THIS is all you need to know about Cambridge Analytica
In my humble opinion, THE one thing you should know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that…
A private organizations allegedly messes up with elections…
Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a privately held company accused of “Facebook-Powered Election Cheating” building a system that could “profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.”
And the ones who have immediately stop it are…
NOT a judge who issued some court order, accourding to rule of law. It was those who have the real power to do it: ANOTHER private company, de-facto accountable only to its own stockholder(s):
“We have suspended Cambridge Analytica from our platform for a clear violation our policies. They cannot buy ads or administer its clients' pages.” says a Facebook VP.
Think to that. Yes, it’s not the first time that certain private companies force government to trust them on the most critical processes of democracy. But it’s still bad. Real bad. And NO, please don’t repeat that “it’s time to regulate Facebook etc..": it would not make sense.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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