It's not all Facebook. It's us who have no control over our data
Facebook is under fire over a massive data breach involving tens of millions of users’ personal information. The drama began when the $500 billion company admitted Friday that data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which has close ties with US President Donald Trump’s election campaign and right-leaning megadonors, used data that had been collected from 50 million users without their consent.
Facebook has since suspended Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) access to its platform. Mark Zuckerberg has reacted to the Parliament’s concern over this issue on the impact on Indian elections by promising to prevent any such abuse of the data from their website.
This, even as the Centre on March 20, 2018 told the Supreme Court that the much-awaited bill on data protection - being drafted by a committee of experts headed by retired Justice BN Srikrishna - would be ready by March.
Attorney General KK Venugopal gave the information to a Constitution Bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice AK Sikri, Justice AM Khanwilkar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan which is hearing a batch of petitions that challenged the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar Act as violative of the fundamental right to privacy.
Ever since internet exploded in our midst, our personal data has been available for exploitation and the world being flat and connected - it is out there in the world wide web for the asking; for free, as journalist and author Thomas Friedman puts it. Add to this the potent and poisonous potion of commercial entities like credit card institutions having the benefit of the data. Social media sites as Facebook, Instagram etc and analytics firms seem to have too much "data" to handle. So much so that in the Aadhaar challenge, lead counsel for the petitioners, senior advocate Shyam Divan quoted professor Yuval Noah Hariri’s speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos and said this was the era of "digital dictatorship".
Just consider the CA imbroglio. There was nothing hidden about their agenda. Their website and advertisements openly stated that they had the tools to divide the data with a psychological tweak, so much so they can impact the likes of the end consumer to "make him vote for a candidate they were recommending".
It is just that the manner in which the Facebook data was put to use made it a classic instance of "dance of democracy in darkness" as a commentator put it.
Robert Mercer, now 71, a brilliant scientist with IBM, a master in artificial intelligence, went on to guide Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund, by pioneering in Algorithmic trading, to make his fund the "most profitable one in recent US history".
And when he quit with his billions, he chose not to ride into the sunset. His conservatives ideas found a mascot in Donald Trump. Mercer and his daughter Rebecca offered CA’s services to Trump. CA got paid 11 million dollars from the Trump campaign and Mercer, and it was then that they bought into the Facebook data, readily available with Cambridge professor Logan, who had run a personality app on Facebook in 2014 and penetrated into personal data of not only 270 million users who had shared information about themselves but double the number from their friends’ likes as well.
It was this data that was bought by CA. Facebook claims it was unaware of the exploitation beyond the 270 million and has suspended CA from its clientele, for now.
It is obvious that while what Facebook has done may be legal, it is totally immoral and unethical. Mark Zuckerberg is finding it difficult to ride the storm, as Facebook shares have slid. Indian Parliament has also seemingly summoned Zuckerberg to "come clean".
But the purport of this piece is not only to tell it as it is - what we are in for, as we surf the net all day long and indulge in social media platforms and the use of plastic for commerce. We willingly do it. But sale/sharing of data is a reality and we have no control over it - none whatsoever.
Here is the icing on the cake. While Parliament has complained of data sharing by Facebook - breaching the privacy and confidentiality policy of the website - we have an insurance regulator enabling the sharing of data by statutory regulations (Insurance Regulatory and. Development Authority [Sharing of Database for Distribution of Insurance. Products] Regulations, 2010). That too under section 14 of the IRDA Act, 1999, a parliamentary legislation.
Let’s get real with the data protection law on the anvil. The only protection that we can ever have, as professor Yuval Noah says, is: "We need not be paranoid of data steal, for there is too much out there which means little, to mean anything significant, and that in a continuing state of flux."
Thus, the more the merrier for us to feel safe?