‘The Great Hack’ tells us why we should be afraid of big data
Los Angeles Times
“The Great Hack” couldn’t be more timely, or unsettling. An intentionally disturbing examination of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it both explains and offers a warning shot about the misuse of personal data and how that influenced past elections and might well do so in the future.
While the name of that defunct British firm, at one point “the world’s leading data-driven communications company,” is likely familiar, “Great Hack” provides invaluable specifics about what the company did and why it mattered.
Trimmed down as well as featuring additional interviews since it debuted in Sundance, this significant and provocative film is directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim.
While Noujaim’s last film, the Oscar-nominated “The Square,” showed, among other things, the positive role Facebook had in Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising, “Great Hack” is nowhere near as optimistic about other aspects of the social media giant.
Because this is a complicated situation, Amer and Noujaim convey its essentials and implications by following the stories of three people of interest.
Introduced first is David Carroll, a professor who teaches digital media at New York’s Parsons School of Design who remembers the initial euphoria over the digital revolution.
“It was the dream of a connected world,” he says, a tool that could function as “our matchmaker, our fact-checker, our entertainer, our therapist.”
But while we were being dazzled by what digital media could do for us, it was taking notes on everything we did, compiling a digital footprint that allowed us to be targeted by advertisers as well as political parties.
“We are the commodity,” Carroll says. “We were so in love, no one read the terms and conditions.”
“Great Hack” follows Carroll (who comes to believe that “data rights are the ultimate human rights”) as he sues Cambridge Analytica in British courts in an attempt to force the firm to reveal exactly what it knows about him.
How this data were acquired by Cambridge Analytica and how the firm came to specialize in using it to manipulate elections is told by two other protagonists, Carole Cadwalladr and the woman who becomes the film’s de facto star, Brittany Kaiser.
Cadwalladr, a veteran reporter for Britain’s Observer newspaper, was key to breaking the story of how Cambridge clandestinely harvested data acquired from Facebook and used it to influence various political campaigns, including the TrumpClinton presidential race.
Kaiser, at one time Cambridge Analytica’s director of business development, has a complicated relationship to data harvesting, as demonstrated by the film’s opening vignette, where she is shown at a recent Burning Man writing the firm’s name on the soon-to-be-incinerated pyre, clearly hoping to expunge it from her life.
Once a true believer who worked at the firm for 3 1/2 years and considered Cambridge’s Chief Executive Alexander Nix a friend and mentor, Kaiser turned into an unlikely whistle-blower who testified to legislative bodies on both sides of the Atlantic.