Have you think Netflix’s “The Great Hack”? The movie is a compelling documentary at the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica statistics scandal. After looking the movie, I hope greater people understand statistics rights are human rights. Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm, harvested statistics from tens of millions of Facebook users and their buddies via a character questionnaire.
At the center of the film is Brittany Kaiser, a director of commercial enterprise development whilst she left Cambridge Analytica in 2018, who blew the whistle on her employers’ connections. The documentary additionally touches on David Carroll, a professor of media layout at The New School in Manhattan, who released a prison marketing campaign in the United Kingdom to force Cambridge Analytica to expose their “records record” collected on him. I have become even extra worried approximately my facts rights after analyzing the interior story of Kaiser in her e-book, “Targeted,” on “how huge information, President Trump and Facebook broke democracy and how it may occur once more.”

The information record strikes a chord in my memory of a comparable request I requested from Facebook on April 16, 2018. I am one of the 1.175 million Filipinos and amongst 87 million users international whose data became improperly shared by Cambridge Analytica. I did now not log in to the Is Your Digital Life app earlier than Facebook eliminated it from their platform in 2015 but a pal of mine did. The film frequently mentions “Data rights are human rights”. According to Onlinemarketshare from the Center of Human Rights Education, the norm of personal records rights as human rights was institutionalized via the United Nations ten years before Google’s founding. I know my rights.
Facebook did now not deliver me the manner to determine which messages had been accessed so I requested help from the National Privacy Commission (NPC) to compel Facebook to reveal it to me. Filing a letter at the Complaints and Investigations Division of the NPC changed into the most effective way to know the information accrued. I requested from Facebook the following:
- May I realize the name of the Facebook pal who logged into “This is your Digital Life” and might have shared my public profile, web page likes, modern-day city, place of birth and messages to Cambridge Analytica?
- May I recognize which messages were compromised?
NPC conducted an “Order to Confer for Discovery” 3 months later however Facebook by no means showed up. I turned into knowledgeable on March 2019 that they submitted my case for decision. Just like me, Carrol in no way got that data document both. Most probable, I would find out extra from Kaiser who released a statistics sell off early this yr. Links to documents are published thru a Twitter account referred to as @HindsightFiles. As of this writing, files on Brazil, Kenya, Iran, Malaysia, and John Bolton, former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs can be downloaded. One could also find the documents at TheGreatHack.Com/Hindsight-Files. I am hoping documents on the Philippines could be launched soon. Kaiser discovered those documents to assist humans realise how easy it’s miles to be manipulated on the net and different verbal exchange platforms. This might help growth attention on net monitoring and statistics alternate for services like the ones used by Facebook, Google, Twitter and other systems which use social networking or advert-based infrastructures as sales streams. As suggested by the Guardian, tens of thousands of documents would soon be uncovered detailing the work of this worldwide operation concerning as a minimum sixty eight countries, used to control voters on an business scale.
Even if Cambridge Analytica closed operations, different corporations could also misuse our statistics.
They may want to goal every one folks. How do we protect ourselves and our democracy? While we have to maintain agencies to make the ethical preference, we couldn’t wait for them to form up. Kaiser shows “we rise up, speak out and act”. Start these days. One recommendation is to grow to be digitally literate. We must teach ourselves and apprehend how records is accumulated, in which it goes, wherein it’s held, and how it is able to be used against us or for true.
Check the internet site of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.Com) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.Org). Second, ask regulators to hold abuses of energy to account. Brazil imposed a $1.6-million penalty on Facebook Inc. For illegal data sharing of 443,000 customers in Brazil. Are we no longer penalizing Facebook considering 1.7 million customers had been affected in the Philippines, second best to the United States? Another name to movement is to make moral choices for your virtual existence. Healthy skepticism needs proof. Some hints stated by Kaiser is to impeach terrible articles and refrain from sharing messages that incite anger or fear.
Taking fee of our digital lives is a begin. And it doesn’t stop there. Aside from owning our statistics, we need to demand transparency from tech groups and safety from our government. Together, we could paintings in this.