Wednesday, July 17, 2019

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCAM OVER FACEBOOK'S DATA

This story started with a student named Nigel Oakes. He graduated from a university at Eton. He started investment business later some years he started getting to know about the psychology of people about things. He got interested in knowing these things he came to know that one can change the ideology of people about things. Later he started investing and developed Strategic Communications Laboratories the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. He developed the company and established many of its branches throughout the world. At first, the company used to help the commercial companies to know how to get people to buy their product. He used these techniques for the first time in a political campaign. It didn't get any result. As a result, he had to flee to Singapore. Later after so many days, he appointed Nix as the company CEO. Nix had brought many changes to the company. He brought in many data analysts and software developers. They made an algorithm called as Ripon. They started with this algorithm as a new company AggregateIQ. Nix was approached by a TV company owner Bannon. Bannon knows a hedge fund billionaire Mercer. Mercer agreed to invest in Ripon with $5million. Then these people started using this for political campaigning purposes. The first politician approached them is Ted Cruz. He gets to know about the algorithm and he doesn't believe in that algorithm so he never uses it. Later when Trump started his campaign he approached these people for the algorithm. Trump used them for the campaign by investing $15million in it.
The question raises where these people got the data about the details of the people. Here comes the Cambridge Data professor Aleksandr Kogan approached the Cambridge Analytica. He made an application which runs on the Facebook API. It is nothing but the apps that are present on Facebook. People don't know that by giving access to the mobile through the permissions anyone can access the data about these people. This was observed by Kogan and he used this as a gateway to access the people data through the Facebook pages and their Datacenters. In this way, he acquired 87 million user data. For this Cambridge Analytica has mentioned that they are taking the data for Academic purposes. For that, they have paid $1.4 million. This news came to light after 2 years. All these 2 years Facebook know about the scandal and they have warned Cambridge Analytica to delete the data. They didn't check whether they deleted the data or not. Some days before it Nix was prosecuted by the parliament members about the fake news they spread on social media platforms. There are many other platforms like Cambridge Analytica who are using the people data for their use. SO BE  CAREFUL WHILE GIVING PERMISSIONS TO THE APPS IN YOUR MOBILE OR WHILE USING THE BROWSER ALSO.

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