Liberty Vittert, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in Arts & Sciences
Facebook is the villain and finally people know it.
About 250 pages of highly confidential documents and company emails that shed light on Facebook’s attitude towards its customers, were released by a British lawmaker this week. But before we dive into that, let’s take a step back and remember Facebook’s first big public scandal.
Last March, the New York Times, along with the Guardian and the Observer in London, uncovered documents proving that the political data firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly acquired data from Facebook. Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist, had developed an app and given the user data information to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook allowed this app to not only collect data from the app users, but also their friends, resulting in Cambridge Analytica acquiring data from millions of different Facebook users.
Read the full piece at Fox News.