The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytica Years Ago

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

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 20, 2018 at 2:35:55 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytica Years Ago
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytica Years Ago
> By Issie Lapowski
> Jun 19 2018
> <https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-who-saw-the-dangers-of-cambridge-analytica/>
>
> In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a 
> professor, warning them that a storm was brewing.
>
> According to an email reviewed by WIRED, Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, 
> Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. 
> Not only did the app collect data on people who opted into it, it also collected data on those users’ Facebook 
> friends. He wrote that if just 100,000 people opted into the app, and if they had an average of 150 friends each, 
> Kogan would have access to 15 million people’s data, which he could then use for the purposes of political 
> persuasion. Journalists had already begun poking around, and Rust wanted the school to intervene, arguing Kogan’s 
> work put the university at risk of “considerable media attention, almost entirely adverse.”
>
> “Their intention is to extend this to the entire US population and use it within an election campaign,” Rust wrote of 
> Kogan and his client, a little-known political consulting firm that went on to be called Cambridge Analytica. He 
> predicted, “I simply can’t see this one going away.”
>
> Six months later, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, and launched a campaign 
> that depended, in part, on Cambridge Analytica's work. His shocking election victory in 2016 thrust the firm into the 
> spotlight, earning the company contracts with major commercial clients around the world. But more than a year after 
> it helped get Trump in the White House, news broke that Cambridge Analytica had hired Kogan to harvest the data of 
> tens of millions of American Facebook users without their consent, stoking international outrage from those who felt 
> their privacy had been violated.
>
> As director of the university’s Psychometrics Centre, which researches and develops psychological tests, Rust knew 
> better than most how Facebook data can be manipulated. It was researchers in his own lab who first discovered that 
> Facebook likes could be used to deduce all sorts of sensitive information about people’s personalities and political 
> persuasions. But he says the goal of that research—and the goal of his 40 years in the field—was to warn the world 
> about what can be done with this data and the dangers of allowing it to be so freely traded.
>
> Years later, Rust takes no joy in being proven right. “We could see even four years ago the potential damage it would 
> do, and there was nothing we seemed to be able to do to stop it,” he says today.
>
> Facebook now acknowledges that Kogan collected the Facebook data of up to 87 million Americans and sold it to 
> Cambridge Analytica. But as CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team attempt to clean up the mess, Rust is hardly being 
> hailed as some digital Paul Revere. Instead, his entire department and indeed his entire legacy have been swept up 
> with both Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, accused by Zuckerberg himself of committing the very violations that Rust 
> tried to warn against.  “Our number one goal is to protect people’s data first and foremost,” says Ime Archibong, 
> Facebook’s director of product partnerships. “We have an opportunity to do better.”
>
> Since this spring, when news of the scandal broke, Facebook has cut off several apps used in the Psychometrics 
> Centre's work, and in his testimony before Congress earlier this year, Zuckerberg suggested that “something bad” 
> might be going on within the department that required further investigation from Facebook. In written responses 
> submitted to Congress last week, Facebook mentions the Psychometrics Centre 16 times, always in conjunction with 
> Kogan, who briefly collaborated with the researchers there.
>
> Now Rust and others await the results of Facebook’s investigation, which is itself on hold until UK regulators finish 
> their own probe. And yet the Centre’s reputation already seems inextricably bound to the fallout of the Cambridge 
> Analytica scandal. Rust fears the condemnations from Facebook have not only tainted the legacy of the department, 
> they’ve brought a key area of research to a halt at a time when Rust insists it’s needed most.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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