The global perception of last week’s discovery of Facebook’s scandal involving the UK Company Cambridge Analytica, is shaping up to herald the beginning of the end of Facebook. The #deletefacebook movement is gaining so much traction worldwide that this social-media turned advertisement-and-personal-data-mining platform is experiencing what is clearly its most difficult problem since it was founded in 2004. So bad is the situation that Brian Acton, the founder of WhatsApp, which Facebook had acquired for $19 billion several years ago, initiated the call last Wednesday for people to “#deletefacebook,” in apparent disgust about the company’s inability to protect your data.
Another manifestation of the deep problem Facebook is facing is the growing number of world tech leaders who have joined in the movement. For example, Elon Musk, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time and the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, deleted the Facebook pages of both of his companies last week. Across the Atlantic, from Euorpe to America, tech leaders are calling for people to abandon Facebook after the company allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to obtain and misuse data on 50 million users.
There have been many issues with Facebook before, such as the negative psychological effects the platform has on young people and the reported mining and selling of users’ data to third parties. There is also the ominous role of Facebook in disseminating fake news, which is generally believed to have influenced election results all over the world.
Last week The New York Times and The Observer of London reported that a Cambridge university research professor, Aleksandr Kogan, used an app to extract the personal information of approximately 270,000 Facebook users and 50 million of their friends in 2015, and then handed over the data to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, apparently in violation of Facebook’s policies. The data were then used to influence political campaigns around world, such as in the Brexit vote and the 2016 presidential election in the US that elected Donald Trump. According to the New York Times, Trump campaign advisor and Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon served as the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board. Of course, Bannon is a well-known ultra-conservative, with apparent white supremacist views.
Mozilla, of Firefox fame, announced last week that it is suspending its advertising on Facebook in the wake of the scandal. Mozilla feels that the current default privacy settings in Facebook remain risky. According to Natasha Lomas on 22 March 2018 in techcrunch.com, Mozilla is also running a petition calling for Facebook to lock down app permission settings to ensure users’ privacy is “protected by default,” saying that Facebook’s current app permissions leave billions of its users vulnerable without knowing it. “If you play games, read news or take quizzes on Facebook, chances are you are doing those activities through third-party apps and not through Facebook itself. The default permissions that Facebook gives to those third parties currently include data from your education and work, current city and posts on your timeline.”
Adding to last week’s discovery is the general perception of Facebook as a company that seems to be losing it. The UK Guardian writer Alex Hern on 21 March 2018 puts it this way: “Facebook isn’t really a social network. It’s barely even an advertising company. It’s a data analytics firm, which manages to use its position as the middleman for a vast proportion of all human communication to find out everything there is to know about its users.” He goes on to list what Facebook knows about you: “Facebook doesn’t just learn from the pictures you post, and the comments you leave: the site learns from which posts you read and which you don’t; it learns from when you stop scrolling down your feed and how long it takes you to restart; it learns from your browsing on other websites that have nothing to do with Facebook itself; and it even learns from the messages you type out then delete before sending.”
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, eventually attempted to own the problem and win back people’s confidence in his company. He laid out the changes he plans to make to prevent future abuses of your data. However, the general reaction of the tech world to Zuckerberg’s plans is skepticism and the feeling that a lot more needs to be done to address the issue head-on.
So many things have gone wrong with Facebook’s mode of operation in recent years, the least of which is not its role in spreading fake news and changing democracies all over the world. However, the exposure of last week tops it all. We don’t know whether or not Facebook has truly learnt a lesson from this, and to what extent it would go to permanently resolve the issues. The execution of the required action items will play a role in whether or not the users will forgive, while they wait for a better social media platform to take over from Facebook. Meanwhile, we may be able to partly rely on the protection provided by existing and forthcoming UK and European Union’s privacy-related laws and regulations.
