About data privacy and the general data protection regulation coming in May 2018

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Is data privacy a reality with the GDPR?
Brian Coyle

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The revelation that over 50 million Facebook users personal information was
accessed and analysed by Cambridge Analytica to create specific politically
motivated targeting during the 2016 US election cycle has only begun to
unfold.
The scandal has been documented in painful detail by the man at the centre
of the storm, Christopher Wylie, and it looks like the fallout is still coming
thick and fast, with Mark Zuckerberg losing 9 billion dollars off his net
worth in the days following the revelations. There are calls in both the United
Kingdom and the United States for Facebook to be investigated and appear
before congressional hearing committees. There has been videos
released of the owners of Cambridge Analytica boasting about their success
in effectively manipulating elections across the world using a combination of
data, targeting ads and bribery. So what should be done in the aftermath of
this revelation?
#DeleteFacebook
The reaction of many is to proceed to delete their accounts from
Facebook and become angry at how their privacy and data was used and
manipulated in a very sneaky manner. Perhaps the voice which carries the
loudest in this cry is Brian Acton, WhatsApp founder, who sold his company to
Facebook and weighed in on the recent debacle by tweeting “It is
time. #deletefacebook” which has been trending on Twitter since the news
broke.
The psychologist involved in the data mining undertaken by Facebook, Dr.
Aleksandr Kogan, maintains he had, “a close working relationship with

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Facebook“, stating ,”We never claimed during the project that it was for
academic research. In fact, we did our absolute best not to have the project
have any entanglements with the University.” “Facebook at no point raised
any concerns at all about any of these changes,”. Facebook also changed
their privacy policy one year after the API “thisismydigitallife”, the app named
in the data mining fiasco, had already collected the data needed. Is there
anything that can be really done to prevent this level of deliberate
manipulation?
Mark Zuckerberg made his first public statement in relation to the scandal and
when responding to a question about regulating social media he responded,
“I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology
is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more
what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?’”
If the information you provide to sites can be used
without your knowledge or consent in ways that are
invisible to you how can you guarantee you won’t be a
victim?
Thanks to the new General Data Protection Regulation, coming into effect
in May throughout the European Union, understanding exactly what details
any site collects or has about you and what data they will use will become a
European standard. Websites will now actively prompt users to read very
clearly structured, stated privacy statements and cookie policies. In addition to
this you can opt to have your details forgotten, have your data removed and
also find out how, where and for how long your data is stored. The details of
any and all analytics tools used by every site you visit must be made very
clear and the ability to opt out of these analytic tools must be provided.
The GDPR has very specific guidelines outlining that if a breach of personal
data happens at a site that there is a timeline of 72 hours in which the breach
must be acknowledged and reported. Furthermore there are severe
punishments in place for those who do not follow this protocol including but
not limited to fines totalling a percentage of your companies net value.

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The question as to whether this will be enough to stop companies like
Facebook misusing private data is hard to say, as Facebook maintains that
they were “not breached” as Andrew “Boz” Bosworth Tweeted, “This was
unequivocally not a data breach. People chose to share their data with third
party apps and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements
with us/users it is a violation. No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or
information were stolen or hacked.”
The future of social media?
In Europe, the consensus on web safety has been allowing the browser the
maximum level of transparency and freedom to choose how much data they
give about themselves. The European Union has been making moves in this
directionfor over six years with the GDPR regulations.The U.S., however, up
until the Facebook scandal broke, seemed to be equally split on regulation of
the internet. With opponents of regulation citing fears that regulation is not
competitive for business, a violation of the first amendment and a slippery
slope toward government control over the content of the internet.
Currently, Silicon Valley outspends any other corporation in America in
political lobbying, with Alphabet, Googles parent organisation, being the
biggest spending corporation in the U.S. Google itself spent a cool 25 million
dollars on lobbying including hiring 18 firms to represent their interests in
Washington, including having six lobbyists to every one member of congress
in Washington. This level of spending has been suspected as the reason

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that Google avoided any major penalties in a two-year Federal Trade
Commission antitrust probe that concluded in 2013.
If there is such a massive gap between European law
and U.S. law in relation to a global platform how can it
be bridged?
One solution seems to be using regulatory standards, like the GDPR in the
United States. Its vital that there is transparency between the service and the
user with clearly explaining what their data is being used, for what purposes
and how they will be used and most importantly regulating the usage of third
party applications. These are the things that guarantee the users maximum
privacy and ironically Mark Zuckerberg proposed something similar to
GDPR guidance, “There is transparency regulation that I would love to see. If
you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV and print
it’s just not clear why there should be less on the internet. You should have
the same level of transparency required. I don’t know if the bill is going to
pass, I know a couple of senators are working really hard on this. But we’re
committed and we’ve actually already started rolling out ad transparency tools
that accomplish most of the things that are in the bills people are talking about
today. This is an important thing. People should know who is buying the ads
they see on Facebook, and you should go to any page and see all the ads
that people are running to different audiences.”
data GDPR general data protection regulation Privacy