Losing faith in Facebook

MOST Australians do not trust Facebook and four in five users fear their information could be hacked.

Just 15 per cent of the population are confident Facebook will keep their personal data secure, according to the national YouGov Galaxy survey done before the emergence of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed sensitive information was harvested from more than 50 million Facebook profiles and used to target US voters with tailored advertisements.

“If the survey was re-run now I’d say the level of trust in Facebook would have slumped significantly — and it was starting from a low benchmark,” said YouGov Galaxy managing director David Briggs.

The survey, commissioned by News Corp Australia, found 62 per cent of Australians do not trust Facebook and 84 per cent say they should be able to opt out of having their information stored. Given millions of Australians are using Facebook every day, the level of trust in it was“phenomenally low”, Mr Briggs said.

University of WA senior research fellow David Glance said Australians were “waking up to how much information they are leaking through Facebook”.

“Facebook built a platform, they don’t really know how it’s being used by bad actors and don’t really know how to control that,” said Associate Professor Glance, who recently took steps to lock down his personal data on Facebook and sold his $30,000 of shares in what was, until recently, the world’s fifth-largest company.

“I didn’t want to be invested in a company as bad as Facebook.”

Its business model was based on collecting as much in- formation about users as possible “and exploiting it”, he said.

Facebook has detailed data on about 16 million Australians. Many have provided their date of birth, credit card details and names of relatives. Possibly without being fully aware of it, they may have also granted access to the mobile phone numbers of everyone they know. Some users have discovered Facebook has logs of their phone calls and text messages.

While there is a growing awareness that it tracks other sites you visit on the internet, what is less well known is Facebook recently began using facial recognition to identify users in photos and that an account holder has to opt out to stop this happening.

The YouGov Galaxy poll found even a majority of Millennials do not trust Facebook.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant recommended all social media users limit the amount of personal information they provide.

THE cheating in the Australian cricket team pales in comparison to the deception uncovered in the Facebook scandal.

Aussie Test captain Steve Smith and teammates have been sanctioned, shamed and will forever carry their dishonour.

So far just one person, Cambridge Analytica’s Alexander Nix, has suffered any retribution at all for a plot that involved the surreptitious harvest of personal data from up to 50 million people for political ends.

Novelist George Orwell failed to imagine the sophistication of deceit involved in the Facebook scandal when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, his novel about Big Brother mind control.

The alarm bells should have gone off when former US president Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign used social media data to bolster support but, like a frog in water coming to the boil, this appeared benign because the data was provided willingly and used largely as an organisational tool.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was a strident and deranged step beyond and, unless we do something about it now, the future holds unthinkable psychological control of the masses.

Facebook started as an amiable way to unite friends and family but with two billion aboard it has become an unprecedented personal record of humanity’s anxieties, beliefs and motivations.

As a resource for marketing, persuasion and yet to be imagined uses, it is the mother lode.

A thousand years ago, an Islamic cleric was quoted saying “knowledge is power and it can command obedience”. Variations of his sentiment have been repeated through history by the likes of 17th century English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon and 20th century physics genius Albert Einstein.

Never has it been truer than today.

In 2014, an app built by Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan was downloaded by 270,000 Facebook users after they had perused every word of the tiny print we all read so diligently before we click “agree” to download.

Kogan’s This is Your Digital Life app invited users to find out their personality type via a quiz, and it harvested their information and that of their Facebook friends without their knowledge.

Kogan says he got data from 30 million people. Others suggest 50 million.

Cambridge University’s legal office raised ethical questions about research being done in Kogan’s department at the time.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie says this Facebook data went from Kogan (via his other academic post at St Petersburg University in Russia) to British firm Cambridge Analytica, with whom he was working at the time.

Facebook says Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica without its knowledge. Cambridge Analytica blames Kogan for any breach of data rules. Kogan reckons he is the fall guy for both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie says Cambridge Analytica got funding from multi-billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer and, with Trump campaign strategist and former Cambridge Analytica executive Stephen Bannon in the know, used the data to psychologically profile users.

It then employed content designers to create pro-Trump and anti-Clinton bait to persuade voters.

WYLIE says this content focused on fears and anxieties identified in the personality profiling and led selected susceptible voters down an Alice In Wonderlandstyle rabbit hole of mouse clicks that had been mapped out for them. The rabbit hole, and its breadcrumb trail, led to Planet Trump.

The intention, Wylie says, was to create, galvanise and mobilise the alt-right.

This clandestine manipulation of voters is Orwellian and Machiavellian but so peculiar to the 21st century it deserves its own moniker. It is Trumpian.

British public service TV broadcaster Channel 4 went undercover and secretly filmed senior Cambridge Analytica figures talking strategies from online chicanery to old-school bribery and entrapment.

Cambridge Analytica “suspended” CEO Nix in the wake of the Channel 4 broadcast last week. Nix claimed what he had said on the broadcast was hyperbole and taken out of context.

Others, including Kogan, have since dismissed claims the US election was influenced by Cambridge Analytica, saying the science of profiling is more fantasy than reality.

We do not know what effect Cambridge Analytica (or parent company SCL and affiliates such as AggregateIQ) had on Trump’s election or, as claims are now surfacing, on the Brexit vote.

Even if it had no effect, alarm bells, air-raid sirens and town criers should be ringing.

The science of profiling, artificial intelligence and quantum computers is advancing rapidly and in the near future could make Cambridge Analytica’s scheme look like child’s play.

We need detailed protection in our laws and a set of overarching principles, including the right to freedom and privacy, that can stand the test of time in a rapidly changing world.

We must ensure humanity is not trampled in the stampede to the future.

We have a generation born into social media that has little concern for privacy and is gambolling like lambs to the slaughter toward a society in which powerful and sly elites play the strings of their marionette masses.

Meanwhile, Steve Smith and his conspirators have lost their jobs for scuffing up a ball. And rightly so.