A dark technology supposedly connecting us globally, but it is actually driving us apart. We should understand how our data is affecting our lives. The Great Hack documentary movie discusses the case of the power of big data and privacy invasion scandal, which happened during 2016 elections. Cambridge Analytica data company “A country’s intelligence agency and a fully service propaganda machine” collected private data from some sources and mostly from Facebook to be able to work in the politics of various countries, including the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign and the 2016 United States elections and affect people’s behaviors, more likely change people’s behaviors towards these incidents. Through the documentation of this incident or this scandal, we were able to see how our private lives are vulnerable, how all our personal information on social networks like Facebook, websites we visits, all transactions we make and every electronic interaction we do are easily accessed and gathered to be transformed into propaganda, campaigns, videos, pictures or advertisement used against us to wash our brains and modify our behaviors and way of thinking without us knowing, or do we know, but we’re not bothered? “we’re now the commodity, but we’re so in love with the gift of this free connectivity that no one bothers to read the terms and conditions”.
All what I could think of while watching the movie how theses technological platforms could sometimes be a bless and sometime be a nightmare, how the data and the platforms turned to a weapon more dangerous than guns that you could sometimes use against people and sometimes it could be used against you. It is a weapon that creates an information warfare. But is it just Facebook’s or Cambridge Analytic responsibility? Or are we creating a scapegoat to avoid facing the truth that it is also our responsibility to protect our data. Facebook and Cambridge Analytic are of course sinners, but we also did a mistake; The mistake of being careless, the mistake of being ignorant, the mistake of accepting all the terms and conditions without reading them and the mistake of believing everything we see without extra research. It is the job of companies like Cambridge Analytics to gather data and use them for marketing and propaganda to affect people’s behaviors, they are sinners, but we should be able to put an end to these sinners by not believing everything we read and listen too, we should put some extra effort in researching to know the truth, we should put some extra effort in knowing more about the application we’re downloading or the quiz we’re taking online to try and limit the invasion of our privacy; just sitting and waiting for data rights to be declared as human rights will not do us good for the time being because even if Cambridge Analytic is gone, the technology is not gone and there will be another Cambridge Analytic. We should be more aware because being ignorant doesn’t just affect us, but it also affects our friends.
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