but ever since these companies started
amassing our data the clock has been
ticking in 2008 we showed you how you
and your friends 'facebook data could be
accessed by a rogue facebook application
without consent in 2011 a researcher
called Mikael Kaczynski warns that if
computers could analyze enough Facebook
data from enough people they could spot
connections between the way you act
online and your personality traits the
type of person you are what's really
world-changing about those algorithms
it's that they can take your music
preferences or your book preferences and
extract from these seemingly innocent
information very accurate predictions
about your religiosity leadership
potential political views personality
and so on by having hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of Americans
undertake this survey we were able to
form a model to predict the personality
of every single adult in the United
States of America by 2016 alexander nix
was explaining how cambridge analytic
could use this kind of research to find
people of different personality types
and target them with specific messages
that might influence their behavior if
you know that the personality of the
people you're targeting you can nuance
your messaging to resonate more
effectively with those key audience
groups because it's personality that
drives behavior and behavior that
obviously influences how you vote soon
afterwards these techniques were used by
two political campaigns that would rock
the world
yes your likes and dislikes your
comments and posts your personal data
they are valuable but it's what they say
about you as a person that's where the
real power lies no one knows exactly how
much these techniques actually
contributed to the results of the votes
one of the first researchers to ask the
question was Paul Olivier - hey
he works on an article at the end of
2016 that investigated what was
happening and this week he was here in
London to give evidence to MPs about the
latest revelations sitting alongside him
in the Commons Select Committee was
Cambridge analytic a whistleblower
Christopher Wylie and straight after the
session Paul sat down with me this isn't
just about Facebook and this isn't just
about Cambridge analytic where is it
this kind of data collection analysis
has been going on for a long time
and it's being done by lots of people
right so it's in two ways it's not just
about those companies Facebook enables a
lot more companies than just camber
charity care to suck out data in similar
ways so that's the first thing and then
Facebook is just one player in a big
ecosystem of online advertising online
profiling some of the companies you have
heard of but some of them you just have
no relationship with even if you fully
understand the terms and conditions that
you're agreeing to about what data
you're sharing I don't think anyone
really understood what can be inferred
from the data so not the list of your
friends not your likes and dislikes but
the things that you've never talked
about that now they can tell from your
digital footprint yeah it's really hard
to understand the inference power of
this data what can be deduced from it
that's true how people make decisions
basically whether they think about about
the issue but before making a decision
or not another way to say this is that
they were trying to find gullible people
so if you are able to do that you can
just make them you know buy into
anything into any content it's easy to
believe that Facebook managed to swing
the u.s. election
to swing brexit was only people on
Facebook who saw these new ads that were
targeted to them and then went out and
possibly changed their votes is that
what we're talking about or are we
talking about Facebook just being used
as a research tool that could then be
applied to the wider community in in
many ways whether people were
individually convinced to vote
differently I don't personally believe
that's how it happens what I believe is
that Facebook itself could be
manipulated using those techniques to
make some content go viral that would
affect public discourse so that would
steer the conversation basically and if
you're able to do this more or less you
know automated more less repetitive in a
repetitive fashion then you've partly
already won the election because you're
steering the conversation around the
election and that's precisely the point
that Hillary Clinton has been making
again and again about camera gigantica
is their ability to steer the
conversation on specific topics like
emails and that's that had an impact the
fact that some content was Reshard
widely during the election had an impact
on editorial decisions made by classic
media more established media which in
turn had an impact on you know other
people's opinions Paul says that even
though Facebook and Google have recently
allowed us to download everything that
they have on us it's not really
everything so Facebook can collect data
of people who don't have Facebook
accounts
yeah it's called shadow profiles yeah so
that practice for instance has been
forbidden in Belgium where I'm from they
even people who do have an account are
being tracked all over the web all over
that same information is collected about
them why can't they see it why can't
they see all the web pages that Facebook
knows they visited before making that
transparent will have a very dramatic
effect I think in making people aware of
how much tracking goes on do you think
that UK or EU regulation is strong
enough when it comes to protecting
our data that's what part of what I
wanted to say in the committee we have
very strong regulations around personal
data that are going to get stronger but
it's completely useless and actually
worse than not having them if we're not
going to enforce them they need to be
enforced that's the critical point we're
currently things are failing why are
they not being enforced because the
regulator's currently see their role as
balancing commercial interests with
Democratic interest around oversight of
personal data and that balancing they've
done so far was wrong or simply wrong
too much on the side of commercial
interests and not enough the
counterbalances issue on Facebook's
reputation and its wealth has taken a
massive hit in the last couple of weeks
with 80 billion dollars being wiped off
its value so can the recently announced
new privacy tools help to restore
confidence this is the end for Facebook
Facebook can still adapt their ways they
can still change they will have to
anyway because of the regulation that's
coming into force it's an opportunity to
revenge themselves if you want to say it
that way