employees in Facebook's political
advertising group had raised concerns internally about Cambridge
Analytica's scraping, or use of software to compile Facebook user
data.
Employees reiterated those concerns in December when a Guardian
newspaper article claimed that Cambridge had misused data.
Internally, Facebook employees called the company a "sketchy (to
say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market
deeply," according to the SEC complaint.
At times, the film assumes that Cambridge Analytica's methods
were highly effective, a point that Facebook advertisers and
researchers say wasn't the case. "There is no publicly available
evidence that suggests they had a measurable impact on the
election," said Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies political
campaigns' use of data.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 26, 2019 09:15 ET (13:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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