Facebook may stop the data leaks, but it's too late: Cambridge Analytica's models live on

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: April 13, 2018 at 7:57:36 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Facebook may stop the data leaks, but it's too late: Cambridge Analytica's models live on
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Steve Schear.  DLH]
>
> Facebook may stop the data leaks, but it’s too late: Cambridge Analytica’s models live on
> Long after the training data has been deleted, the models can continue being improved and used to influence future 
> voters.
> By Jacob Metcalf
> Apr 9 2018
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610801/facebook-may-stop-the-data-leaks-but-its-too-late-cambridge-analyticas-models-live-on/>
>
> Today Facebook is releasing a tool that will allow its users to see if their Facebook profile was harvested by 
> Cambridge Analytica. Facebook says 87 million people were affected, 71 million of them in the US. It makes for a 
> compelling story about egregious personal privacy harms committed in pursuit of electoral victories. In response, 
> Facebook has clamped down on access to its users’ data, and in his testimony to Congress this week, CEO Mark 
> Zuckerberg promises to make political advertising on the platform more transparent.
>
> But focusing solely on the purloined data is a mistake. Much more important are the behavioral models Cambridge 
> Analytica built from the data. Even though the company claims to have deleted the data sets in 2015 in response to 
> Facebook’s demands, those models live on, and can still be used to target highly specific groups of voters with 
> messages designed to leverage their psychological traits. Although the stolen data sets represent a massive 
> collection of individual privacy harms, the models are a collective harm, and far more pernicious.
>
> In what follows, I argue that Cambridge Analytica and its parent and sister companies were among the first to figure 
> out how to turn behavioral algorithms into a portable worldview—a financially valuable, politically potent model of 
> how humans behave and how society should be structured. To understand Cambridge Analytica, the anti-democratic vision 
> it represents, and the potentially illegal behavior that its techniques may make possible, follow the models.
>
> (In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked as a consultant for Facebook on topics not directly related to 
> this story.)
>
> The data
>
> First, let’s discuss that data. As has been widely reported, the original data set was collected by Global Science 
> Research (GSR), a small firm belonging to University of Cambridge quantitative psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, for SCL, 
> the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Kogan used a personality quiz named “thisismydigitallife,” hosted on 
> Facebook, to obtain access to the Facebook profiles of the 270,000 people who took the quiz. That allowed him to use 
> Facebook’s API—which was then much more permissive than it is today—to scrape the data of their Facebook friends, 
> allegedly a total of 87 million. (That’s much more than the 30 million profiles that SCL says it contracted for.) 
> Cambridge Analytica then combined the Facebook data with other data sets to build robust, integrated profiles of 30 
> million US voters.
>
> In what remains a murky and ethically dubious exchange, it appears that Kogan claimed to Facebook that he was 
> collecting this data for only academic purposes, despite the clear commercial intent of his contract with SCL (page 
> 67) and discussion of commercial purposes with his home university. Reselling this data in the fashion GSR was 
> contracted for was clearly a violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook overlooked red flags about the amount 
> of data being collected because of Kogan’s academic credentials, and now claims that he deceived people at Facebook 
> about his intents.
>
> However, though Cambridge Analytica built profiles of 30 million US voters, its central goal wasn’t to craft ads 
> targeted at those people. Rather, the models it built from that much smaller cohort of 270,000 quiz-takers would 
> allow an advertiser to create proxy profiles of much larger collections of similar people on Facebook. This 
> capability is what enabled the company to craft ads precisely targeted at small groups of voters based on personality 
> traits. And it continues to exist even after the original data is deleted.
>
> The method
>
> Kogan’s technique—emulating an innovation by psychology researchers at the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, 
> particularly Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell—was to use a scientifically validated psychology quiz inside 
> Facebook’s API system. By taking the quiz, users also granted him access to a gold mine of behavioral 
> data—essentially the record of their “likes” on Facebook.
>
> This allowed Kogan to correlate that relatively inexpensive behavioral record with an otherwise expensive 
> psychological measurement, all of it conveniently formatted by Facebook. Although this method was fairly new when 
> Cambridge Analytica seized upon it in 2014, recent research has shown commercial advertising built with the Cambridge 
> researchers’ psychological techniques to be significantly more effective than non-targeted ads.
>
> The value of this data is predicated on the emerging field of digital psychometrics, the science of quantitative 
> measurement of psychological and personality characteristics. All people are presumed to fit somewhere on a matrix of 
> “high” and “low” rankings of certain traits—most commonly the “OCEAN” or “Big 5” traits: openness to experience, 
> conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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