The last 7 days (or week), I have been researching more about ethics specifically Cambridge Analytica, more than last week’s blog. This means that I did research, I learned more about how dodgy they are, and how the long history was uncovered once some of their employees whistleblowed them out. I am finding this topic interesting, but the actual writing part (putting words on paper) is hard/painful.

It started all the way back in 2014, with a very privacy app, named “This Is Your Digital Life”, and for some years it didn’t do much other than collect data. But then some people at the Trump organization talked to Cambridge Analytica, and got a deal were targeted ads will be shown to Facebook users (and other platforms also). I chose to mainly focus on the Trump election issue but still have the overarching Social Influence section. Even if you are smart and didn't download the app (and give acsess), your data could still be collected, because your friends might have allowed it unknowingly.

However, peoples reception to this news was not happy, with lots threatening to remove/delete their accounts, but only some actually did that according to Facebook. There is also lots of lost trust for every social media, that is unsurprising that people didn’t trust them as much anymore, but it was more supervising the amount of damage that had been done. So much that Mark Zuckerberg did a testimony to regain Facebook’s trust again

There are even reports of ties to Russia, and apparently something with the oil companies wanted to influence the election. But it is hard to agree or disagree, as I haven't done enough research and is hard to prove that kind of stuff. Considering the amount of voting issues the organization has done (for example, Trump, Brexit, and more), it does make it sound very plausible for Russia to be involved.

This week I learned that companies are untrustworthy and how a reputation can change easily. I also learned there are people that did the unethical things but when realized how bad it was, they decided to tell everyone about it. Something to improve on is time management, I have not really done much on this in the last week, even though I said that I will do better this week, so next week (the only week left) I will complete the assignment. For the time I actually did the assignment, I put a decent amount of effort on writing and doing the required parts, I could have done better (if it was programming then I probably would have put my best effort TBH). I kept on finding the things that made me curious but wasn’t useful to write on the assignment, an example was when I got myself into a rabbit hole of finding out the exact events and things that Cambridge Analytica did. I can improve that next week by focusing on researching the questions, and spending time on the other assignment in web dev.

TL;DR: I did more on assignment, and discovered that Cambridge Analytica is not ethical. And need to do more next week