What Facebook Does with All that Personal Data It Collects

What Facebook Does with All that Personal Data It Collects

Top of Mind with Julie Rose

MS-13 Gang and Trump, Martha Hughes Cannon Legacy, Michal Kosinski and Facebook

Episode: MS-13 Gang and Trump, Martha Hughes Cannon Legacy, Michal Kosinski and Facebook

  • Mar 22, 2018 11:00 pm
  • 17:40 mins

(Originally aired: March 14, 2017) Guest: Michal Kosinski, PhD, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University Let’s look now at some of the underlying science behind the current scandal involving UK-based Cambridge Analytica. The company got access to profile and preference data for some 50-million Americans through a personality quiz app that was available on Facebook and then used that information to try and sway the election for President Trump. The whole approach is based on work published in 2015 by psychologist and data scientist Michal Kosinski when he was a grad student at Cambridge University. Multiple reports indicate Cambridge Analytica approached Kosinski for help, but he declined and the firm turned to a different researcher at the university named Aleksandr Kogan.  Michal Kosinksi is now a professor at Stanford University and still working on using big data to predict people’s preferences. We spoke with him a year ago about his work.

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