Remember when the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up in 2018? It’s the data harvesting scandal that took place around 2014, where Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed — and sold — the data of Facebook users to target them for political campaigns. Cambridge Analytica was a British political consultancy that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
Facebook later reported that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data of over 87 million users, over 1.1 million of which were Filipinos. The data obtained included users’ phone numbers and contact lists, which allowed them to target not just the users who fell prey to the operations, but also their contacts who weren’t necessarily on their Facebook network.
How did they do it? Well, they had to be creative. They used those viral personality quizzes that tricked users into sharing details about themselves, perhaps convincing them that it was all in good fun. In reality, the firm used these details to profile, segment, and micro-target them for political campaigns.
Targeted advertising has been found to create isolation and division among consumers by limiting their exposure to diverse viewpoints and feedback — hence reinforcing what we now call “echo chambers.”
That happened over a decade ago. So much has changed in our information landscape since then, and malicious actors have gained other tools beyond social media platforms.
What if I told you that, with today’s technological advances, malicious actors have found a way to get consumer data without you clicking on anything?
READ: Israeli firm used online ads to run vast spy operation, researchers say
Just last week, reports said that an Israeli digital advertising agency called Discover-Tech gave access to Candiru, a spyware company blacklisted by the US government, to advertising platforms run by Google, Comcast, and Russia’s Yandex. By doing so, Candiru was able to spy on internet users through a wide network of online ads, which only needed to load on the user’s side for the spying to occur. No clicks needed!
Two research groups, Citizen Lab and Confiant, separately investigated Discover-Tech and said that it utilized its data-sharing arrangements called cookie matching to track people. The researchers also said that some of its ads were used to help “plant spyware” on users’ devices.
Granted, the researchers said that the ads they found to be tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of Discover-Tech’s overall volume. But the point stays the same: unlike the Cambridge Analytica scandal where users had to be coaxed into taking quizzes, there is now evidence that users don’t even have to do anything to be targeted by malicious actors. Simply being served an ad could be enough to compromise their personal details.
You might think that this is a problem for other countries, not for the Philippines. But recall that Cambridge Analytica had used the Philippines as a “petri dish” to test out its strategies before rolling it out to Western countries, thanks to our high social media usage and lack of regulation.
If you find this scary or at least alarming (like I do), Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa’s new book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators, is a good place to start.
READ: From Duterte to Big Tech: Maria Ressa’s blueprint on fighting back
In The Fight Back, Maria draws on her years on the frontlines against disinformation and Big Tech overreach and discusses in detail what citizens and institutions can do to understand, defend, and rebuild democracy in the age of AI.
She lays out 10 strategic goals across 10 chapters, each broken down into 10 concrete actions, to help people reclaim control over the technologies now shaping our lives — from mapping the battlefield and defending our communities to building a world where technology works for the people, not against us.
Maria discussed these and more in a conversation with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer for the second edition of Democracy Dialogues on October 16. You can watch Maria’s full interview here.
I hope this newsletter spooked you enough to take a more active role in protecting your own data and digital life. October, after all, is not only about Halloween. October is also cybersecurity awareness month. – Rappler.com