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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