MPs must demand proper answers from Facebook over data scraping

A great many people in the UK hand over vast amounts of personal data to social media companies with barely a second thought – they must have confidence that their information will not be misused

Given the potential political impact of Cambridge Analytica’s apparent use of data acquired from Facebook, it is surprising that politicians seem to have so few answers to the troubling questions raised by the present scandal.

True enough, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are first and foremost in the firing line. But any political party that has undertaken targeted online campaigns in the past three or four years might reasonably wonder whether there are smoking guns pointing in their direction too.

As experts have made plain to The Independent, the scraping of Facebook user data by the firm that worked on both the Trump presidential campaign and for Leave.EU during the Brexit referendum may be simply the tip of the iceberg. Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook deny any wrongdoing, with the former contending that it never used the data it had obtained.

That claim is called into question by Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee. His account of the company’s activities, alongside Channel 4 News’s undercover filming of Cambridge Analytica executives seemingly discussing ways in which politicians could be discredited online, tell a very different story.

On the face of it, there seems little doubt that Facebook’s infrastructure has enabled a wide range of actors to scrape the personal data of users, for instance by encouraging them to take part in fun quizzes. Until changes were made to Facebook’s terms of service in 2014, it was also possible for companies to obtain data belonging to a user’s network of friends too.

Whichever way you cut it, therefore, for a significant period of time Facebook could be used to obtain personal data about individuals without their explicit consent. There were, in theory, rules about how that information could then be used. But nobody should be under any illusion that all data harvesters are paragons of virtue when it comes to the ethics of our information-rich age.

Quite rightly, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Damian Collins, has called on Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to give evidence about Cambridge Analytica’s activities. Meanwhile, the Information Commissioner is seeking a warrant to inspect Cambridge Analytica itself.

There is undoubtedly a feeling among a growing number of parliamentarians that big tech firms have for too long been able to avoid difficult questions, regarding themselves as beyond the reach of national regulators or elected politicians. These, after all, are global players in global markets.

Slowly but surely, that appears to be changing. There may, indeed, be more to come if MPs really get stuck in. And there is certainly no doubt that they should.

There is though a modest irony that the current outcry should coincide with the passage through Parliament of new data protection legislation, the primary purpose of which is to modernise and harmonise European data law. Some of the changes this will introduce are timely, not least in making it more difficult for data controllers and processors to avoid regulatory oversight by virtue of their physical location outside EU territories.

However, the bill has also become a forum in which old debates about the traditional news media are being rehashed. Amendments introduced by the House of Lords seek effectively to reopen a Leveson-style inquiry into the media’s use of data, and to create a legal regime in data protection cases which would punish legitimate journalism and make it easier for bad people to whitewash unwanted histories from the internet.

That some politicians should still be so absorbed with the past wrongdoings of a few tabloid newspapers is questionable in its own right. But set against the backdrop of the very modern, very high-impact and enormously widespread use – and misuse – of online data harvested from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, it looks like a bad case of misplaced priorities.

A great many people in the UK and elsewhere hand over vast amounts of personal data to social media companies with barely a second thought. They must have every confidence that their information cannot be obtained by third parties without the clearest of consent, and that it will not be misused.

If MPs do not demonstrate, and quickly, that they are able to get a grip on this scandal – a scandal that implicates the very business of political campaigning – the people they represent will demand to know why.