The Great Hack

[harlan4096]

Today, I will be talking about the new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. The documentary takes a look inside the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was tied to both Brexit and the US presidential election of 2016. Yeah, that one.

Before we get into the review, I want to note that this post contains spoilers for the documentary. If you don’t want the story revealed, please stop reading now. However, to be fair, if this is the first you are hearing of Cambridge Analytica, I would like to know the rock you have been living under.

The movie opens up with a powerful image from the Burning Man festival. Brittany Kaiser writes “Cambridge Analytica” on an architectural sculpture and ties a whistle to it. From there, the documentary takes a long look into the questions: Who is feeding us fear? And how?

Following that arresting opening, we are introduced to a cast including Chris Wylie and David Carroll. Wylie, the first face of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is the whistle-blower. Carroll, a New York–based professor, made headlines challenging Cambridge Analytica (before it was cool) while trying to get his data from Cambridge Analytica.

The directors set the stage with showing two sides of the story. Wylie represents the political machine that was Cambridge Analytica. Carroll is the voice of the everyday social media user who was being exploited by the networks and companies like Cambridge Analytica for gains based upon his data.

Now, privacy and social network data are topics my colleagues and I cover quite a bit on Kaspersky Daily as well as on the Transatlantic Cable podcast. To put it bluntly, we humans overshare on social media. And many of us do not read EULAs. It doesn’t take a cybergenius to connect the dots — we overshare in exchange for use of the platform that we are oversharing on. Of course, we effectively pay for that “free” access with our data, which companies, advertisers, and political campaigns around the world can mine for their purposes.

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