University of the Pacific professor discusses Facebook data breach

In light of recent allegations of unethical data mining via Facebook, Rick Hutley, program director and professor of University of the Pacific’s Data Services Department explained what happened.

Christopher Wylie, co-founder of the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica which specializes in data mining and analysis, claimed that Russian-born data scientist Alexsander Kogan sold data to the firm that he had collected from Facebook two years ago, Hutley said.

“In essence, Dr. Kogan, who is not a part of Cambridge Analytica, is a data scientist trained at Cambridge University, U.K. He built a Facebook survey application, and approached Facebook users claiming that he would use their data for research” Hutley said.

Approximately 270,000 people agreed and downloaded the application which collected their data, Hutley explained. The application also used the participants’ friends lists to capture data from more than 50 million Facebook users, he added, who had no idea that their data was being collected, or for what purpose.

Kogan reportedly sold the data to Cambridge Analytica, Hutley said, who then used it to perform psychographic analysis on the millions of people during the presidential election in the U.S. as well as the Brexit vote in the U.K. to modify their behavior and sway their decisions.

“Dr. Kogan absolutely acted unethically, but whether or not he acted illegally remains to be seen. He captured data under false pretenses, captured far more data than was agreed upon and gathered data without knowledge or consent,” Hutley said.

Cambridge Analytica denied knowing where the data came from, Hutley said, which he finds hard to believe. Facebook also claimed that they did not know what the data would be used for, he added, saying that the two parties would be negligent, at best, if they were in fact ignorant of the data’s source and intended use.

SCL, formerly Strategic Communications Laboratories, is the British parent company of Cambridge Analytica, Hutley said, that specializes in data collection for targeted marketing.

Steve Bannon, a former advisor to President Donald Trump’s campaign and executive board member of Cambridge Analytica, allegedly tried to get SCL and billionaire Trump supporter Robert Mercer to fund the building of a Cambridge Analytica office in the U.S. and helped make the decision to purchase the data from Kogan.

“The idea of using data to understand an audience is nothing new. The big story here is how the data was captured. It was captured unethically, in vast quantities and used by Cambridge Analytica and, one can only assume, the Trump campaign. If they didn’t know where the data came from, they should have asked,” Hutley said.

Although he is unaware of this happening to other websites, Hutley said that it could possibly happen to sites such as Google and Amazon that he said store similar types and amounts of data.

“It’s not just the data itself, but what we can infer from the data. If you go on Facebook and click ‘like,’ the data from that like is recorded. It also means that an analyst can pigeonhole you from the gathered data. Data scientists can determine all sorts of things — your politics, sexual orientation, faith — a lot more information than just the data itself,” Hutley said.

In order to prevent this from happening again, Hutley said that governments need to enact regulations requiring websites to disclose what data they have. He also mentioned the General Data Protection regulations that will take effect in Europe in May allowing users to find out what types of data companies hold and request that it be removed or corrected.

Corporations also need to emphasize ethical behavior more strongly, Hutley added, and have consequences in place for employees who violate those ethics.

“On a personal level, we all need to be responsible for what we expose. Some of that information is impossible to control, but people post incredible amounts of information. We need to be far more diligent and conscious of the data we share with the world and how it might be used. Data science is a powerful tool, but it does mean that companies need to employ professional data scientists trained in the ethical aspects. As with anything, with great power comes great responsibility,” Hutley said.