Tech firms be treated like tobacco industry, pleads whistleblower

PARIS: Facebook and other technology companies need to be regulated like the tobacco industry, warned Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The data scientist revealed how he helped the disgraced company, founded by Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon, to use unauthorised personal data harvested from Facebook to help swing a string of elections, including Trump’s US presidential win in 2016.

Despite Facebook being fined a record $5 billion in the US last year for “deceiving” users about keeping their information safe, Wylie said the world has yet to wake up to the consequences of the scandal.

“If we want to prevent another Cambridge Analytica from happening … that starts with regulating big tech beyond just data protection issues, but also looking at whether or not we want as a society to tolerate manipulative design,” he insisted.

Too powerful

So great is their potential power over society and people’s lives, that tech professionals need to be subject to the same codes of ethics as doctors and lawyers, he said as his book was published in France.

“Profiling work that we were doing to look at who was most vulnerable to being radicalised … was used to identify people in the US who were susceptible to radicalisation so that they could be encouraged and catalysed on that path,” he said.

“You are being intentionally monitored so that your unique biases, your anxieties, your weaknesses, your needs, your desires can be quantified in such a way that a company can seek to exploit that for profit,” said the 30-year-old.

Wylie, who blew the whistle to the British newspaper, The Guardian, in March 2018, said at least people now realise how powerful data can be. “We are now talking about it, whereas before we weren’t. For a long time, I think journalists and society at large really did drink that Kool-Aid.