The Cambridge Analytica revelations have exposed how little Australians know about the extent of personal data held by Facebook and Google, according to competition chief Rod Sims.
The chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which is in the early stages of an inquiry into digital platforms, said the public’s shock at the scandal confirmed what he already knew – that consumers are largely ignorant about the potential of social media giants and search engines to access and harvest their information.
The ACCC inquiry is investigating the impact of Google, content aggregators such as Apple News and social media platforms such as Facebook on the state of competition in media and advertising.
Last month the Guardian revealed a third-party application on Facebook scraped profile information from users and their friends, which data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica then used to target voters for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The story sparked calls for users to delete Facebook and examine how much of their data it held.
“I’ve been in a presentation where an informed person said, ‘people know what Google and Facebook have on them and they don’t mind’. I’m not sure I would have said that,” Sims told Guardian Australia.
“I think the reaction to Cambridge Analytica [revelations] indicated a lot of people don’t understand the data that’s held on them and potentially what it can be used for. I thought it was very interesting from that point of view and very relevant to our inquiry.”
The ACCC has published an issues paper on the inquiry, for which submissions close on Tuesday. Sims will then decide what type of public hearings to hold.
But he said he had no plans to invite the Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to address the inquiry, despite Zuckerberg’s agreement to testify before the US Congress, because the ACCC inquiry is a different beast.
“Look, we’re not sure about [holding public hearings],” Sims said. “We need time to find out what we need to find out. Ours is very much an analytical exercise to try to understand what is going to help from a competition and consumer point of view.
“We will engage with people and we certainly will hold public forums. But we are really trying to hear perspectives.”
The inquiry will not specifically investigate the role of Cambridge Analytica in harvesting data in Australia, but will consider more broadly how the public understands the collection of their data on social networks.
“It was a very useful development in the sense that it brought out how data potentially could be used and I was interested that people reacted as if perhaps they didn’t know what data people had on them,” Sims said.
“Prior to Cambridge Analytica we were certainly posing the question, ‘What do consumers understand about what data Google has on them?’ And a couple of weeks later we had this example, which illustrated that point nicely,” he said.
Alexander Nix, CEO
An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the company’s elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from Robert Mercer.
Aleksandr Kogan, data miner
Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA’s data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan.
Steve Bannon, former board member
A former investment banker turned “alt-right” media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016 he became Donald Trump’s campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the “populist, economic nationalist” agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out.
Robert Mercer, investor
Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax.
Rebekah Mercer, investor
Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father’s billions. The fortysomething, the second of Mercer’s three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump’s presidential campaign.
Sims said at the heart of the inquiry will be the impact of the platforms on the level of choice in news content and its quality.
“We’ll be looking at a range of competition, consumer and level-playing-field type issues,” he said. “But then we’ll be looking at what the impact of this is on the media, understanding very much the role that media and journalism play in society.”
Sims sees journalists as the gatekeepers of information, reporting and interpreting what they see for the public.
“I have this example where journalists go along to a results presentation and report, so people find out about it that way. Or do people find out about it because the company uploads its results on Facebook?” he said.
“I suspect there is a very big difference between the two and that is very much at the front of our minds as we go about doing our work.”
A preliminary report is due in early December, with a final report in early June 2019.
