Every day brings new revelations about the protection of personal data and the nefarious uses to which it can be put. The most recent scandal involves Facebook and the way it manages third-party access to user information. Current protocols and regulations are not doing the job. Ordinary users — individuals whose most intimate details are being traded and exploited — must register their discontent if change is to come. Absent a radical shift in thinking among consumers, that is unlikely.
Facebook is facing intense scrutiny in the wake of charges that Cambridge Analytica (CA), a data-mining firm that puts its skills to work on behalf of political campaigns, violated Facebook rules by taking personal data from the social media site's users and the company did nothing about it. In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher developed a personality quiz app that required users to grant access to their personal data, information that included friends and "likes." While "just" 270,000 users downloaded and used the app, it estimated that each Facebook user has about 200 friends, meaning that the researcher had access to more than 50 million people.
The researcher provided the data to CA, which used it to create detailed profiles of users and target them in the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. (The Trump campaign has said that it did not use data from CA; Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the claim.) Provision of the data to a third party violated Facebook's rules and Facebook says that it conducts "a robust review" to ensure that apps have a legitimate need to obtain users' data. The company also says that it discovered the transfer in 2015 and demanded that CA delete the data, and received assurances that it had done so. A whistleblower has claimed that Facebook knew otherwise and did nothing to either stop the violations or protect the data of its users.