Analysis of Cambridge Analytica Case Study

Running head: ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTISE AND ETHICS
ICT Professional Practise and Ethics
Topic: The case of Cambridge Analytica
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTISE AND ETHICS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Background of the Case Study...............................................................................................2
Analysis of the situation using the “Doing Ethics Technique”..............................................3
Analysis of the situation from the point of view of an ICT Professional using the ACS
Code of Ethics........................................................................................................................8
Recommendations......................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................10

2ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTISE AND ETHICS
Introduction
The internet has provided the world with many advancements and made life much
easier for the people in this era. From the daily lives of the people to the social interactions, it
has become much easier to be conducted through the utilization of internet. However, it is not
just the provision of the benefits as with the advancements of the technical world, there are
also various unethical means that have been reported of. These are the activities led by
malicious people who utilize the medium of internet to tactfully manipulate the psychological
graph of people. There have been various reports about issues such as these, and one of them
have been identified to be the case of the organization of Cambridge Analytica that disguised
as a data science company to extract data out of 270,000 people to manipulate their personal
information and provide them to the presidential campaign of President Trump (Peruzzi et al.,
2018).
Therefore, the following analysis of the incident would be performed in details with
the help of Doing Ethics Technology, with a set of 8 questions that would provide help in
figuring out the ethical or unethical considerations of the situation and also find out an
appropriate solution had there been any problem regarding the incident.
Background of the Case Study
According to recent reports, it was found that there is the presence of an organization
called the Cambridge Analytica, that represented themselves or disguised as a data analytics
organization. However, this organization also pretended themselves to be a data science
company, but at the other end it provided information about the general mass in USA and
provided them all to the presidential campaign of President Trump (Cadwalladr & Graham-
Harrison, 2018). This particular situation had been formulated through the use of Facebook,

3ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTISE AND ETHICS
where the utilization of Facebook gaming apps was masqueraded as normal applications, but
helped in extracting data from the users. Almost a total of 270,000 people who accepted the
invitations to use the data have been victimised and the data has been extracted from them.
As per other reports as well, it was found that the app that was used to lure the users
in Facebook had the potential to extract out all the socially available information about a
person and also everybody present in the Facebook profile of the individual as well (Habash,
2019). In this way, the organization could easily extract out all the psychological mapping of
the people involved by extracting out all their data and helped in the gathering of data from
the profiles of everybody present in their friend list as well. The application made people to
provide permission to log in to their respective Facebook profiles, but they had no idea, that
doing these, they were allowing the organization of Cambridge Analytics the permission to
get into their Facebook profiles by logging in. Therefore, in this way, the organization had the
ability to barge into all the people in the friend list of the people. The strategy made the
organization to collect and extract data from over 8,700,00 people at once by barging into the
profiles of almost 270,000 people (González et al., 2019).
The section of the report would thus present the analysis of this incident mentioned
above to find out if the entire act was unethical, what were the reasons behind confirming it
to be an unethical one and what could be the solutions for the entire scenario to that people
would look out for ethical considerations before performing any sort of actions like this.
Analysis of the situation using the “Doing Ethics Technique”
The process of Doing Ethics Technique is one which helps in the analysis of any
given situation with the help of 8 analytical questions. It helps to reach a conclusive idea
generated from the answering of these questions and the conclusive idea help in finding out a