Synthèse anglais Cambridge Analytica

LVA oral type bac Cambridge Analytica

Intro :

« Fine, privacy you shall have » ; that’s what Facebook said after Cambridge Analytica scandal which became the greatest crisis in Facebook history. The next documents illustrate the notion of the idea of progress because the surge of progress and technology can be used unwisely by malicious people. To study this subject, I chose 2 documents which talk about Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook, so the first one named Facebook and Privacy is an extract from the Independent and The Guardian newspapers and the second one named Cambridge Analytica and harvesting methods is an extract from Business insider and The Verge. Based on these documents we will see to what extend Cambridge Analytica took advantage of Facebook to collect data and how Facebook reacted about it?

On the one hand we will study the data collected by Cambridge Analytica from Facebook and on the other hand Facebook reaction about the crisis.

Development

In the first place Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to collect some of user’s data thanks to a quiz application connected to Facebook. This application called “thisisyourdigitallife” “had acquired information on up 87 million people” l.26 according to the second text. Moreover, this type of quiz app “have been used to inform decades of psychological studies on happiness and longevity” l.8 but nowadays, as we see with Cambridge Analytica scandal that quiz apps can be used against us, connected generations. Besides, scandals about Facebook and user’s data already occurred as we can see in the first text “the social media giant has acknowledge giving other big tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo extensive access to users personal data” and “it also collected call and text logs form phones running Google’s Android system in 2015” l.12

Furthermore, the first text tells us that “Facebook had allowed someone to extract vast amount of private information about vast numbers of people from its system, and that entity had passed the data along to someone else, who had used it for political ends” l.27 and we also know that “The FTC has been investigating allegations Facebook inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million users with the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica” l.4 in the first text. It can be used like proofs against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and their responsibilities in this scandal.

Then, Facebook reacted with some security measures, such as the first text says “Facebook has vowed to do a better job protecting its user’s data” l.10. so that reassures its users about their personal data whereas we can suppose that Facebook was an accomplice in the Cambridge Analytica scandal as we can understand in the last lines of the first text “what happened with Cambridge Analytica was not a matter of Facebook’s systems being infiltrated, but of Facebook’s systems working as designed : data was amassed, data was extracted, and data was exploited” l.41 Even though Facebook banned quiz after CA scandal as the second text say line 24 “Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users”. Nevertheless, Facebook never said that this ban, after CA scandal had a link with it : “Facebook doesn’t say the personality quiz ban is because of CA, instead it’s about removing apps with minimal utility from the platform” l.38 of the second document.

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