March 21, 2018

The Cambridge Analytica case: Old News

I am really surprised with the recent outburst of anger and frustration following revelations about the tactics of Cambridge Analytica in influencing the results of the American elections and the Brexit referendum with the possible tolerance of Facebook. 
This is in my view old news: In the winter of 2017 the case was already presented to my Bachelor students by SocialInc in a guest lecture and on June 2017 I discussed the Cambridge Analytica's case in a talk in June in the UT titled "Algorithmic Marketing".
I was surprised till 2 days ago that no one seemed to worry about this story that was also extensively discussed in various platforms, for example in the article in the Observer from May 2017, with a very graphic title (this article was also posted in our Smart Marketing Group Facebook group  on 23 October 2017).
Maybe when the mainstream media pick up a story and decide that the public is ripe to hear about it, the story reaches the increasingly passive, hypnotized public.
The question is what will happen from now on: Is this the beginning of the end of Facebook or even of the social media hype? Are there legal steps to be 

 taken against various over-jealous marketers and nerdy professors who sacrifice their intellectual capacities to profit? Will the wider public finally understand what is at stake here? And, last but not least, will the new EU GDPR put an end to these practices? Stay tuned!