Meta, in those times Facebook, had to face one of the biggest credibility crises of all we have experienced in the technology sector when it became known about the tricks used by Cambridge Analytica, making use of data from the social network, to trying to influence some very important electoral processes, such as the British referendum to leave the European Union (popularly known as Brexit) or the 2016 US presidential election.
As you will surely remember, the inference attempts focused on Facebook profiles that aimed to be undecided voters, and for weeks they received a large volume of advertising impacts aimed at tipping their opinion (and with it their vote) towards one of the options. In both processes, the polls show very, very short distances between the main options (Yes or No in Brexit and Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the presidential elections), so the analysts were clear, from the outset, that in both elections the undecided would play a determining role.
The problem is that Cambridge Analytica, a London-based political advertising and data analytics company founded in 2013 that operated primarily in the United States, illegally obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent (or nor, allegedly, from Facebook) and then used that data to create user profiles and personalized ads with the aim of influencing public opinion and voting behavior.
With the Cambridge Analytica scandal, public opinion about Facebook changed substantially, and many users decided to delete their profiles on the social network or, at least, stop posting on it as frequently as they had done before. In addition, news about security breaches, inadequate data management and other revelations soon began to follow one another that left the name of Facebook, once one of the great technology companies, in the ground.
But with this scandal, Facebook not only had to face an image crisis, multiple legal processes were also launched against the company that, due to inadequate protection of its users’ data, had allowed data scraping, a technique used by Cambridge Analytica to obtain them.
Although Meta has never acknowledged its guilt for the events at Cambridge Analytica, today we know from Reuters Agency that the company has reached an agreement with a group of plaintiffs, for which reason will pay $275 million to avoid trial. An agreement that, however, still must be ratified by the judge and that, according to the technology, has been reached “in the best interest of our community and shareholders«.
And I wonder if, in the best interest of his community, he should not have protected his data at that time. But of course, what do I know?
