The Big Facebook Data Drama

Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is under mounting pressure after news broke that a shady company mined its data to affect the outcomes of elections

- Jane Vorster

WHEN you look at him you struggle to join the dots. Christopher Wylie has pink hair and a nose ring and describes himself as a “gay, vegan liberal” with an interest in fashion trend forecasting. He seems harmless. Is this really the geek behind one of the biggest data breaches in internet history?

It’s a scandal that’s tarnished Facebook’s reputation, causing once faithful users to desert it in droves and its share price to tumble. People feel duped – they never dreamt the social-media giant would give conniving third parties access to their sensitive personal information and allow them to use it in any way they saw fit.

The latest crop of damning revelations has caused users to rethink the network. It might seem like an innocent space where people share random snippets about their daily lives but in the background things are going on. Data is being collected with the express purpose of devising methods to manipulate users into behaving in certain ways. And the result can change the fortunes of an entire country and shape the world.

It may sound like the plot of some farfetched science fiction movie but this is exactly what happened. By taking an innocent-looking online psychology test, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users were tricked into sharing not only their own information but also granting instant access to all their friends’ profiles. In this way more than 50 million Facebook profiles were breached.

The geeks at Cambridge Analytica, where Wylie worked, weren’t interested in finding out what colour socks people wear or what coffee they drink in the morning. They wanted to know how they were likely to vote and this treasure trove of data told them exactly that and more.