Data Privacy - The Ethical, Sociological, and Philosophical Effects of Cambridge Analytica

Abstract

In today’s world, “[t]he threat of conventional warfare has changed, and we have to recognize that information can be a weapon (SCL, 2020)”. How can information serve as a weapon one might ask? What if data mining and analysis combined with targeted messaging were used as weapons and could influence politics globally? The Cambridge Analytica scandal not only answers this question but illustrates this concept. The Cambridge Analytica data breach was a data leak whereby millions of Facebook users' personal data was harvested without consent and used for political advertising (Chan, 2020). This paper will explore the details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the role of social media giant Facebook in the incident, and the impact to privacy and associated privacy principles. Additionally, the paper will explore the concept of privacy and its ethical, sociological, and philosophical underpinnings.