“Who has seen an advertisement that has convinced you that your microphone is listening to your conversations?”. The phrase said right at the beginning of the 2019 documentary, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, already leaves us with a question about the extent to which our privacy is respected and the extent to which we own our data.
Our microphone isn´t actually listening to our conversations. The truth is that the data we provide to our social media can be used by companies to anticipate our reactions, understand and manipulate our behavior (I know, this looks a lot like a Black Mirror episode).
This documentary shows us the story of how the company Cambridge Analytica influenced the results of the 2016 American elections and Brexit using data acquired through Facebook ads. The data was used to catalog people’s profiles and apply strategic communication to influence popular votes.
The narrative has two main characters. One is Professor David Carroll who discovered that his personal information, as well as that of the entire American population, was being hacked to create political profiles and influence the vote of the population. So, he filed a lawsuit for the knowledge and possession of his data. The other character is Brittany Kaiser, former director and whistleblower of the Cambridge Analytica case.
Although the testimonials given by Kaiser are incredibly detailed and rich for the documentary, the lack of a counterpoint with testimonials given by employees who still worked for Cambridge Analytica makes the narrative one-sided. This makes the film tend to overvalue Brittany’s actions without questioning her past attitudes. She ends up being put on the role of anti-heroine giving the final impression that the documentary serves much more for her personal redemption than in fact to denounce and analyze the case.
The argument proposed by the film is that nowadays our data is our most valuable asset. More than that, we and our data become commodities, we are literally traded by politicians. It is our right to know what information companies have about us, the sale of such information by these companies is a violation of our rights.
The question remains, how to have democratic elections in a scenario where platforms like Facebook, which has billions of users, have a direct effect on democracy? This calls into question the democratic structure itself as we know it.
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The article above was edited by Laura Ferrazzano.
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