To serve a free society, social media must evolve beyond data mining

As Congress and the public wrestle with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, many people are now realizing the risks data collection poses to civic institutions, public discourse and individual privacy. The U.K.-based political consulting firm didn’t just collect personal data from the 270,000 people who used researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s online personality quiz – nor was the damage limited to 87 million of their friends. Facebook recently revealed that nearly all of its 2.2 billion users have had data scraped by “malicious” people or companies. The firm itself has joined calls for better privacy regulations.