The Cambridge Analytica Con

When news broke that British election data firm Cambridge Analytica may have accessed millions of Facebook profiles and used that information to help shape the 2016 US presidential vote, pundits and consumers alike were predictably outraged. In an era of nearly daily massive data breaches and growing concerns around privacy in general, it is appropriate that media outlets shine a spotlight on companies that violate the public trust. In order to truly understand what happened with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, that scrutiny needs to dig deeper than just two companies.

“What Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing, Facebook and Silicon Valley giants like Google do every day, indeed, every minute we’re logged on.”

As far back as the 1950s, US political institutions were using data to understand and control world events, especially as anticommunist sentiment grew. That’s the environment in which Ithiel de Sola Pool cut his analytics teeth and eventually founded a military contracting company called Simulmatics. That outfit would contribute to the development of ARPANET, an early version of the Internet that allowed military personnel to work with large datasets to make predictions about potential political uprisings. Pool devised a system to represent each potential voter as an aggregate of 480 data points, a model he used to help John F. Kennedy tailor his campaign messages in the 1960 presidential election.

“Now, of course, every election is a Facebook Election.”

While Pool and his company are long gone, the ideas they helped engender live on, and the maturation of the Internet has made it easier to collect the data that inform the various models being developed by Cambridge Analytica and others like them. After all, it was Facebook, and not Cambridge Analytica, that collected all those user profiles, and Facebook makes good use of the information to promote the stories and posts it deems most relevant or influential for each user.

“We are tracked and watched and profiled every minute of every day by countless companies – from giant platform monopolies like Facebook and Google to boutique data-driven election firms like i360 and Cambridge Analytica.”

Facebook isn’t alone, as other tech giants like Google and Amazon also have built their empires on the ability to understand their users at deeper levels. That knowledge only comes about through intense and constant data collection and analysis. Unfortunately, public outrage and oversight don’t reach nearly as deep.