Dhruv Agarwal - Cambridge Analytica's use of fake social media accounts to influence the 2016 presidential vote in the United States of America
During the 2016 election between Hilary Cliton and Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica collected data on millions of Facebook users without them knowing- a breach of privacy. Facebook was also aware of all of this while it was happening, and was fined $5 billion as a result of the breach of privacy. After collecting data on these users, Cambridge Analytica was hired by political leaders such as Donald Trump to target specific user's with personalized ads, which as a result influenced their voting in the 2016 election. Had this not happened, the election might have swung the other way. Facebook users were not aware they were being fed personalized, misleading ads.
Some of the systems I chose were Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Influencing Voting. A system like Influencing Voting is important to think about, because in this case, it is one of the bigger ethical problems that was effected, especially in the context of a presidential election. The other systems I chose to investigate were Big Data, User's Feed, and Personalized Ads. These are all important when it comes to the larger picture of this case. The ethical quandries I chose to investiage were 'Going against the public's interest', 'Uknown tracking of user's data', 'Showing incorrect information', and 'Secretly invading privacy'. I thought these were the main ethical issues that were effected by this case. For example, showing tracking a user's feed is defintely an invasion of privacy. The ethical quandry of invading privacy is a huge issue, and the companies Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are defintely at fault in this case in my opinion.