Has the Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted you to #deletefacebook?

I can never really understand why people ever used it. It was clearly eventually going to be abused. Along with Whatsapp and many others, there are almost no safeguard for what might happen in the future. Even organisations you think might be totally reliable and never let you down will do so when it suits them.

I never went there in the first place, since I could simply communicate everything I needed to by E. mail and letters in the post box. I am one of the minority who was never persuaded to publish and share my life as it happened. That said, my sister is an avid user and uploads photos, chats with friends and family and gains a great deal of pleasure being social on this media. There always has to be a black side, doesn’t there? This seemingly innocent and enjoyable pastime has been hijacked by the cynical manipulators and, of course, that’s simply because there is money to be made in selling data. Whether this has now extrapolated into political influence as well is a matter for debate, but the evidence points to the fact that this power game is growing and might supersede the desire to make a profit from targeted advertising.

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As we engage with any and all digital media we create our own digital footprint.

Anything that we make publicly available can obviously be collected by anyone, for whatever purpose they have in mind.

What Cambridge Analytica reportedly did was to gather up oodles of data and then apply that commercially, irrespective of whether or not that had warned their data subjects that this would be done, or sought permission to do so.

As I see it, that is somewhat different from some smart hackers doing likewise with directly stolen data. But in either case, if we give our data to someone else, how can we trust that they will keep it safe?

As regards illicit data acquisition, or espionage, and also for counter espionage, it is interesting to note that Cambridge frequently provides leading players in these fields.

Make no mistake; the Cambridge Analytica scandal is not about YOUR personal FaceBook data. You can delete your account and try to exercise your right to be forgotten (good luck with that!), and millions of others can do the same, but it is too late to undo the damage already done.

What is going on here is misuse of the enormous amount of data (so called “big data”) that exists about all of us and is being collected, curated and sold to all comers.

Every time you go shopping with a store card, every time you browse the internet, every time you use your smartphone, every time you make a banking transaction, you are being tracked and you leave a digital fingerprint. Using social media, completing online surveys and personality tests is just the icing on the cake that enables companies with access to that data, like Cambridge Analytica, to build a more complete profile of who you are and how you behave.

What is really unfair is that those of us who are more cautious about the use of our data have been impacted in exactly the same way, as those who wear their online hearts on their sleeve. This is because Cambridge Analytica, and no doubt other companies not yet in the public eye, are using information about you to undermine the democratic process for all of us. Unbelievable? Not a bit!

It is alleged that Cambridge Analytica were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump. All this about Hillary Clinton’s misuse of email servers, Russians dirty tricks and Twitter Bots (which are unintelligent programs) is unlikely to be the real reason Trump beat Clinton by the narrowest of margins, and only in the States where it really mattered.

Careful analysis of FaceBook profile data, the infamous personality test, and posting of personally-crafted messages likely to provoke an imperceptible change in political viewpoint, are techniques called “psychographic segmentation”, “micro-targeting” and “nudging” in IT marketing speak. These covert techniques are already used today (legally) to sell you products you probably don’t want and didn’t know you needed.

But the big difference here is that, regardless of whether YOU have a FaceBook account or not, and whether you choose to delete it, the outcome for 100% of Americans has already changed – and possibly for the rest of the world who didn’t get a vote in the matter either.

If the alleged involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit Leave campaign is also true, and the same targeting methods have been applied, then we are all heading rapidly for the EU exit, thanks to a small minority of the British population who have been careless with their personal data. No doubt any pro-Brexit voter will deny this. The simple fact is they may not even realize they have been targeted by organisations like Cambridge Analytica – that is the whole point of the exercise.

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This comment was removed at the request of the user