Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: Data protection and citizen's privacy as a line of defence against election manipulation (debate)
Julia Reda (Verts/ALE). – Mr President, one aspect I am missing so far in this debate is that the Facebook scandal is also a scandal of secrecy. We must demand more transparency about data breaches on the one hand, but more generally about how personalised algorithms work and who is served which customised messages on whose behalf. In a world where information flows are now so personalised that we no longer really have one shared reality, we must make it understandable and investigate how information is spread and who is spreading it.
As we debate regulatory responses to the scandal, here is my proposal: let us regulate advertising targeting. There is an arms race in the industry to collect ever more data, to create ever more precise psychological profiles of users and to move ever closer to outright manipulation – just to secure advertising revenues. Let’s end this arms race and return a share of the advertising market to those whose business model is not based on invading our privacy.