Directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, The Great Hack, which arrives on Netflix after an acclaimed debut at the Sundance Film Festival, offers a disturbing examination of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the rise of data as the single most important commodity in the current era.
It unravels the complicated strands of the scandal in which Facebook and other big data corporations exploited the privacy of users to influence elections in the US and elsewhere. It manages to give a deeply unsettling portrait of what happened and what it means for the future of privacy, democracy and freedom of expression.
Amer and Noujaim's approach is to follow the events through the perspectives of three characters. The first of these is digital media professor David Carroll, who is an advocate for the idea that data rights are the "ultimate human rights" and takes Cambridge Analytica to court to get the company to reveal what it knows about him through the data it mined.
The next part of the story - how data was acquired and how it was used - is told by two other characters, British reporter Carole Cadwalladr and Cambridge Analytica's twenty-something former director of business development, Brittany Kaiser.
Kaiser - a deeply conflicted and often horribly unlikeable person who went from running social media for Barack Obama's presidential campaign to working for a company that helped to elect Donald Trump - is the single most important character in the film, but she is also difficult to trust.
She helps to unpack the complexities of the data economy and its power as a tool for persuasion, but her road-to-Damascus moment occurred only after her involvement, so it's not always certain that she's sincere about her efforts to fight the system she was once happy (and well paid) to support.
She asks if the US can ever have free and fair elections again, but she's also part of the problem and considered Cambridge's former CEO, Alexander Nix, a friend and mentor. Anyone who's seen some of the secret camera footage of Nix and his associates selling their services and gleefully laughing at the naivety of the users whose information it harvested for its nefarious purposes will know he's not the kind of man you want on your contacts list.
What Kaiser's story does show us is the allure of power and the hubris that comes with it and how, in a world where data is worth more than oil, those who have access to it are often either unwilling to confront the implications of their actions or just don't care.
The Great Hack is a shocking and upsetting film that leaves a horrible aftertaste, but it's also an important and necessary look at what our participation in the digital world tells us about ourselves and how we perform our identities online.
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