Overall a good documentary on the events, but the narrative is more partisan than it should be for accuracy purposes.
The ending message of the documentary: don't vote for Trump in 2020 because they're at it again - personally, I think it is a poor way to end when you try your best throughout to seem impartial. I'm not a fan of Trump, but you should abstain from hypocrisy.
The bigger issue, which is touched lightly here, is that the great tech giants are not regulated in the ways they traffic your personal data. Preventing targeted campaigns is crucial, but it comes at a price... user data currently pays for the infrastructure of Google and Facebook, and then some; commercial ads are one thing, political ads are another - only the former should be allowed worldwide, but even then what's the criteria?! There are lots of commercial products which are bad for health, should they be allowed to target the public at all? No, they should not and this conversation also happened with TV ads.
The issues arising from this are deeper and much more complicated than this documentary reveals, but I guess we have to start somewhere. Starting with ourselves, and our lack of understanding about how our data can be subtly used against us.
While there's no question that companies like Cambridge Analytica are a huge problem, and that the work they do is unethical, there's still something to be said about this movie. Watching this movie, you would think that Cambridge Analytica is the sole reason for why Trump or Brexit got the most votes, and that if such companies were to be banned, everything would be solved and there would be no authoritarianism ever again. The unfortunate fact and the true problem is that Trump and Brexit would still have huge amount of support even without Cambridge Analytica, and the causes of that are much deeper and something that this movie doesn't even touch on.
I am not much of documentary watcher but this documentary's topic attracted me to watch it. Generally I don't like documentary as some has narrative from single side only.
Seeing as we have an election approaching this fall, I figured it'd be good to refresh myself on the manipulation of our last election and the Brexit campaign. I liked the first half of this documentary, but the second half was not quite as engaging (likely due to the personality of Brittany Kaiser and a lack of breadth of topic coverage). With the doc starting off talking about some of the logistics in play by Cambridge Analytica's approach to manipulation and posing some intriguing philosophical questions, it peters out towards the end and shies away from further depth into CA and breadth of the tech world in general (and implications of how this type of manipulation is an everyday practice nowadays). For someone who doesn't know much about this at all, it's a good doc, but if you're looking for something to sink your teeth into, it's not going to satisfy that hunger.
Whole thing was a propaganda piece.. to Visit Thailand and buy Apple products.
Seriously though, it started great and ended up being so hypocritical itself.
Real facts or a new Black Mirror?
Anyone who thinks that posting a statement on Facebook is going to protect your data needs o watch this and realize that you have no hope. It’s too late.
Review by Niklas PivicBlockedParent2019-07-25T09:48:37Z
"I don't care about apps. When does it turn sour?"
This documentary mainly follows two persons, Professor David Carroll and Brittany Kaiser. The former is a privacy and data-rights advocate and the latter is a former executive at Cambridge Analytica (CA), the company that in joint abuse of privacy stole great amounts of beyond-extremely private data from Facebook users and their friends.
The documentary started out better than I had expected: Carroll expertly and clearly shows that our personal experiences and behaviour are more valuable than oil, that they are the commodities that are being sold and, most importantly, used against us.
Who are "us"? The documentary goes into that, too, by interviewing former CA staff, Carole Cadwalladr—an investigative journalist with The Guardian who exploded the CA story—and Carroll himself, as he tries to find out exactly what data of his it is that SCL/CA have.
The entire documentary takes place in context of two big political events: the 2016 USA presidential election and the UK Brexit election.
The documentary makers do a quite good job at showing how Facebook not only helped CA, but also endorsed their use of Facebook to not only sift data from users, but also attempt to change their behaviour to make them do what they wanted. CA enabled Ted Cruz's campaign trail, and did the very same for Donald Trump.
At the same time, the documentary takes a human aspect as it introduces Brittany Kaiser. As a former executive at CA, she had access to many exclusive documents which she later used against CA; she knew Alexander Nix, the CEO of CA, well.
We learn that Trump's administration spent approximately one million USD/day on Project Alamo, the code name for Trump's database of voter information for his campaign. Much of this money went into CA and trying to convert "the persuadables," i.e. people who had not yet made up their mind on whom to vote for.
Remember, 70,000 votes made the American election in 2016.
Seeing Alexander Nix be interrogated and asked "So you are the victim in all of this?" and answer "Yes" is quite overwhelming, especially when the documentary makers display a CA sales presentation that displays not only how they swung the most recent political Trinidad/Tobago election by generating apathy in non-Indian persons, but how Nix boasts of this.
Cadwalladr points out how "British election laws are not fit for purpose" and cannot be, because of "completely unaccountable tech giants."
Facebook evades responsibility. WhatsApp—owned by Facebook—is used to generate fake news (which is proven fact). Myanmar military initiated genocide thanks to Facebook. Russia created Black Lives Matter posts and protest invitations to create divides in the USA.
"Is this how you want history to remember you? As handmaidens to totalitarianism?" Cadwalladr asks during a TED talk.
Carroll says our dignity is at stake, and pushes for data rights to be included as a basic human right.
This documentary pushes matters far, but not far enough. Sure, this book focuses on CA, but could have included more, e.g. how Amazon, Microsoft, and to a much farther extent, Google, to show how human behaviour is commoditised and sold to benefit a few capitalists.
I recommend seeing Laura Poitras's "Citizenfour" on top of this, to see how Edward Snowden's information came out.