Will they continue to use the networks to violate our privacy?
The social network Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica after the company committed a breach of computer security to thousands of users using the famous network. The company assures that there was no malpractice in its actions, a thesis also affirmed by Alexander Nix, founder of the data analysis company.
For its part, the social network says that it is no longer possible for an app to access the personal information of friends of users who use it. However, at that time that option depended on the privacy settings of each user.Also, a spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg's company said that the collection of data by Kogan and Cambridge Analytica does not mean that the security of the platform has been breached. The users gave their information when making use of an application, in this case, there was no infiltration on the systems or theft of passwords or sensitive information.
A scandal has been unleashed on privacy and computer security that affects the internet and in the middle of the hurricane's hole are Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica data analysis company.In terms of inquiries made by The Observer and The New York Times, Cambridge Analytica stole personal information from 50 million Facebook profiles without users knowing about it.
The data analysis company, which bears no relation to the well-known British university, is popular for its role in the campaign for the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. During that electoral process, the company provided complex information about the thinking of American voters.Five years ago, Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge, started a personal project outside the university, a test that presented users with a way to discover their personality.
When an interested party, in this case, a user, wanted to do the test called "this is your digital life" the application requested permission to access their personal information and also that of their network of friends.Also, the subjects who executed the test and agreed to the conditions for it, were providing all their data to the developer of the app, and in turn, granted approval to collect information from all their contacts.Christopher Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica worker told
The Guardian newspaper that Kogan sold the information he had collected with his app to Nix's company, thus transgressing Facebook's policy.As seen from the social network, the compiled data can only be used for interests of the same app, and cannot be transferred or sold. According to Wylie, what Kogan offered was much cheaper, much faster and of unlimited quality.Wylie also said that some 265,000 people accessed the test developed by Kogan.
What, if we do a quick calculation and we add the network of friends of each of these users, allowed access to about 50 or 60 million Facebook profiles in two or three months.Although it did not seem so, in a smug tone, Christopher Wylie says that this way only needs to touch a couple of hundred thousand people to expand throughout the social network, from there to scale the rest of the United States would be nothing.
