The former director of Cambridge Analytica, which is at the center of Facebook’s data privacy scandal, has a vision for the future of your data privacy.
Sitting in front of a background with « R. I. P. STOLEN DATA » plastered on it, a former director of Cambridge Analytica had a message for Mark Zuckerberg: it’s time to change.
Brittany Kaiser, who came to New York City a day after testifying to the UK Parliament about Facebook’s data scandal with Cambridge Analytica, a data profiling firm, has changed her tone on the industry she used to help run.
Cambridge Analytica has set off the sparks for data concerns after a whistleblower revealed that the company acquired data on up to 87 million Facebook users through a quiz created by University of Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research. The incident has served as a catalyst for questions about Facebook’s ability to protect our information.
During Tuesday’s hearing in the UK, Kaiser said there were many more quizzes that Cambridge Analytica took data from for political purposes, including one called « sex compass. »
On Wednesday, Kaiser, who had been the director of program development at Cambridge Analytica for four years until January, positioned herself as an advocate for data privacy, calling out companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon for making billions off of people’s data.
« I’m not a supporter of the #DeleteFacebook campaign, » Kaiser said. « I think that Google, Facebook and Amazon can reform. »
That suggested reform comes with her new project, IOVO, the Internet of Value Omniledger. The idea is for tech companies like Facebook and Google to view data as people’s property, and allow people to sell that data for monetary value, instead of trading it to use their services for free.
Kaiser compares the idea to Airbnb, where people can open up their homes to the app in exchange for money. She doesn’t want people to delete their Facebook accounts, she wants them to make money from it.
She pointed out that under the current agreements between tech companies and its billions of users, people are giving up valuable information for free without even being aware of it.
« There’s a very low amount of data literacy around people, » Kaiser said during the press conference.
Facebook has vowed to protect people’s privacy better, with Zuckerberg telling US lawmakers that users own their data. The social network also changed its data policy and how app developers can harvest information on people.
The new project had its fair share of skeptics, considering Kaiser’s history with Cambridge Analytica, and how it took advantage of that data illiteracy that the former director pointed out. At the press conference, Issie Lapowsky, a journalist from WIRED, asked her why she should be the messenger for the new standards of data privacy.
Kaiser cited her history with Cambridge Analytica as an advantage, pointing out that she had been working with data profiling for politics for over a decade.
« To be honest, for many years, I never questioned it. That’s the way that the political system works, that’s the way that advertising works, that’s the way that every single industry that exists in the entire basis of digital communications works, » she said. « I do really understand the industry, and I have the ability to be a voice for change. »
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