OWN YOUR DATA
Advocating for your data is extremely important, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee and whistleblower of Cambridge Analytica stressed to students during her visit to Elon this past Tuesday, September 28th.
For those who are unaware, Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica, a company that collapsed after details of misuse of Facebook data were brought to light.
According to Business Insider, “Cambridge Analytica harvested information from over 87 million Facebook users through an external app in 2015 … which helped build psychological profiles that analyzed characteristics and personality traits.”
Kaiser has a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, that shows the impact of Cambridge Analytica potentially changing the voting outcome in the 2016 U.S. election and the UK Brexit referendum.
As a result, she believes we as a county need to really take seriously what federal data protection would look like.
Since then, Kaiser has formed her non-profit organization Own Your Data, a 505c3 charity on digital literacy education. As a data protection advocate, she works across a variety of ways around data protection: legislative initiatives, lobbying on data protection on digital asset laws, education, and technologies.
In an exclusive interview with The Edge, Kaiser gave us the inside scoop on how she is advocating for data protection.
“I get a lot of questions about data ownership,” Kaiser says, “why should companies give you a percentage of their profits? This is not the way that this works. Companies are able to get access to more data and more individuals data if there is an incentive.’’
This allows for a future where we can easily share our information and benefit from it, it’s a win-win situation for everyone, nobody’s losing. Kaiser believes that Americans should keep their data to themselves, if we decide to share it we should be rewarded.
How does personality profiling from your data work?
‘’Everybody’s different, through your data it can show whether you’re the type of person who can be easily convinced to change their mind or not. It can be any type of person from any background. They call it personality-driven, it’s just the personality that you happen to be given. If you are presented with an idea that is different from your own ideas are you persuaded by that, or are you staunch?’
“If you are open-minded and persuasive and the more times you hear an idea that is not your own you can start to believe in that idea and then you go down that rabbit hole of clicking on it and all of the sudden you're targeted by all these other things that are supporting that idea. This is when people are convinced that that is the way you should be thinking.’’
Why should your data become your property in the eyes of the law?
‘’Property rights are the highest form of protected law. If you have a property right you can always go to court and have that upheld. So if your data becomes your property, we would be able to fight in court and win and therefore companies would not be able to take our digital assets without our consent or at least pay us for them if we’ve agreed that those assets can be monetized.
“Just because you can’t touch it doesn’t mean you can’t own it.’’
How does data collection work right now and how should it work?
‘’If my favorite brand that I like to buy clothes from asked me to tell them what I had for breakfast this morning and I get 25% off my next purchase, I’m going to tell them.
There is no ethical issue, it’s a very transparent interaction where they can get real data from me instead of purchasing data about me from third parties which might be incorrect, which is how ALL companies do data analytics right now.
They spend millions of dollars purchasing data about everybody and then they match those data files together to try to clean them and hygiene them and then they have people build models to guess at an answer, that entire process takes millions of dollars and they might guess that my favorite color is purple because I click on things that are purple but in reality my favorite color is red. They could have just asked me and given me the incentive to give them the answer, it would be easier and faster and cheaper for everyone.’’
Is there anyone in the industry currently that is doing things the right way?
“Jack Dorsey is doing quite a lot as the CEO of twitter. He’s doing a lot more than any other social media company. I consider Mark Zuckerberg a bad actor, basically being deceptive about Facebook's internal policies, definitely a nearly polar opposite to Jack.’’
Thoughts on TikTok?
‘’I don’t know if you’ve ever read the terms and conditions of TikTok but they’re pretty bad. TikTok is taking data from other apps, contacts, live location, photos and videos, microphone, and can turn it on whenever they want, so that's quite a lot to be giving away to a company where you don’t even really know who it's owned by and who has access to this information.
If you have checked the box and downloaded the app you have given informed consent. I wouldn't really call that informed consent if you didn’t read the terms and conditions and even if you do read them you probably won't understand what you're agreeing to unless you’re a law major. TikTok is up there with Facebook that has egregious data protection issues.’’
Overall Kaiser believes that where we are going is a future that is driven by artificial intelligence and smart city infrastructure.
Keep your data to yourself. If you decide to share it, you should be rewarded. For more information on protecting your information, check out the Own Your Data Foundation and follow Kaiser on Twitter.