The internet is used hundreds of times a day, on mobile phones, on computers, but it is completely unregulated, the 29-year-old Canadian graduate of the London School of Economics and former director of research at Cambridge Analytica (CA), pointed out in an on-stage interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy, presenter of Channel 4 News and Unreported World. By contrast, when people go to the doctor, buy food or travel by plane, most feel safe thanks to regulation.
So why not set up an institute to regulate this area? he asked rhetorically, to applause from many of the thousands-strong audience in the Altice Arena, in Lisbon’s Parque das Nações.
“People sleep with phones more than they sleep with people,” Wylie said, only half-jokingly.
Wylie is best known for, in 2008, providing several documents to UK newspaper The Observer that unmasked illicit methods used by CA, namely using private personal data from 50 million Facebook user accounts to which the company had no official access. The data was used to the benefit of political campaigns in the course of the 2016 US presidential elections.
The scandal triggered the closure of CA and a mea culpa from Facebook.
Gurum-Murthy asked Wylie whether it had been worth blowing the whistle on CA, given that it had “turned your life upside down” and his interviewee said it had, but that he felt duty bound to do more.