Why content matters. Zuckerberg, Vox Media and the Cambridge Analytica data leak

Abstract

Following a major data breach scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg found himself at the center of a heated privacy row. The personal Facebook profiles of over 87 million users were unethically "harvested" by a Cambridge professor, using a deceptive personality quiz app and a web "scraper." The rich data set was then transferred to Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, which used it to build models of voting behavior and influence voters in Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential Campaign. Zuckerberg was held accountable for the leak. He offered vague apologies for the "breach of trust" that had occurred but refused to take the blame for data misuse. This article examines his line of defense and subtle evasion tactics, from a cognitive linguistics and gesture studies perspective.

Assessing MyData Scenarios: Ethics, Concerns, and the Promise

“…We crafted the scenarios based on prior works [19,21,68], and drew further inspiration from recent privacy and potentially ethical violations of people's data in the real world [28,29,44,49]. The authors met three times to ideate a range of scenarios (diverging), followed by the selection of our fnal set of scenarios based on their Figure 1: The Human Intelligence Task (HIT) deployed to MTurk.…”

“…The concerns often deal with issues of data sharing with third party organizations, such as governments or businesses, and sometimes without clear user consent or even illegally [21,25,59]. Notable public scandals in this regard include, for instance, tech vendors pre-installing software on their hardware to collect consumer data without the knowledge or consent of consumers and selling this data to third parties [49], or the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal where millions of Facebook users' personal data were used to support political campaigns [44]. In the health domain, examples of unethical conduct include e.g.…”

“…At the center of this investigation is MyData, a data management vision that is yet to catch the attention of the CHI community. Using a variety of diferent data management scenarios as the experimental stimuli, we collected quantitative data using Amazon's Mechanical Turk [18] on ethics and concern on 96 diferent scenarios that emulate common types of personal data use and misuse, as modelled after related literature and various historical real-world events [19,21,28,29,44,49,68]. We additionally invited the contributors back for a second-stage study to gain descriptive statistics about our sample and their qualitative insights on broader issues around MyData.…”

Publicidade inteligente

“…Recentemente, em abril de 2016, milhões de dados de usuários do Facebook foram minerados indevidamente com o escopo de criar um sistema inteligente capaz de influenciar a campanha presidencial norteamericana de 2016 a favor do então candidato Donald Trump. O episódio foi denominado como Escândalo da Cambridge Analytica (LAPAIRE, 2018). Ao analisar este episódio, Jean-Rémi Lapaire (2018) defende que o Facebook está longe de ser uma rede bem-intencionada que busca integrar pessoas.…”

Information Privacy Opinions on Twitter

“…In 2018, it was revealed that the personal data of 87 million Facebook users were exposed and used by Cambridge Analytica to support political campaigns [9]. This Cambridge Analytica scandal sparked a worldwide conversation on Twitter about this particular misuse of user data.…”