Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Monday 19 March 2018

Facebook's recurring nightmare: Helping muddy up elections

By RYAN NAKASHIMA and vertisers." said Mike Caul- lie a disgruntled former em-
ANICK JESDANUN field, a faculty trainer at ployee.
AP Technology Writers Washington State University It acknowledged obtain-
MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — who directs a multi-universi- ing user data in violation
Facebook has a problem it ty effort focused on digital of Facebook policies, but
just can't kick: People keep literacy. blamed a middleman con-
exploiting it in ways that Late Friday, Facebook an- tractor for the problem.
could sway elections, and nounced it was banning The company said it never
in the worst cases even un- Cambridge , an outfit that used the data and deleted
dermine democracy. helped Donald Trump win it all once it learned of the
News reports that Face- the White House, saying infraction — an assertion
book let the Trump-affiliat- the company improperly contradicted by Wylie and
ed data mining firm Cam- obtained information from now under investigation by
bridge Analytica abscond 270,000 people who down- Facebook.
with data from tens of mil- In this March 15, 2013, file photo, a Facebook employee walks loaded a purported re- Jonathan Albright, re-
lions of users mark the third past a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. search app described as a search director at the Tow
time in roughly a year the Associated Press personality test. Facebook Center for Digital Journal-
company appears to have first learned of this breach ism at Columbia Univer-
been outfoxed by crafty tion-related propaganda Facebook says the main of privacy more than two sity, said Facebook badly
outsiders in this way. campaigns through tar- problem involved the trans- years ago, but hasn't men- needs to embrace the
Before the Cambridge im- geted ads and fake politi- fer of data to a third party tioned it publicly until now. transparency it has essen-
broglio, there were Rus- cal events. And before the — not its collection in the And the company may still tially forced on its users by
sian agents running elec- Russians took center stage, first place. be playing down its scope. sharing their habits, likes
there were purveyors of Each new issue has also Christopher Wylie, a former and dislikes with advertis-
fake news who spread raised the same endur- Cambridge employee who ers. Albright has previously
false stories to rile up hy- ing questions about Face- served as a key source for noted cases in which Face-
perpartisan audiences and book's conflicting priorities detailed investigative re- book deleted thousands of
profit from the resulting ad — to protect its users, but ports published Saturday posts detailing Russian influ-
revenue. also to ensure that it can in The New York Times and ence on its service and un-
In the previous cases, Face- exploit their personal de- The Guardian , said the firm derreported the audience
book initially downplayed tails to fuel its hugely lucra- was actually able to pull in for Russian posts by failing
the risks posed by these tive, and precisely target- data from roughly 50 mil- to mention millions of fol-
activities. It only seriously ed, advertising business. lion profiles by extending its lowers on Instagram, which
grappled with fake news Facebook may say its busi- tentacles to the unwitting Facebook owns.
and Russian influence after ness model is to connect friends of app users. (Face- Facebook is "withholding
sustained criticism from us- the world, but it's really "to book has since barred such information to the point of
ers, experts and politicians. collect psychosocial data second-hand data collec- negligence," he said Satur-
In the case of Cambridge, on users and sell that to ad- tion by apps.) day. "How many times can
Wylie said he regrets the you keep doing that before
role he played in what he it gets to the point where
called "a full service pro- you're not going to be able
paganda machine." Cam- to wrangle your way out?"
bridge's goal, he told the The Cambridge imbroglio
Guardian in a video inter- also revealed what appear
view , was to use the Face- to be loopholes in Face-
book data to build detailed book's privacy assurances,
profiles that could be used particularly regarding third-
to identify and then to tar- party apps. Facebook ap-
get individual voters with pears to have no techni-
personalized political mes- cal way to enforce privacy
sages calculated to sway promises made by app de-
their opinions. velopers, leaving users little
"It was a grossly unethical choice but to simply trust
experiment," Wylie said. them.
"Because you are playing In fact, the enforcement
with an entire country. The actions outlined in Face-
psychology of an entire book's statement don't
country without their con- address prevention at all
sent or awareness." — just ways to respond
Cambridge has denied to violations after they've
wrongdoing and calls Wy- occurred.q