Cambridge Analytica whistleblower appears before Senate – as it happened

Hersh: I encourage my students to never share political ideas on social media. I don’t agree that you don’t have a choice not to use it. Facebook has a lot of data. I think it has acted really inappropriately, notes that they take no responsibility for how they’re used.

Tillis is again discussing the use of Facebook data by the Obama campaign. This is a common talking point for Republicans who want to make the point that data use by political campaigns is bipartisan, which is true enough. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that people who downloaded the Obama campaign app were clearly aware that they were using a political app. By contrast, the Facebook data set in question here was obtained via a personality quiz application whose users would have had no idea that their data would eventually be used by a political campaign.

Thom Tillis, Republican senator from North Carolina: “I hope that the result of this hearing is figuring out what if anything Congress should do with respect to a regulatory framework.”

Tillis was actually a client of Cambridge Analytica in 2014. He brings this up during his questioning of Wylie.

Klobuchar: What do you know about voter suppression?

Wylie: One of the things that provoked me to leave was discussions about “voter disengagement” and the idea of targeting African Americans. Mentions that he has seen documents about this.

Klobuchar: What states were focused on?

Wylie: States that were winnable by Republicans.

Klobuchar: What’s the potential overlap for users who were shown IRA ads and the users’ whose data was used by CA?

Wylie: My concern is that information may have been shared or misappropriated by a Russian entity from Cambridge Analytica. It’s not just whether or not these individual records were targeted, but if it was used to build an algorithm, other uses could also have been exposed.

Wylie: We should be requiring safety standards for online platforms and software.

Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, raises her legislation to allow opting out of data collection.

Would this legislation have prevented the Facebook data harvest?

Wylie: Not really because of the API that was allowing people to pull data.

Wylie: You have to imagine what the developments we’ll see moving forward. Notes that when he signed up for Facebook, it didn’t have facial recognition so he uploaded photos. Then it started scanning faces. We have to think about how data will be used in the future.

Wylie: Social media is not really a choice for most people. The internet is not really a choice for most people. I don’t know a job that would let you go in and not use Google. Although we use this narrative of choice, they substantially don’t have a choice. I don’t know a job that would hire someone who refuses to use the internet.

Cornyn: There’s this idea in the law that your consent must be informed. Is that too much to ask for?

Wylie: People absolutely should have informed consent. But when you go and see a doctor, you consenting to surgery is proportionate to the benefit you are getting. When someone “consents” to something online, if that’s the only way you can get a job it’s not really a fair situation. We should take a step back from this narrative of consent and look at the fact that you don’t have a lot of choice.

Cornyn: But I can use Twitter instead of Facebook.

Wylie: Yeah, but they all do the same thing and conduct a huge amount of data comparative to the benefit they give you.

Cornyn: Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that they don’t sell data, and I said they clearly rent it. How would you characterize it?

Wylie: They’ve created a platform that encourages the use of data. It’s true that you can’t go to Facebook and simply buy it, but they make it readily available through network of applications, or the fact that the layout of the profiles make it very conducive to scraping data. They have a setup that catalyzes misuse in my view.