It is now clear that data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns. Facebook knew about this, and the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.
Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon.
Yes, it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page and fix the problem or his company will get prosecuted and maybe closed down, I guess.
Meanwhile the number of cameras in China is at 176 million today, with a plan to have 450 million installed by 2020. One hundred percent of Beijing is now blanketed by surveillance cameras, according to the Beijing Public Safety Bureau. The Chinese government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city.
While the Chinese government has long scrutinized individual citizens for evidence of disloyalty to the regime, only now is it beginning to develop comprehensive, constantly updated, and granular records on each citizen’s political persuasions, comments, associations, and even consumer habits. The new social credit system under development will consolidate reams of records from private companies and government bureaucracies into a single “citizen score” for each Chinese citizen.
However, a state-run, party-inspired, data-driven monitoring system poses profound questions for the West about the role of private companies in government surveillance. Is it ethical for private companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their data to the government? Alibaba (China’s Amazon) and Tencent (owner of the popular messaging platform WeChat) possess sweeping data on each Chinese citizen that the government would have to mine to calculate scores.
In order to comply with a recently enacted Chinese law, Apple will begin migrating China-based iCloud accounts to its new Chinese data center next month. The facility is operated by Guizhou-Cloud BIg Data, which is supervised by Guizhou State government.
Although Chinese companies now are required to assist in government spying while U.S. companies are "not", it is possible to imagine Amazon in Alibaba’s position, or Facebook in place of Tencent?
Meanwhile check out this recent movie, it’s a little bit melodramatic but has some serious people telling some scary stuff...