Report: Facebook Data Privacy Scandal and Cambridge Analytica Analysis

This report examines the Facebook data privacy scandal, focusing on the actions of Cambridge Analytica. It begins with an introduction and overview, highlighting the misuse of user data for political advertising, specifically referencing the 2016 US presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign. The report then delves into further evidence, detailing how Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million users through a personality quiz application, 'this is your digital life', leveraging the OCEAN model to create psychographic profiles. This data was used to predict sensitive personal attributes. The report concludes by emphasizing Facebook's history of inadequate data protection measures, pointing to systemic issues within the platform and other social media companies, and the erosion of user trust. The report references key sources such as Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison (2018) and Isaak and Hanna (2018) to support its analysis. The report is a detailed exploration of the topic and provides a solid overview of the issue.

Business Research Methodology

Table of Contents
Introduction and overview...............................................................................................................3
Further Evidences............................................................................................................................3
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................4
Reference List..................................................................................................................................5

Introduction and overview
Around 10 years of obvious indifferences related to the data privacy at Facebook has given rise
to various revelations regarding the fact that companies have gathered the information and data
of people for the purpose of advertising. Advertising here is specifically political advertising that
has been used by organisations in companies to their appearance success. The most well-known
offender of such data breach and theft is the Cambridge Analytica which is a strategic
communication and political consulting company. The company was known for being behind the
presidential campaign of Donald Trump in the year 2016 as well as behind the European
campaign of the pro Brexit leave (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, 2018).
Further Evidences
The data privacy scandal of the Facebook revolves around gathering sensitive and personally
identifiable data and information of more than 87 million people across the globe by using the
strategic communication and political consulting company, Cambridge Analytica (Isaak and
Hanna, 2018). Facebook as well as various other companies, by such an action were successful
in gaining the access to the personal and sensitive information of Facebook users because of
confluence of various different factors. These factors broadly include the agreement of users
regarding overbroad conditions and terms, abuse of the API of Facebook by the developer, zero
or minimum developers' oversight by Facebook and inadequate and insufficient safeguards
against the organisations who engaged into data harvesting and collection.
For the case of the Cambridge Analytica, the organisation was capable of harvesting and
collecting the personally identifiable and sensitive information of individuals by the means of a
personality quiz application known as this is your digital life. The quiz application was based on
a personality model known as the OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness and Neuroticism) (Isaak and Hanna, 2018). The data and information which was
collected by the means of such an application was helpful for developing psychographic profile
of the individual users. After adding the application to the Facebook account of the users in order
to participate in the quiz provided the application developers and creators with the access to the
information of the Facebook profiles as well as the user history for every individual who takes
part in the quiz. The application also gained access to regarding the friend circle all the friend list

of the individual Facebook. The information also included the items or posts which had been
liked by the users as well as their friends over Facebook. Various researches of the Cambridge
University claimed in a research paper that such an application could be used for accurately and
automatically predicting a wide range of personal attributes which is highly sensitive regarding
an individual (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, 2018). These attributes include ethnicity,
political and religious views, sexual orientation, happiness, intelligence, personality traits,
parental separation, usage of addictive substances, gender and age.
Conclusion
Facebook possesses track record of more than 10 years related to incidents highlight insufficient
and inadequate measures of protecting the privacy of data and information of users. While the
degree of severity and sensitivity of the cases derived from each other, the continuous sequence
of failures depicts a bigger picture of the systematic issues within Facebook and various other
leading social media platforms. Hence, it is clear that organisations have indulged into various
questionable activities by accessing the personal information of users of social media platforms,
which is broken the trust between the users and the platforms.

Reference List
Cadwalladr, C. and Graham-Harrison, E., 2018. The Cambridge analytica files. The
Guardian, 21, pp.6-7.
Isaak, J. and Hanna, M.J., 2018. User Data Privacy: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and
Privacy Protection. Computer, 51(8), pp.56-59.