In “’I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: Meet the data war whistleblower” the author talks with Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, who goes on record to speak about his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in an effort to target the U.S. electorate.
More specifically, Wylie speaks of Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 election. Wylie created the idea of analyzing the Facebook profiles of more than 230 million U.S. citizens and then used their personal information to create “psychological and political profiles” so that they could be targeted with political ads that worked “on their psychological makeup.” Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of the news network Breibart, liked Wylie’s idea and saw it as a way to transform big data and social media into military methodology.
Thus, based on a popular Facebook personality quiz created in 2007, called myPersonality, in which users were scored based on the “big five” personality traits, such as openness and conscientiousness, 40% of users consented to the sharing of their Facebook profiles. In this way, personality traits could be measured from millions of users, along with scores against Facebook “likes.” Through these measures, patterns could be analyzed between a person’s interests and their political views. This became very useful for Cambridge Analytica.
While this article was interesting and insightful in regards to something I had always heard about, but never knew much of, it was also very eye opening. When my friends and I are bored, it’s easy to see a silly quiz online and take it. I never realized how the information you share could actually be later used against you or for some overarching purpose. I think now I’ll be more careful with the types of information I share online. When taking part in a quiz, for example, it seems as if the information isn’t going anywhere, when apparently it really could be. What other social media platforms are being used as political tools, I wonder? Is any social media platform really a safe space for users? I’m not so sure.
Deirdre, you bring up some really fascinating points. I also take quizzes online with my friends on a consistent basis. We all take the same ones and compare our answers, which is a really fun and silly activity. I had heard that personal information can be gleaned from these quizzes, but I did not fully realize the severity of the implications. From these quizzes, it seems like sensitive personal information can be stored and consequently used elsewhere to cause harm/hack (i.e. to answer a security question for a bank). This is a digital literacy skill that everyone should be aware of, especially more vulnerable populations like elderly individuals.
You bring up an interesting point about how the information we give to simple things like quizzes or websites could be used for an overarching purpose, and I agree that it is something we should be more aware of. It makes me wonder, does the potential risk of your personal information being given away outweigh the benefit of whatever the original purpose for using a site was?
Your point that the random quizzes we take online could be stored is an interesting one, especially because almost everyone has taken at least one buzz feed quiz it seems. I know that when I was first getting to know my current girlfriend over zoom we took probably 50 buzzfeed quizzes, so your post made me wonder how much random data analysts out there know about me.
The idea that online quizzes or mini games can be used to collect information and gather data is impressive. Also, nowadays, more and more applications and websites want people’s permission to gather data, and stores want people’s personal information. We live in an era that have limited privacy, and it really makes people concern about the online environment.