Tag: Mass

Almost 90 million Facebook users from Los Angeles to London may have had their online information illegally collected by Cambridge Analytica as part of its work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mark Zuckerberg, the social networking giant’s chief executive, will testify to U.S. lawmakers this week over claims that the tech giant played fast and loose in its protection of people’s online privacy. Do people using such websites really understand that they are, in fact, data-gathering strategies by the country’s leading political parties? Just as Facebook, YouTube and other popular digital services offered people apparently “free” goodies in return for their personal information, lawmakers have realized that they too can use similar smartphone-friendly tactics to (legitimately) gather data on potential voters. Privacy campaigners — and, increasingly, the general public — have raised hackles about how much data many of the world’s largest tech companies now hold on all of our digital habits. But to play, people had to hand over a raft of personal information, including their cellphone numbers and addresses, as well as complete an online survey about Brexit, which was then used by Vote Leave’s data experts to hone their political targeting tactics. As part of the Trump and Vote Leave campaign apps, which functioned as quasi-social networks, people were asked to fill in personal information, including their phone numbers and, in the U.S., voter registration information. “It’s about people coming back to the app.” Neither the Trump or Vote Leave campaigns were the only ones to use such digital tactics to woo voters into handing over personal information. If anything, the recent Facebook data scandal has taught us is that nothing in the digital world is free. The same also goes for politics.