Marketing lessons from The Great Hack
The era of fast and loose with people’s data is at an end
If you were still in the dark about how much Facebook knows about you, the new Netflix documentary The Great Hack should put an end to that. Centred on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the film points to the fact that by scraping user info from the site Cambridge Analytica managed to collect up to 5,000 data points on every American voter. This allowed the firm to exploit the data and to hyper-target ads during the 2016 US presidential election.
The Great Hack is a wake-up call for users to not blindly trust Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire. But, as Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr correctly notes, “… the Cambridge Analytica story actually points to [the] much bigger, more worrying story, which is that our personal data is out there and being used against us in ways that we don’t understand.”..
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