Cambridge Analytica scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook
Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook on Business Standard. In Cambridge Analytica scandal, whistleblower Christopher Wiley accused Cambridge Analytica of gathered details of 50 million Facebook users. Know more on Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal.
Latest News The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light when whistleblower Wylie accused Cambridge Analytica of gathering details of 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used this data to psychologically profile these users and manipulated their opinion in favour of Donald Trump. BJP and Congress have accused each other of using the services of Cambridge Analytica in India as well. How can India safeguard the democratic process against such intervention? The author tries to answer this question in this Business Standard Special. Those that celebrate the big data/artificial intelligence moment claim that traditional approaches to data protection are no longer relevant and therefore must be abandoned. The Cambridge Analytica episode, if anything, demonstrates how wrong they are. The principles of data protection need to be reinvented and weaponized, not discarded. In this article I shall discuss the reinvention of three such data protection principles. Apart from this I shall also briefly explore competition law solutions. Collect data only if mandated by regulation One, data minimization is the principle that requires the data controller to collect data only if mandated to do so by regulation or because it is a prerequisite for providing a functionality. For example, Facebook’s
messenger app on Android harvests call records and meta-data, without any consumer facing feature on the app that justifies such collection. Therefore, this is a clear violation of the data minimization principle. One of the ways to reinvent this principle is by borrowing from the best practices around warnings and labels on packaging introduced by the global anti-tobacco campaign. A permanent bar could be required in all apps, stating ‘Facebook holds W number of records across X databases over the time period Y, which totals Z Gb’. Each of these alphabets could be a hyperlink, allowing the user to easily drill down to the individual data record. Consent must be explicit, informed and voluntary
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