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Friday, March 29, 2024

Striking a gold mine

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We normally would not provide details of our lives and personalities to an acquaintance, much less a total stranger.

We would shy away from doing it, per se, and perhaps even more so if we knew that the information would be used by others to profit from—monetarily, politically, or any other way.

We could, however, be persuaded to take some interesting polls over social media. Certainly they look harmless, and it does sound nice to validate what we think we already know about ourselves. Or be surprised.

This was how exactly a company called Cambridge Analytica was able to fleece intimate information from thousands of Facebook users who took a personality quiz through an app called “thisismydigitallife.”

Now the CEO of the company has been made to step down following the discovery that information generated from the quiz was used in the campaign of US President Donald Trump. The data did not only belong to the actual people who took the quiz but also to those on their friends list. The final tally came up to 50 million Facebook users—their personal information, their interests, places they’ve visited, their photos, and everything else they have shared.

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In fact, this is not a new practice altogether. Marketers use information to target their campaigns and know whom to sell what to. They point to what people have “liked,” where they have been, even the words they frequently use as an indicator of their actual and potential buying patterns.

It could also be used to predict voting patterns, it turned out.

Because this is a field with which only a few specialists are familiar, it is easy to disregard the potential harm in offering such information about ourselves. But the technology is there, and is even more dangerous because the invasiveness is cloaked in, say, a harmless-looking online quiz.

Many people just think they are just going about their daily lives, documenting trips and meetings, clicking the thumbs-up sign for something that catches their fancy.

Nothing stops us from doing this, of course. We just have to be reminded that whatever we put online, even when we think we are being careful, is out there and there is no taking the information back. It’s fair game, and those who milk this information are many steps ahead of the overwhelmed regulators and angry public.

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