CLEAR EXPLANATION OF DATA USAGE CAN DELIVER A WIN-WIN
WE know Facebook collects data on its users, but until the Cambridge Analytica revelations, most did not realise just how far it went.
It’s a sober warning to be more careful about downloading free software that is little better than spyware.
Your personal details become a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
With 2.2 billion active users, all those Facebook postings add up to an absolute goldmine. The service is free because you are the product. At last reckoning, Facebook is worth around $500 billion.
The eye of the current storm is Cambridge Analytica, a New York headquartered data mining, brokerage, and analytics company specialising in “strategic communication for the electoral process”.
Translated this means they help political candidates target their campaigns based on the detailed demographic information they get from Facebook and other sources. They helped Donald Trump get elected.
Working with the app developer thisisyourdigitallife, Cambridge acquired personal data from around 50 million Facebook accounts.
People were offered a free downloadable quiz that promised to reveal interesting things about themselves, but first they had to answer some probing questions.
What they didn’t say is this data would be sold to Cambridge, nor did they get people’s informed consent. The data was used very effectively indeed by the Trump campaign.
The Cambridge Analytica fiasco is not an isolated incident in the business of data mining. When you download a “free” app, you pay with your privacy.
When you click “Accept” the terms and conditions, who bothers to read the 5000 word legal document that lies behind it? One survey in Britain found that only 7 per cent of people read the T&Cs carefully when signing up for an online service or product.
That same survey found that one in five people said they had suffered as a result of agreeing to terms and conditions without having read them carefully. One in 10 had been locked into a contract for longer than expected because they didn’t read the small print.
With billions of dollars at stake, IT companies need to make it clearer what the consequences of using that product or service will be, including potential dangers.
One solution that already works well is the way Creative Commons includes a human readable summary of its licensing conditions. It breaks it down to the basics then highlights anything out of the ordinary.
If users can give genuinely informed consent, it’s a winwin situation. If we know we’re agreeing that an online product can use some of our personal information – and we know what that information is – we could receive targeted advertising that might be useful to us, and even be a good fit for our lifestyle.
It’s not difficult to do this, and if you have nothing to hide, the user is unlikely to be scared off by it.