Article content

The dirty little secret about Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. and other tech companies is that their business model is unethical — it is a combination of espionage and propaganda.

This week the “data misuse” scandal, involving allegations that a third party obtained 50 million Facebook users to influence the 2016 election, underscores this description and reveals the extent of the problem. Facebook said it did not know about or gave permission to do this.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Big tech's dirty little secret is that its business model is unethical — it's time to hold Facebook and others accountable Back to video

But the bigger story is that Facebook and others should be held accountable for how they treat our data, never mind rogue third parties.

Interestingly, the centre of this week’s scandal is a Canadian whistleblower, Christopher Wylie from B.C., who described how data was used by Cambridge Analytica, to create a psychological tool for Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign to “explore mental vulnerabilities of people” and to take “fake news to the next level.”