Every like, share and click you perform on Facebook is already being used to target you with content and consumer advertising, but experts warn that activity can also be used to subtly (and sometimes dishonestly) influence your political beliefs, especially with a federal election looming next year.
Some are already sounding the alarm in Canada about the potential for data firms to harvest and repurpose individuals’ Facebook information for political and potentially nefarious purposes, just as one U.K. firm stands accused of doing to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.
It’s alleged that firm, Cambridge Analytica, covertly harvested data on 50 million users to help Trump’s presidential campaign build voter profiles for the U.S. election. A Channel 4 sting also captured video of the company’s top executive, Alexander Nix, suggesting unorthodox methods to help smear an individual’s political opponents. The company has vehemently denied all of the allegations against it.
Canada’s former top spy, Dick Fadden, points out that the federal Liberals, Conservatives and NDP have all contracted data firms of their own. Those firms do not face the same allegations as Cambridge Analytica, but their mere existence should be enough to make Canadians think twice about what they share online, Fadden suggests.
“Basically, what they’re using is a psychological profiling algorithm,” Fadden, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. He explained that these data firms essentially scrape every bit of publicly-available information from social media platforms such as Facebook, then offer that data to political parties for their election campaigns.
“The key is to give political parties and others access to individually-based information that they can use to advance their purposes,” he said.
On Monday, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien voiced his concern that political parties are not currently bound by the same data collection laws that apply to commercial companies. “We have asked Parliament to consider regulating the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by political parties,” Therrien said in a statement.
He added that a research paper was commissioned “some time ago” to examine the issue.
It’s unclear what exactly political parties are currently doing with voter data, but Fadden says the smartest thing online users can do is to practice informed consent. That means actually reading the user agreements that most people simply accept without reviewing. It also means being judicious about what you share and interact with on social media, knowing that it might be used to target you.
“Most people don’t read these agreements, and they don’t know exactly what they’re agreeing to,” he said.
What can be done with my Facebook data?
Your Facebook data is already being used to target you for advertising. For instance, if you’ve been looking at engagement rings, you might start seeing ads for rings or wedding dresses appear on Facebook. And if you’ve been shopping for a vacuum cleaner online, you might start to see Amazon ads for vacuum cleaners in your Facebook feed.
Fadden describes Facebook as a sort of “vacuum cleaner” that will take in and categorize as much information as its users give it. The more information a user provides, the easier it becomes for advertisers to target that person with things they want.
The same principle can also be applied to a person’s political beliefs. For instance, Facebook revealed last fall that a group of suspected Russian trolls purchased targeted advertising during the U.S. presidential election, which ultimately spread to 126 million users. The ads were primarily focused on divisive social issues in the United States, and would point users to pages allegedly run, in secret, by Russian agents. Those pages were also dedicated to fanning division through the sharing of fake news, either by smearing a candidate or encouraging politically-active groups to vote for third-party candidates who had no chance of winning.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the U.S. election, indicted 13 Russians last month in connection with those politically-charged Facebook ads. His indictment suggests the Russian-backed organization ran several Facebook pages dedicated to fanning division on both sides of the political spectrum, with names such as “Blacktivist,” “Trumpsters United,” “South United” and “Secured Borders.”
“These groups and pages, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by Defendants,” Mueller wrote in the indictment. Mueller said the groups were targeting their online ads at people in states known to flip-flop between Republican and Democrat.
Facebook adjusted its News Feed in response to the Russian ad scandal last October, but it is again reeling in light of the Cambridge Analytica allegations, with its shares plummeting by approximately $52 billion this week.
U.K. lawmakers have summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on the issue.
