Facebook users to find out who was hit
‘You are the product,’ warns one victim of the data misuse
Christopher Deason stumbled upon the psychological questionnaire on June 9, 2014. He was taking a lot of online surveys back then, each one earning him a few dollars to help pay the bills. Nothing about this one, which he saw on an online job platform, struck him as “creepy or weird,” he said later.
So at 6:37 that evening, Deason completed the first step of the survey: He granted access to his Facebook account.
Less than a second later, a Facebook app had harvested not only Deason’s profile data but also data from the profiles of 205 of his Facebook friends. Their names, birth dates and location data, as well as lists of every Facebook page they had ever liked, were downloaded — without their knowledge or express consent — before Deason could even begin reading the first survey question.
The information was added to a database being compiled for Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm with links to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. None of the people whose data was collected knew it had happened, not even Deason.
“I don’t think I would have gone forward with it if I had,” Deason, 27, said.
Deason and his Facebook friends became early entries in a database that would ultimately encompass tens of millions of profiles and is now at the center of a crisis facing the social media giant. News of Cambridge Analytica’s data collection has spurred a “Delete Facebook” movement and brought the social network under intensifying scrutiny from lawmakers and others in the U.S. and Britain.
‘A breach of trust’
Still, few of the roughly 214 million Americans with Facebook profiles know whether their data was among the information swept up for Cambridge Analytica. Facebook, which learned of the data misuse in December 2015, plans to begin telling affected users Monday, a day before its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is to testify before Congress. Records reviewed by the Times show that roughly 300,000 people took the survey, but because of the access to friends’ information allowed at the time, Facebook said that as many as 87 million users could have been affected.
But the Times, which has viewed a set of raw data from the profiles that Cambridge Analytica paid an academic researcher to obtain, contacted nearly two dozen affected Facebook users in recent weeks. Some were angry — one woman compared it to being robbed — while others were annoyed but unsurprised, having grown cynical about tech giants’ use of the data they collect. They are the first known affected Facebook users to be publicly identified. And nearly all said the misuse of their data had given them second thoughts about staying on Facebook.
“I’ve come to grips with the fact that you are the product on the internet,” said Mark Snyder, 32, who lives in Florida and was among Deason’s friends whose data was collected.
“If you sign up for anything and it isn’t immediately obvious how they’re making money, they’re making money off of you,” said Snyder, who maintains computer networks for a living.
Zuckerberg has said the misuse of data represented a “breach of trust” by the company. But even he has suggested that other app developers could have done the same.
Until April 2015, Facebook allowed some app developers to collect some private information from the profiles of users who downloaded apps, and from those of their friends. Facebook has said it allowed this kind of data collection to help developers improve the “in-app” experience for users. But Facebook appears to have done little to verify how developers were using the data or whether they were providing any kind of experience on Facebook at all.
For academic purposes
The questionnaire used to collect data for Cambridge Analytica was not actually on Facebook. It was hosted by a company called Qualtrics, which provides a platform for online surveys. It consisted of dozens of questions often used by psychology researchers to assess personality, such as whether the respondent prefers to be alone, tries to lead others and loves large parties (the answer choices range from “disagree strongly” to “agree strongly”). The questionnaire took about 10 to 20 minutes to complete.
Facebook has said that people who took the quiz were told that their data would be used only for academic purposes, claiming that it and its users were misled by Cambridge Analytica and the researcher it hired, Alexander Kogan, a 28-year-old Russian-American academic. But the fine print that accompanied the questionnaire may have told users that their data could be used for commercial purposes, according to a draft of the survey’s terms of service that was reviewed by the Times.
Deason, who runs a computer business in Roanoke, Va., is among Facebook’s more techsavvy users. He is keeping his account open for now because his business has its own page and he moderates Facebook groups dedicated to computers.
“But if I were just working my 9-to-5 at the local bank or whatever, and coming home and getting on Facebook to check on my friends and whatnot, yeah, I would delete Facebook,” he said.