{"id":21772,"date":"2018-03-23T12:16:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T16:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=21772"},"modified":"2019-11-15T06:39:31","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:39:31","slug":"delete-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/delete-facebook\/21772\/","title":{"rendered":"Why it’s too late to #DeleteFacebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook was recently hit by a huge scandal. According to media reports<\/a>, data on the \u201clikes\u201d of 50 million Facebook users was harvested by the firm Cambridge Analytica and used for targeted political advertising. Facebook\u2019s own behavior of added fuel to the fire of public outrage.<\/p>\n

As a result, the company\u2019s capitalization shed tens of billions of dollars (it\u2019s down $35 billion as we write), and a number of Twitter activists launched the #DeleteFacebook campaign. In our opinion, first, the action comes a bit late \u2014the horse has well and truly bolted \u2014 and second, the incident underscores yet again people\u2019s dependence on modern technology and vulnerability to it.<\/p>\n

A dime a dozen<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s deal with the chronology first. It really began in 2014 with a study<\/a> by Wu Youyou and Michal Kosinski of Cambridge and Stanford Universities, respectively, along with a coauthor from Stanford University.<\/p>\n

As part of the research, participants were asked to create a personality portrait based on the OCEAN model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extravertism, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), involving downloading the Facebook app MyPersonality, which analyzed their likes. About 86,000 people took part. The authors\u2019 main conclusion was that the Web knows much more about people than people know about themselves. Sure thing, Sherlock.<\/p>\n

The results attracted the interest of another Cambridge University professor by the name of Alexander Kogan<\/a>. Kogan is reported to have asked to see the initial research data, but was declined. It\u2019s not known why \u2014 professional ethics, potential legal trouble with Facebook (although officially no rules would have been broken at the time), or academic rivalry. Whatever the case, soon after the exchange, Kogan decided to conduct his own study.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Facebook tightened its privacy settings, making likes inaccessible to third-party apps by default. But then crowdsourcing came to Kogan\u2019s rescue \u2014 in the form of Amazon Mechanical Turk, where the app Thisisyourdigitallife was hosted. Users were informed that the app had been created for the purpose of conducting a psychological study, and Kogan was named as the research leader.<\/p>\n

The purpose of the research was stated as follows: to study the likes of as many Facebook users as possible and build sociopsychological profiles based on that information. The participants, about 270,000 in all, were paid a dollar each.<\/p>\n

There was nothing criminal about the study itself \u2014 except perhaps the price tag ($270,000 is quite an outlay for a psychological study, and one doubts that the Cambridge professor paid for it himself).<\/p>\n

However, such data is a goldmine for market scientists \u2014 and not only those who work for commercial companies, but also those in political parties. The idea that political figures are marketable like consumer goods to the masses (based on target group preferences) has been around since Stanley Milgram began conducting his renowned sociopsychological experiments.<\/p>\n

Milgram is remembered today for, among other things, his revelations about the interconnectedness of North Americans. It\u2019s likely Milgram thought the development of technology would bring us ever closer together. But even he could not have imagined that, having obtained data on hundreds of thousands of people, research commissioners would be able to up that figure to hundreds of times greater (according to the latest accusations against Cambridge Analytica) than the original number of respondents.<\/p>\n

That was because in handing over information about their likes, research participants simultaneously also gave away their Facebook friends\u2019 likes, raising the count to over 50 million.<\/p>\n

GetContact: Find a contact or give your contacts away?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n