Positive thinking

Giuseppe Loporchio Today's technology seems to have revolutionized the way we do things. Many believe that it has improved our lives. If we think of the progress in the studies of artificial intelligence, we can see that huge steps forward have been made. In our modern days, everything or almost everything is done using the Internet. We buy train, airplane or music concert tickets, holidays, food, clothing, electronics, etc. We do everything over the Internet, and in most cases, there is no need for sophisticated knowledge.  What are the implications of this technological progress? The events related to Cambridge Analytica, the British analytics data firm which is believed to have been using tools capable of gathering information of unsuspecting users to influence their minds, are a revelation. Technology can be used to our advantage. But what are the limitations of these benefits? The limits begin where the knowledge of these technologies can change nations electoral trend...

Ivan Manokha  On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research. But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview , the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that the...

The head of the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in 2016 United States elections, Robert Muller, wants to clarify the links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Cambridge Analytica. The American media are reporting that Muller’s assistants are investigating President Trump’s payment of 6 million dollars to the British firm. It also seems certain that at some point there have been contacts between Cambridge Analytica and Russia. Yania Ledovaya teaches at the faculty of Psychology at the University of St. Petersburg, and she told the online newspaper Meduza that she had met Alex Kogan, the inventor of the app that collected data from 50 millions Facebook users, in 2013, "by chance". Kogan (from the Russian media seems to have another surname, Spektor), is of Russian origin, born in Moldova and lived up to 8 years in Moscow, before moving with his parents to the United States: "He speaks Russian, but he does not read it and he does not wr...

   Michael Wade, IMD Business School The dealings that have been revealed between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller: a Bond villain-style CEO, a reclusive billionaire, a naïve and conflicted whistle-blower, a hipster data scientist turned politico, an academic with seemingly questionable ethics, and of course a triumphant president and his influential family. Much of the discussion has been on how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain data on more than 50m Facebook users – and how it allegedly failed to delete this data when told to do so. But there is also the matter of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with the data. In fact the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence. For example, pollsters have long used segmentation to target particular groups of voters, such as through categorising audiences by ...

Jennifer Cobbe   Over the weekend, allegations emerged surrounding the use of Facebook user data by a data analytics firm called Cambridge Analytica . But while they have allegedly broken Facebook’s rules, the real problem is Facebook’s business model. And it’s a model that isn't unique to Facebook. It originated with Google, which realised that the data gathered as people used its search engine could be analysed to predict what they wanted and deliver targeted advertising, and it’s also employed by most ‘free’ online services. This isn't just a problem with Facebook. It's a problem with the internet as it exists today. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ was the term coined in 2015 by Harvard academic Shoshanna Zuboff to describe this large-scale surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit. It involves predictive analysis of big datasets describing the lives and behaviours of tens or hundreds of millions of people, allowing correlations and patters to b...

Facebook suspended the profile of Cambridge Analytica, a well-known, British data analytics firm. The profiles of Strategic Communication Laboratories, Cambridge University psychologist Aleksander Kogan and the head of Eunoia Technologies, Christopher Wylie, were also suspended. Paul Grewal, Vice President of Facebook confirmed that Professor Kogan in 2015 had violated policies by passing data to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by Robert Mercer, big supporter of Trump. It is believed that the company had an important role during the American elections and the Brexit referendum. Kogan's app, thisisyourdigitallife, proposed a predictive personality test, describing on the social network as "a search app used by psychologists". The app got the information legitimately, but it violated Facebook's platform policies" passing the information to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Eunoia Technologies. The app also collected other information, such...