Christopher Wylie used to work with Cambridge Analytica. He left. He became a whistleblower and told the world that Facebook was transferring personal data to Cambridge Analytica which was then making it available to political entities in America and UK.
It transpired that Facebook was not only giving information about 100,000 people who took part in what looked like a very innocent quiz game but also to all their friends. Quoting CNN “ the amount is now 87 million Facebook users”.
This personal information was then processed in an algorithm software, and a very detailed profile of every targeted user emerged. Six thousand of these users were Maltese. This was announced by the European Commission who said that “2.7 million citizens in 28 EU members states might have fallen victims of this scandal. The people profiled will receive propaganda which is intended to confirm or alter their voting patterns such as the Brexit issue or the US elections where Trump was elected.”
Quoting CNN , Aleksander Kogan, a Russian data scientist who gave lectures at St. Petersburg State University, gathered Facebook data from millions of Americans. He then sold it to Cambridge Analytica, which worked with President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In an interview with The Guardian, whistle-blower while said that the difference between Obama and Trump using Facebook is very clear. He says that Obama targeted people with information, but Trump targeted people with fake news only after knowing from their secret profile how to get it through. Vice news asked where is the data now?
“It could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia, given the fact that the professor who was managing the data harvesting process was going back and forth between the UK and to Russia,” Wylie said.
Speaking to Maltese IT expert Dr Anton Ghio, he said that this is very dangerous. In fact, he deleted his Facebook as he is not willing to share his data without his consent. He insisted that Facebook is not safe anymore but would go on and say that even Whatsapp belongs to Facebook. Dr Ghio said that is so serious that on the day this news was out there, Founder and CEO of Facebook, Zuckerberg, lost 4 billion U.S. dollars while Facebook lost 100 billion U.S. dollars.
In this situation, one might think what would happen if this information would be available to robots who have already the artificial intelligence to not only analyse the data but learn strategies how it can be used. In this context, it is even scarier that our data will end up belonging to robots as this would make the quote of Profs Stephen Hawking very true.
“The emergence of artificial intelligence could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It will transform or destroy society says Hawkins to NBC news a year before he died.”
It’s been two weeks since Chris Wylie went from faceless data expert to world-famous whistle blower by revealing that Cambridge Analytica gamed Facebook on behalf of right-wing causes like the Brexit “leave” campaign before the firm was hired for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. (Vice news)
Because of Wylie, we now know how Cambridge Analytica got its hands on 50 million Facebook users’ data and spread targeted political content, and how Facebook’s old privacy rules made it acceptable.
On this day, VICE News is Wylie’s fourth interview, and he’s not even close to done. Earlier in the day he’d given a witness statement to U.K. police, and attended a “Fair Vote” rally on Brexit, at which he was harassed. “I got attacked several times after,” he said. “I had bodyguards, and even then I had to be bundled into a car.”
(CNN)Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie says the data the firm gathered from Facebook could have come from more than 87 million users world wide and could be stored in Russia.
References
Anon, (n.d.). Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: ‘We spent €0.81m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles’. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M.
Anon, (n.d.). Christopher Wylie: The Whistleblower Who Exposed Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Scam (HBO). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPvRaKQikE.
Anon, (n.d.). Ex-Cambridge Analytica staff say Bolton super PAC used compromised Facebook data. [online] Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/23/politics/john-bolton-super-pac-cambridge-analytica/index.html.
Anon, (n.d.). Wylie: Data might be from more than 87M users. [online] Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/08/politics/cambridge-analytica-data-millions/index.html.
Anon, (n.d.). British physicist Stephen Hawking, among world’s greatest minds of science, dies at 76. [online] Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/british-physicist-stephen-hawking-among-world-s-greatest-minds-science-n702301.