FACEBOOK FACING EXODUS
ELECTION DATA-MINING FALLOUT
FACEBOOK’S data leak that compromised the accounts of more than 50 million users could be its undoing after the Australian Privacy Commissioner threatened to take action against the social network yesterday and thousands of its users joined a #DeleteFacebook protest on a rival social network.
Users of the world’s largest social network started deleting and deactivating their accounts in droves as part of the global trend that followed revelations Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest personal information for use in US President Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign.
Fallout from the news and protest saw Facebook stock suffer its biggest plunge in five years yesterday, wiping $46 billion from the company’s market value and more than $6 billion from creator Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune.
Despite Facebook promising to launch an investigation into the unprecedented privacy breach, the technology giant also appears set to face action from governments across the world, including Australia, the US, and Great Britain.
Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he was investigating whether the privacy breach affected Australian users and whether his office should take further action, including enforceable undertakings or courtordered penalties against Facebook.
Britain’s Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she would apply for a warrant to access users’ data used by Cambridge Analytica after the firm had proven “uncooperative,” and US Senator John Kennedy called for Mr Zuckerberg to answer questions about the privacy breach before Congress.
The information harvested from Facebook users came from a personality-testing app created by Global Science Research in 2015, which sold the information about users’ likes and dislikes to Cambridge Analytica, a firm run by billionaire Trump supporter Robert Mercer, so it could be used to predict users’ race, gender, sexual orientation, and purchasing habits.
Many of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users are reacting to news of the privacy breach with their feet, threatening to leave to the social network and posting angry tales and screenshots of their expunged accounts under the #DeleteFacebook trend on Twitter yesterday.
Curtin University adjunct senior research fellow Dr Kate Raynes-Goldie said the #DeleteFacebook protest could see significantly more users flee the social network than the company’s last user revolt in 2010 as warnings about how personal information could be exploited had become a reality.
“Now there are all these issues like fake news and getting hacked that is making people rethink what Facebook is giving them,” she said.