After watching the documentary The Great Hack, I have a greater understanding of how big data works. Big data is this new phenomenon in today’s society. Now many people are growing up with technology and social media, more of their lives will be online. From what I have learned from this film, companies like Cambridge Analytica loves to take advantage of people’s profiles and many times without permission. For example, if I permit a company to gain access to my Facebook account, I would think that they would only have access to just my profile. However, this is not the case. They would be able to see all my friends and their information. According to Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica uses this data for many campaigns. Alexander Nir, CEO of Cambridge, claimed that he used it for several campaigns around the world. From the U.S 2016 Presidential Election, Brexit in the U.K, to Brazil. They claim they take information from all users, but they actually have a targeted audience called the “persuadables”. With all the information they gathered from the persuadables, they are able to predict their personality. Personality leads to behavior and that leads to possible voting behavior. The persuadables are people who are undecided about their political views. In order to persuade them to swing to one side, they bombard their social media with ads skewed to one party. In the case of the 2016 election, Kaiser was able to help the Republican Party to boost their image. The ads persuadables would see on their Facebook page depict the disadvantages of open borders or call out Hillary Clinton as crooked for her email scandals. Donald Trump was able to push out millions of advertisements while Hillary Clinton in comparison only had a couple thousand. Kaiser emphasized that marketing teams spend the most money on Facebook advertising.

Professor David Carrol believes that data rights should be human rights. He wants to know all the data Cambridge has on him, but they were unable to comply. Therefore it becomes a criminal investigation. Companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook both failed to protect the privacy of millions of users. This leads to the issue if there can ever be a fair election.

There are connections that can be drawn for The Great Hack and Death of the Private Self.  The article talks about how private self has decreased since the birth of social media. More people are on social media and are on it more frequently. This leads to big data companies like Cambridge Analytica to take advantage of this. Privacy might no longer exist, as social media continues to and that is what Professor David Carrol is fighting for.