In the last few days the news have mainly focused on the Cambridge Analytica story. Investigations by The Observer, The Guardian and Channel 4 News in the UK and The New York Times in America unveiled a major data breach by the political data firm.
Mainly funded by conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and Stephen K. Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump and Breitbart chairman, the company gained access to 50 million Facebook profiles via the app thisisyourdigitallife.
Built in 2014 by Moldovan-born researcher and psychology professor from Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan, the app offered users the possibility of taking a personality test (they were paid to do so). When they did it, users agreed to have their data collected for academic use. As a whole around 270,000 users took the test, but the app automatically downloaded the data of their friends as well.
Whistleblower and former research director at Cambridge Analytica Christopher Wylie explained in interviews that the data obtained was then used to predict and influence the outcome of the US presidential election. An algorithm analysed indeed the test results and Facebook data to determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.
The data was then employed as the starting point to reach out audiences with tailor-made adverts and influence their behaviour with extensive micro-targeting activities.
The data analytics firm also worked with the leaders of the Leave.EU group during the Brexit campaign, so there is more to investigate there, while at the moment Facebook is facing questions about failing to alert users about the data breach.
There are all sorts of wider implications in this story - from the immoral and subtle manipulation of voters to women being exploited, if we analyse what Cambridge Analytica's Chief Executive Alexander Nix, boasted about while talking with undercover Channel 4 reporters and suggesting using Ukrainian women to entrap politicians in embarrassing and compromising situations.
The story also prompts you to wonder about the possibility of a black market for data and about future wars made employing digital weapons rather than nuclear bombs.
There is also a secondary issue linked with this story: in a profile published in The Observer trendy pink-haired whistleblower Wylie (who appears in the Channel 4 documentary wearing the bright orange MISBHV's "Warszawa" sweat currently sold out on Farfetch) mentions a connection between fashion and politics. Yet he is not referring to the usual links you may expect, such as studying the sartorial choices of a head of state that may reveal hidden political beliefs and messages.
Fashion seems to have been the inspiration behind Wylie's work: The Guardian's profile highlights indeed how, at 24, Wylie was studying for a PhD in Fashion Trend Forecasting, it was then that he came up "with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup."
Wylie told to Bannon that "politics was like fashion", as he explains to The Guardian: "[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking 'Ugh. Totally ugly' to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for."
It sounds as if Wylie applied a system valid for fashion to politics and then redeveloped for politics a system that could be applied to fashion to influence consumers.
Wylie's quote makes you wonder if there are actually data harvesting companies out there servicing not political but trendy clients such as fashion groups or fashion houses interested into buying data and manipulate them to increase their customer base.
Democracy and morality are definitely more important than fashion, but the way Cambridge Analytica has been playing with the mental vulnerability of people, misrepresenting the truth to change the culture of America and swing the election results makes you wonder. After all, similar apps to the one developed by Kogan have been harvesting similar quantities of data for years for commercial purposes and, if a personal quiz may be used to swing elections, it may be used also to change and drive consumers' behaviour. You may argue that nobody has proved this theory yet, but it may explain why hordes of talentless copycat designers (not to mention vapid influencers...) are idolised.
Time will tell, but, hopefully, we won't have to hire digital forensics firms to discover if we genuinely wanted what's hanging in our wardrobes or if someone subtly manipulated and brainwashed us into doing so by harvesting private data about us. What's sure at the moment is that data is the new gold and that algorithms to analyse them will be the weapons of many political, financial and (maybe?) fashion wars in the coming years.
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