From Digital Culture & Society

Article Title: User Data Privacy: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Privacy Protection

Find article online: http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/00189162/v51i0008/56_udpfcaapp.xml

doi: 10.1109/MC.2018.3191268

Contents 1 Context 2 Overview 3 Strengths and Weaknesses 4 Assessment

[edit] Context

With the revelation that Facebook handed over personally identifiable information of more than 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, it is now imperative that comprehensive privacy policy laws be developed. Technologists, researchers, and innovators should meaningfully contribute to the development of these policies. The ubiquity of data gathering,storage, and analytics on our devices, systems, applications, and social media platforms—aimed at personalizing experiences, optimizing sales, and maximizing return—have been disruptive in shaping the global economy, the flow of ideas, and access to information that resulted in the advancement of innovation around the information marketplace.

[edit] Overview

The discovery that Facebook gave unfettered and unauthorized access to personally identifiable information (PII) of more than 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users to the data firm Cambridge Analytica has fuelled growing interest in the debate over technology’s societal impact and risks to citizens’ privacy and well-being. It is clear that national governance institutions demonstrably lack the ability to anticipate technology’s future impact on the rights and duties of its citizens, much less its impact on the structure of society, ideological divides, and political schisms among its citizens and the expansion of identity politics promoted by isolated social and news media echo chambers.

[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses

A major strength of this article is how it encourages subjective thinking for social media users, specifically users of Facebook. Facebook users who read this article are forced to think differently, more critically, about their profiles. This article does possess many strengths as Jim Isaak does support his claims strongly, however it does shine a negative light on Facebook opposed to Cambridge Analytica. With that being said the article can potentially be damaging for the social media platform, as it creates an anxiety for users about their user data privacy. Although it is important to think more critically about this, the article may encourage users to delete their profiles all together as little to no solutions have been provided through the article. A very minor weakness in an article that contains many strengths, and even this weakness could be looked at as beneficial for the article because it encourages users to think differently and become more aware of their own data privacy.

[edit] Assessment

This article provides a critical analysis of the privacy that Facebook can manipulate. Facebook has the ability to compromise it's user's profiles and mislead them with the ideologies that their profiles are private and unaccessible by anyone else. However this article discusses how there is a growing interest over analyzing this data in order to anticipate or address certain implications in the future. Specifically this article addresses how Cambridge Analytica has fuelled the growing interest in user data privacy.

---Jc13vi 21:44, 21 March 2019 (EDT)