We have all seen that one advertisement that made us suspicious. Just moments ago you told a close friend you were going to learn to cook and now you are seeing advertisements for cooking shows and cooking books on sale. You suspect that someone or something is listening to you. This could be the case but what is actually happening is your behavior is being accurately predicted. So these suspicious ads that you see are just proof that the data science algorithm works.
So what's so bad about seeing an ad for something that could help you achieve this goal? Well, personally I don’t think it’s s such a bad thing. If someone can analyze my likes and dislikes and understand me better than I can and it can benefit me, that should be fine right? Maybe it's my ignorance, then you question yourself “Is this really a free choice, or am I opting into this because it was information being fed to me?”
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
Cambridge Analytica was a data science firm that worked on political campaigns. They were infamous for working with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election that, eventually, lead to Trump becoming president. Back in 2016 Facebooks API allowed developers to access the user's information, such as likes, dislikes, comments, and everyone else on their friend's list. Facebook has since removed this feature from its API since the scandal. This has been public information, in-fact back in 2008 Obama’s campaign used a similar idea but it was disclosed to the app users. The problem was how Cambridge Analytica obtained its data. A Cambridge University researcher by the name of Alexander Kogan creates an app called Your Digital Life which was a survey-style application. It collected about 270000 users' information and every one of their friends. It estimated that about 50 million Facebook user’s information was passed to Cambridge Analytica without the knowledge of the users or their friends. With this information, the Trump campaign was able to send out ads to all of the swing states. They spent $1million per day blasting the swing states with ads.
“It was a grossly unethical experiment, you are playing with the psychology entire countries without their consent” — Christopher Wylie
Christopher Wylie was a former data scientist at Cambridge Analytica that worked on the campaign and help set up the company. Wylie later came out in 2018, he released documents prompting the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, giving The Guardian documents that described the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica.