Why Data Privacy Is Crucial to Fighting Disinformation

Why Data Privacy Is Crucial to Fighting Disinformation

The data we give tech companies when we buy online or like a tweet will soon fuel disinformation campaigns intended to divide Americans or even provoke destructive behavior — and data-privacy legislation isn’t keeping up with the threat, intelligence community veterans, disinformation scholars, and academics warn.


This could bring back the kind of population-scale disinformation campaigns seen during the 2016 presidential election, which led to some reforms by social media giants and aggressive steps by U.S. Cyber Command. The fact that the 2020 election was relatively free of foreign (if not domestic) disinformation may reflect a pause as adversaries shift to subtler manipulation based on personal profiles built up with aggregated data.


As Michal Kosinski and his colleagues argued in this 2013 paper, easily accessible public information such as Facebook Likes “can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.”


It’s the sort of thing that worries Joseph E. Brendler, a civilian consultant who worked with Cyber Command as an Army major general.  Brendler discussed his concerns during a Wednesday webinar as part of the AFCEA TechNetCyber conference.


“A dynamic that started with a purely commercial marketplace is producing technologies that can be weaponized and used for the purposes of influencing the people of the United States to do things other than just buy products,” he said. “Activ ..

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