Britain’s chief data regulator has said the online political advertising industry will be forced to reform for good as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Elizabeth Denham, the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office, said that her organisation’s forthcoming report into the use of personal data for political purposes “will change the behaviour and compliance of all of the actors in the political campaigning space”.
She also told a hearing at the European parliament that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook would have to take greater responsibility for the material hosted on their sites in future.
“Online platforms can no longer say that they are merely a platform for content,” she warned the tech companies. “They must take responsibility for the provenance of the information that is provided to users.”
Denham told MEPs her organisation’s year-long investigation into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns was “unprecedented in its scale” and thought to be the largest ever undertaken by any data protection authority in the world.
The organisation has more 40 investigators working full-time on the inquiry, aided by 20 external legal and forensic digital recovery experts. The investigation, which will incorporate the one being undertaken into Cambridge Analytica, is looking at 30 separate organisations and the actions of around a dozen individuals.
However, she warned that misuse of data was widespread across the internet and was not confined to the Facebook platform or this particular case.
“We have seen that the behavioural advertising ecosystem has been applied across political campaigning to influence how we may vote,” she told MEPs.
“I am deeply concerned about the fact that this has happened without due legal or ethical considerations of the impacts on our democratic system.”
Denham said her organisation was one of the best-resourced data regulators in Europe and warned MEPs from other countries that they should provide more funding to their national equivalent.
“I recognise that some aspects of our legal systems have failed to keep up with the unforeseen pace of the internet.”
Denham was giving evidence to the European parliament alongside Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, former Facebook employee Sandy Parakilas, and US professor David Carroll.
Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who went public with his concerns earlier this year, told MEPs the issue helped cause Brexit: “This crisis is not just one of privacy, it is one that may have led the EU to losing one of its largest member states.
“What I witnessed at Cambridge Analytica should alarm everyone. Cambridge Analytica is the canary in the coal mine of a new Cold war emerging online.”
