Even though we see and consider everything in the world from a collective standpoint, in all honesty, that’s not really how it works. On a granular level, each one of us views the world in a unique manner. Our personal perspective is largely influenced by what we choose to prioritize and how we can fulfil that priority without straying from our ideas of right or wrong and other related factors. While our priorities and principles can differ to a larger extent, it’s not to say that the whole of world’s population doesn’t share anything at all. In fact, the modern generation has more in common than you can realize. This shift, as you can guess, is triggered by technology. After all, when you have such a creation on the table, the pull of it can bring even the most diverse set of human beings together. Our relentless focus on technology has also made our priority lists more uniformed, with pretty much everyone consistently agreeing over what are the most important things in our lives at the moment. Now, there are a ton of things on the said list, but one that’s quickly forming a strong case to claim the top spot is data. As new and more subtle methods for data collection are emerging from the pipeline, so are the ways we can use it for personalizing human experience. Nevertheless, with the potential of data becoming more apparent by the day, some organizations are resorting to unscrupulous methods to get the most out of it. Hence, the regulatory bodies now look to tighten their grip on such organizations, and their latest attempt to do so has landed Mark Zuckerberg in another controversy.
District of Columbia’s Attorney General, Karl Racine took to Twitter for revealing that, owing to some strong evidence, he’ll be adding Mark Zuckerberg as one of the defendants in the infamous Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal. Filed in 2018, the lawsuit already had Facebook in the hot waters after it was claimed that the company first misinterpreted its own policies regarding third-party access and then topped it with substandard security, which eventually led to privacy violations taking place on a huge scale. The developments since then, however, have made Zuckerberg’s role in the whole scandal increasingly clear. Racine went on to say that the Facebook CEO was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.”
The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how Facebook was all but allowing the collection of data from non-consenting users. If the reports are to be believed, the said activity has been done for a variety of purposes, which included sensitive themes like pushing certain political agendas through targeted advertisement.
Facebook has responded to the recent District Attorney’s decision by stating:
“These allegations are as meritless today as they were more than three years ago, when the District filed its complaint. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts,”
