In the UK, where privacy issues are actually taken seriously, it was announced yesterday that Facebook is facing the maximum possible fine for having allowed Cambridge Analytica to forage through the personal data of it citizens.
The announcement came after an investigation into Cambridge Analytica, which declared bankruptcy this year following allegations that it used personal information harvested from millions of American Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. The data allegedly helped the Trump campaign target political advertising more accurately by giving them insight into what American Facebook users liked and disliked.
While the penalty is but a drop in the ocean for Facebook, which generates that sum roughly every seven minutes, it stands as a stark warning for similar companies, which now face fines of up to two percent of global revenue under the European Union’s new data protection regulations.
British regulators found that Facebook failed to safeguard users' information and failed to be transparent about how data was harvested by third parties, and published a progress report on the broader investigation, which includes a recommendation that the British government introduce a statutory code of practice for the use of data in political campaigns.
The UK regulator found that Facebook ‘contravened the law by failing to safeguard people's information’ and didn't inform its users about how their information was harvested by others, and called on political parties, online platforms and the public to pause and ‘reflect on their responsibilities in the era of big data’.
New technologies that use data analytics to micro-target people give political campaign groups the ability to connect with individual voters but, the UK regulator found yesterday, this cannot be at the expense of transparency, fairness and compliance with the law.
But what does all this have to do with Malta, one may quite rightly ask. The answer is that in its vast data foraging and harvesting expedition, tiny Malta was, believe it or not, the second-most targeted country after the UK in the whole of the European Union in the months preceding the June 2017 general election.
One could quite rightly ask, what on earth is going on?
Within this whole controversy, it is tiny Malta that should really be taking an interest in how its citizens’ data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. Although only 6,011 Maltese citizens had their data harvested by the controversial firm, Malta’s per capita proportion makes it the most ‘harvested’ country in the European Union after the United Kingdom.
Although the Maltese government has denied any sort of involvement with the firm, it still stands to be understood why the company had such an interest in tiny Malta, so much so that close to one in 70 Maltese Facebook users are reported by the European Commission to have had their data mined and harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
Such campaigns are not conducted on a whim, there is always a reason for them. And while the details of 6,000-odd people may not seem like a mountain of data, it is significant for a country of this size, as it is far more than enough of a sample size to psychological electioneering profiling and who knows what else.
And those dubious, alleged, links between Cambridge Analytica’s mother company, SCL Elections, and Malta’s citizenship concessionaires Henley and Partners makes answers from a Maltese view point even more pressing, especially coupled with allegations that SCL Elections manipulated elections in St Kitts and Nevis.
Like British citizens, we Maltese deserve answers too, but the truth is that we will have no answers whatsoever until Maltese citizens, like their British counterparts, become a little more discerning and begin demanding answers from their politicians.
Until then it will be a case of two weights and two measures when it comes to this case, our privacy in the era of big data and, for that matter, practically every6thibngeklse that the government would rather not have discussed.