Acuna, Justinne Raphaell G.

BS ECE – 1
SOCECON 10 – XC

Reaction Paper on the “The Great Hack (2019)”

The Great Hack is a 2019 documentary film about the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica
data scandal, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. The
documentary offers an alarming glimpse of the way data is being weaponized for political gain
and what it might mean for future elections.

The documentary highlights about the Trump campaign and other reckless elections all
over the world and their connection with Cambridge Analytica, the British data research
company that illegally harvested information from millions of Facebook users and their friends
via a “personality” questionnaire.

At the center of the film is Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica

employee who is remorseful for her work with the company. She has referred to Cambridge's
tactics as the "hijacking" of democracy. The aim of the game: influence voters and in turn,
political campaigns and elections.

Cambridge focused their efforts on swing voters or the "persuadables" – people who
could, under the right conditions, be influenced to vote for the candidate, group or party the
company was serving. They bombarded them through blogs, websites, articles, videos, ads and
every platform you can imagine, until they saw the world the way they wanted them to. It’s
like a boomerang, you send your data out, it gets analyzed, and it comes back at you as targeted
messaging to change your behavior. This was the thing that was invisible to all of us.

The data from that quiz, which Kogan sold to Cambridge Analytica, was used to
construct highly accurate data profiles on thousands of people, providing an in-depth portrait
of their personalities and therefore their behavior, which goes hand in hand with how people
vote in elections. But not only did that app get information from those who had used or joined
it, it also exploited the information of their entire friendship networks, too, without their
knowledge or consent.

I believe that this film helped me open my eyes on how our data online could be used
as a target in exploiting our personal lives. For me, data rights should be considered as a
fundamental right. Data is the most valuable asset in Earth. The reason why the wealthiest
companies are technology companies is because these companies uses their technology to
exploit people using their assets. It’s like these companies are playing with psychology of an
entire country without their consent or awareness.

There is no such thing as true privacy in this Digital age, everything that we input to
social medias, whether data such as status updates, likes, even private messages can be used to
target our personality. So, let us be aware to know what data we post online because it may be
used to backfire at you.