Last week, when it became public knowledge that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal information of over 50 million unsuspecting Facebook users, allowing the Robert Mercer-owned political consulting firm to build a “psychological warfare weapon” that, according to one of the men involved, existed to exploit the “inner demons” of Americans for political gain, David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design, took the opportunity to file suit against the political analytics company in UK court, demanding that they disclose both the data they had collected on him via his social media presence and the psychographic targeting profile they’d produced with said data. [While Carroll’s UK filing is new, he’s been attempting to acquire this information for some time in the United States.] The following comes by way of the Guardian.
…In his statement to the high court, Carroll says he brought the action as part of “a general desire to ensure that my personal data was not used for purposes I consider unsettling or unlawful. This was particularly true with respect to my political opinions.”
He told the Guardian his “great concern” was that if voters received through social media messages tailored to their beliefs and personality, ideas about shared reality and shared sense of civic discourse would be eroded.
“Can this democracy survive this micro-targeting machine,” he asked, “and is it going to erode the idea of the public sphere for advertising purposes?”
In his statement to the court, Carroll said he was “concerned that I may have been targeted with messages that criticized [Democratic 2016 presidential candidate] Hillary Clinton with falsified or exaggerated information that negatively affected my sentiment about her candidacy and consequently discouraged me from engaging with the Clinton campaign as a formal or informal volunteer.”
But Carroll says he is not motivated by political partisanship.
“The escalation and weaponization of data is really concerning,” he told the Guardian, “and we have to make sure we understand the effects before we allow this to just run its course.”
Cambridge Analytica has described his claims as “unfounded” and said: “Unfortunately, he is wasting other people’s money with this spurious legal action.”
A special House of Commons committee headed by Collins visited Washington DC last month, questioning media and tech executives about fake news and misinformation in the political sphere, including the 2016 referendum on Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.
The direction of the questions posed by the UK politicians to Facebook and Twitter executives, Carroll believes, hinted that committee members already knew about third-party developer access, data retention and verification. “It looked like parliament had known about this for a while,” he said…
For those of you who are unaware of Carroll’s work, here’s video of a keynote he gave recently at the NYC Media Lab summit about data, design, privacy and democracy. [I’d intended to watch an episode of Columbo tonight, but instead got sucked into this. It’s that damn good. It’s “better than Columbo” good.]
And, here, for those of you who still want more, is a clip from an interview with Carroll that the Columbia Journalism Review just put out today.
I know, right now, we’re fighting about guns, and rightfully so, but, this is the battleground of the future. In and age weaponized data and targeting algorithms that grow more sophisticated by the day, where our online personas have virtually no protection, where were expected to forgo privacy in return for being able to exist in the modern world, what chance do we really have to maintain a healthy democracy? We can debate how successful Cambridge Alalytica was in their 2016 psychographic campaign, and whether or not it really had an effect on the outcome of the election. I don’t think, however, that we can debate the threat all of this poses going forward. Now that we’ve seen a glimpse of what’s on the horizon, we have to act.
One last thing… I’d like to leave you with this 2010 quote from American cryptographer and privacy activist Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”
