> The Guardian on Facebook: they're the bad guys, definitely not us
A new editorial from The Guardian, damning Facebook as a threat to democracy:
If data is the new oil, then Facebook has one of the biggest reservoirs of black gold. Cambridge Analytica, it might be argued, tapped a rich well of information.Well yeah, this is true. But the page on which this editorial is published contains five pieces of embedded code belonging to four organisations that tracks whoever is visiting. All of them are collecting unknown data which we, as users, aren't aware of and have very little ability to stop.Yet the scale of the data that was extracted without anyone noticing exposed as hollow the idea that users could control what was done with their personal details. In today’s world, information is accessed in complex, hidden ways: by data-sharing, third-parties, via friends. The risk is that we don’t know what it is we are authorising.
While the Facebook story is a really important one, The Guardian needs to think long and hard about what data it generates that could easily end up in the hands of companies like Cambridge Analytica.