These days the social network Facebook is getting hit from all sides and the most dangerous thing for the company itself is that its CEO and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, does not appear on the scene as he did on previous occasions in which the social network "got into trouble" so it aggravates the issue a little more.
It seems that this time the Facebook scandal is more powerful and it is that platforms are being created for you to eliminate the social network permanently from your computers, something that has also happened on previous occasions but this time it seems to be really active.
Issues related to user privacy
Undoubtedly, if any of you have not been in a cave for several days, you will know that the main problem is related to the privacy of Facebook and the data that was leaked from more than 50 million users of this service. The revealing news from media such as New York Times the newspapers The Guardian and Observer, as well as various official statements issued by own Facebook they offer the magnitude of the problem that this episode has generated.
Undoubtedly, the data was not stolen, manipulated or fraudulently leaked from the Cambridge Analytica consultancy, therefore the stir that has arisen with this issue is greater if possible. The millions of data obtained by this consultancy and that came from Facebook, were used directly in the UK Brexit campaign and during the US elections in 2016, in which Trump won the same.
Who is Cambridge Analytica?
Well, in principle and "without carrying out an illegal maneuver" this consultancy obtained the data of all these people on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica is in charge of assisting in political campaigns, with its parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories, at the fore. This firm has information from many sources and with them conducts surveys to create "profiles" of voters and without a doubt this affects the publicity they receive, which we can call a strategy for political ads to go directly to them.
This company has data on more than 230 million North American voters, which we can undoubtedly say is the entire population taking into account that there are about 250 million people of voting age in the United States. So we already have the second main part of the problem on the table. Manipulating the elections was possible at that very moment and more so considering that the Donald Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica to execute data operations during the 2016 elections, which would be to obtain data and launch direct mail to obtain votes.
How did Cambridge Analytica get Facebook user data?
Well, as I said at the beginning of this article, the company did not perform hacking, forced entry or tampering to get more data from users on Facebook. Here comes Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge, who, thanks to the application "thisisyourdigitallife" that he used to obtain profiles and study the personality of Facebook users as a research, came to Cambridge Analytica without specific permission from users.
This is usually something common when we register for any service, application or similar with our Facebook account, but the problem is that all our friends, acquaintances and other users who have access to our profile are also participants in this data step, therefore the firm can access millions of users simply with our profile, is a string.
"Although Kogan accessed this information legitimately and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at the time, he did not abide by our rules," said Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice president and legal counsel, it's a statement.
Facebook banned access to Cambridge Analytica
If the information in the applications we access with our Facebook user is legal, why did you ban access to Cambridge Analytica? as it seems that after requesting the deletion of the personal data of the users and that it accessed it without problem, it seems that they were not erased entirely.
The personal information of the users is shared with the applications that we access with the Facebook user but these cannot "market" with them and less without our consent, something that Cambridge Analytica was doing until In 2015, Facebook itself eliminated application developers' access to our friends on the social network. This was the "legal" method of obtaining the confidential data of 50 million people who Kogan accidentally switched to Cambridge Analytica.
Adulterated campaigns and Zuckerberg's absence
Logically, Brexit in the United Kingdom or the elections in the United States are key to determining the future of a country, so this is really serious enough to take drastic measures. Many thousands of users are campaigning for us to delete our Facebook account, something that will surely affect the social network that is already noticing the drop in the stock market after the hard blow. Can voting be rigged thanks to the information obtained from Facebook? This remains to be clarified, but it certainly helps a lot to publicize voters and "attack" directly at the necessary points for this.
For his part Mark Zuckerberg, which usually appears in difficult moments with a statement in the social network itself, does not appear and this is setting the atmosphere on fire. In Washington and the United Kingdom, legislators and other officials are demanding the presence of Zuckerberg, something that he has not done to date and that further penalizes the credibility of Facebook's data protection in relation to electoral processes, trolls and piracy that can be found on the social network.
We can do little beyond being suspicious of the information we post on the social network, but this is something very personal and although we are cautious about it, in this case, access to our data was made from "friends" who do use Facebook credentials to log into games or similar, so there is not much to do ... Well yes, we can remove the social network from our devices, but this is not clear to me that everyone likes it so it is up to you.