Tag: Information Age

Last week, social media giant Facebook announced that it was suspending data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) from its platform. According to Facebook, CA had violated its policies on user data when a researcher accessed millions of user's data from the site and transferred it to CA. Vindication, because we had already seen the footprints of various data analytics firms like CA all over our contentious, yet-unresolved 2017 election; alarm because we still don't know what exactly CA did in Kenya beyond its PR operations. And that, in part, is why this issue has caused problems for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in the UK and not in North America or Africa: UK privacy law prohibits such indirect data collection and has systems in place to punish it. Of course, illegality and immorality are two separate things. All of this is illegal in the UK, where the corporation is domiciled. Kenyan politicians still don't get it. For CA, the Kenyan election was a revenue stream. Cambridge Analytica was both a data analytics corporation and a political consultancy, and it is important not to conflate the responses to both. The political consulting problem is more complex because the solution lies in changing the political culture around the world.