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...

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...