Case Study 1: Millions of Facebook profiles secretly harvested for data by Cambridge Analytica
Read the case then answer the questions below:
Between 2014 and the 2016 U.S. election, Cambridge Analytica, a big data political consulting firm chaired by Alexander Nix, was founded by Donald Trump’s future campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, who acted as vice president of the company for a time. A famous Republican donor, Robert Mercer, invested to help Bannon start the company. The company provided targeted advertising to more than 40 U.S. campaigns in 2014 and provided its services to LeaveEU during the Brexit campaign and most famously to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The company was built on the expertise of Michal Kosinski who researched at the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Kosinski showed how psychological profiles of users could be formed based on social media activity such as “liking” posts, thus allowing smart, targeted advertising. Targeted advertising is not illegal, nor is data gathering per se, but Cambridge Analytica did not acquire its data legally nor with the informed consent of the users.
An app developed by another researcher at Cambridge, Alexander Kogan, called “mydigitiallife” was advertised to Amazon’s Mechanical Turks and Qualtrics as a personality quiz. The app gave permission to access the users’ Facebook account and gather information from their profile and from their contacts. In fact, the personality quiz was little more than a rouse to obtain data from Facebook activity—including of the users’ contacts—so as to form a personality profile. Over 320,000 people downloaded the app, and information was gathered from, on average, 160 of their friends. Ultimately, the personal data of 80 million Facebook users was collected and used to make psychological profiles. This gathering of data in and of itself was not illegal because Kogan had permission from Facebook to collect such data for academic purposes. However, Kogan sold that data to Cambridge Analytica in a violation of Facebook’s protocols (it is illegal to sell such data to a third party without the permission of the person). From there, Cambridge Analytica made an algorithm to profile even more people for use in elections.
The role that Facebook played became clearer when Christopher Wylie, the employee at Cambridge Analytica who worked on the algorithm, came forward and blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica primarily but also exposed Facebook’s inaction. Facebook initially downplayed the data breach, and Wylie’s recollection indicates that Facebook was well aware of the breach but did very little to rectify the situation. Wylie explained that the only actions Facebook took upon discovering the illegal handling of the data was to have lawyers contact him about the data being obtained illegally and demand that he delete it. He did. Since Wylie gave his public interview, Facebook has suspended Wylie’s Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. Critics say this is retaliation, but Facebook released a statement saying in effect that the suspension is due to Wylie’s admission of misusing user data and that the suspension will be lifted when Wylie talks to Facebook about the data breach.
Answer the following questions about the case:
- What are the morally relevant facts of the case? What happened (or will happen)? Why did it happen (or will happen)? Who made (or will make) the key decision(s)? Who was (or will be) affected? What are (or will be) the long-term consequences?
- What is the most important moral issue raised by the case? Try to formulate the moral question in a single sentence.
- Define the key terms of the case and clarify any unresolved conceptual issues. (For example, what is a whistle-blower and does anyone count as a whistle-blower in this case?)
- Apply the relevant code(s) of ethics. Do the code(s) issue clear and coherent verdicts? If not, why not?
- How robust is the moral verdict issued by the code(s)? Check this by applying the ethical theories discussed in chapters 5 and 6 (specifically, Act-/Rule-utilitarianism, Duty Ethics, Virtue Ethics, and Rights Ethics). Do all ethical theories yield the same verdict? If not, develop a strategy for managing this moral uncertainty.
