How you helped create the crisis in private data
The perilous role of data in society has been laid out bare for all to see thanks to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. In this crossposting from The Conversation, Sarah Igo argues the case for why the revelations might ultimately be a good thing, and considers the part we all had to play in its making.
As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress, he’s likely wondering how his company got to the point where he must submit to public questioning. It’s worth pondering how we, the Facebook-using public, got here too.
The scandal in which Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook users to craft and target advertising for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has provoked broad outrage. More helpfully, it has exposed the powerful yet perilous role of data in U.S. society.
Repugnant as its methods were, Cambridge Analytica did not create this crisis on its own. As I argue in my forthcoming book, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America,” big corporations (in this case, Facebook) and political interests (in this case, right-wing parties and campaigns) but also ordinary Americans (social media users, and thus likely you and me) all had a hand in it.
