It matters that you choose carefully which company you hand the responsibility of collecting, processing and visualising your customers' data to.
Data security breaches on social networks are common today. One of the most talked-about happened at Facebook during the US presidential election that Trump won. The company involved in that scandal was the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica [1], which worked for the current US president's campaign and used data from around 50 million American Facebook users while doing so [2].
Specifically, Cambridge Analytica supplied the campaign with information about voters' psychographic profiles, obtained through a quiz application called 'ThisIsYourDigitalLife', developed by the university professor Aleksandr Kogan. The application ran on Facebook, and many users gave access — through using it — to their private information and that of their contacts. All of it apparently without explicit authorisation. The professor is said to have later sold the information he gathered, breaching Facebook's policy prohibiting the transfer or sale of data.
Facebook confirmed it had learned of the situation in 2015, the year it told Cambridge Analytica to delete all the information [3]. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, explained that 'the collection of the data by Kogan and CA did not amount to a security breach on the platform', since users handed over their information and there was no infiltration of the systems or theft of passwords. The situation led the country's authorities to request information from Facebook about its data practices.
This alarming news brings us to one of the most-discussed subjects of the digital era: the regulatory framework around the use of the data held on social networks.
In most countries there are data protection laws obliging companies to register their databases, ask for express authorisation for their use and not to infringe the right to privacy. But it is also well known that mishandling this information, on the part of those responsible for customer service or marketing campaigns, can benefit product or brand strategies — which unfortunately does happen [4].
Knowing that the photos, comments, information and relationships we share could end up being used for other purposes is a worrying matter. In that sense, it matters that you choose carefully the company or supplier you hand the responsibility of collecting, processing and visualising the customer data handled through social networks to.
[1] www.cambridgeanalytica.org
[2] From the newspaper El Comercio. 'Facebook hires lobbyists in Washington amid scandal.' 1 April 2018
[3] From the newspaper El Comercio. 'Facebook's passion.' 31 March 2018
[4] Panorama programme report on the sale of information on Av. Wilson. October 2017
