Netflix’s ‘The Great Hack’ doesn’t have the answers we need: Review

Broadly speaking, people like me are the problem — or, at least, we’re part of it.

Sitting ducks with a fondness for instant gratification, tech consumers like myself are often aware of the world’s rapidly worsening privacy problem, but regularly fail to act on the warnings given to us by journalists, policymakers, and human rights advocates attempting to protect us from ourselves.

Instead, we eagerly partake in problematic trends like FaceApp, heedlessly accept unread terms and conditions, continuously leave our webcams uncovered, and otherwise toss away our personal data points like valueless confetti. Whether that’s because we’re lazy, unafraid, uninformed, or point-blank don’t care is hard to say. 

It’s a frustrating conundrum that has beget countless headlines and academic journal titles from industry professionals begging us stubborn users to wake up and smell the invasive coffee. As we’ve heard time and again, these reckless moves have the power to change life as we know it.

But in Netflix’s The Great Hack, a documentary that sheds new light on the unethical data mining practices behind the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, our complacency is not shamed or vilified. Rather, it exists as a blameless reality of an unsolvable problem of the digital age — presenting unknowing consumers as clear-cut victims of Big Bad Tech.

For those unaware of the 2018 scandal’s intricacies, the documentary plays like an informative thriller, doling out blame to Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, its parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories, and the many culpable individuals therein, while maintaining a well-researched and tense narrative.

The mechanics and motivations of the widespread data breach that aided in the election of a U.S. President, contributed to the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union, and left millions of users questioning their online autonomy are broken down clearly and digestibly. It’s a markedly accessible recounting, made even more approachable by its hosting on a platform as professedly user-friendly as Netflix. Arguably, its the best way to learn about an act of exploitation in which many viewers, informed and uninformed alike, may be victims. 

But for those well-versed on the world-changing event, The Great Hack serves as little more than a satisfying dose of salt in the PR wounds of wrongdoers still attempting recovery. 

The documentary doesn’t present much new verified information to feed our hunger for answers, but it does revel in retreading criticisms gone by. Despite declining to participate in interviews, Mark Zuckerberg, the current CEO of Facebook, and Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, are mercilessly (and rightfully) raked across the coals for their actions and inactions in equal measure.

Meanwhile, even those who did cooperate with filmmakers — namely, former Cambridge Analytica business development director Brittany Kaiser, who exists as something between a whistleblower and an opportunist (and bizarrely appears in a luxurious swimming pool for much of her screen time) — are contextualized by the damning evidence of their accountability.

But like many of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica explainers and exposés that have come before it, The Great Hack stops short of offering any tangible solution, recourse, or plan of action for its viewers.

If it can be said that this story has a hero, then that title is shared by David Carroll, the American professor who sued Cambridge Analytica for access to his online data profile last year, and reporter for The Guardian Carole Cadwalladr, who has played an instrumental role in informing the public about the aftermath of the industry-shaking discovery. 

Both offer up critical insight into the scandal’s consequences, predictable and unforeseen, and act as pseudo-narrators when the documentary calls for it. In the film’s final acts, they even predict future repercussions, emphasizing the permanent nature of losing control of your data. 

And still, not even they can offer clear steps forward. 

As a story, The Great Hack struggles to present this immensely unsatisfying conclusion. That is, in no small part, a reality of its ongoing nature. We are just beginning the campaign season for President Trump’s potential reelection, the United Kingdom remains part of the European Union (for now), and many of the individual privacy violations felt by users are still hidden from view.

Of course, the documentarians can’t be blamed for events developing as slowly as they have. Both the British and American governments have shown a marked inability to deal with the complex debacle, as evidenced by numerous public hearings in which some officials have failed to keep pace with even the most basic of related technical concepts.

That being said, I do, to some extent, wish we — the often pigheaded consumers that we are — had been held more accountable by these creators and their interviewed experts. Or, at the very least, been told what and what not to do now that we’ve seen behind the curtain. 

Yes, it’s appropriate that The Great Hack doesn’t outright berate viewers for not foreseeing what was happening with Facebook, as almost no one could have. And sure, Carroll’s parting thoughts about limiting our personal “flood of data” is a vaguely reassuring move in the right direction.

But, amidst the bleak realities of this story, there is an added sense of familiar hopelessness that begins to border on apathy. The experts we’re turning to don’t have the answers we need, and we can no longer trust the companies that want our business to even consider our well-being. For those of us dawdling to take the easiest of self-protective steps, all that can make it seem as though worrying about the issue of privacy is a pointless exercise in stopping the inevitable.

And yet, as The Great Hack makes clear, this is a dire issue. If we don’t know what to do, then we must find out. We must demand retribution and solutions to the effects of this scandal, and others like it. We have to stop this disturbing trend before it morphs into an acceptable standard. We need to change our behavior, before something changes it for us.

Simply put, it is essential that we get in front of this thing. I just wish someone would tell us how to do that — and, perhaps more importantly, we were showing any sign that we actually wanted to. 

The Great Hack is now streaming on Netflix.