Uproar May Upend Internet Businesses
SAN FRANCISCO — The consumer surveillance model underlying Facebook and Google’s free services is under siege from users, regulators and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic.
It amounts to a crisis for an internet industry that until now had taken a reactive, whack-a-mole approach to problems like the spread of fraudulent news and misuse of personal data.
The uproar centers on the recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company hired by Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, harvested data from 87 million Facebook users, and it has led to accusations that social media is pulling society down instead of lifting it up.
There has been debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. The United States Congress might restrict consumer data use in specific sectors, and require increased transparency in online political advertising, said Daniel J. Weitzner, director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, said advertisers and tech platforms could collect vastly less user data and still effectively customize ads to consumers.
The next chapter is set to play out in Europe, where regulators have already cracked down on privacy violations and are examining the role of data in online advertising.
The Cambridge Analytica case was not just a breach of private data, said Vera Jourova, the European Union commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality. “This is much more serious, because here we witness the threat to democracy, to democratic plurality,” she said.
Although many people had an understanding that free online services used their personal details to customize ads, the latest controversy exposed the machinery. Consumers’ ‘likes’ could be used to covertly categorize and influence their behavior. And not just by unknown third parties. Facebook itself has worked with presidential campaigns on ad targeting, describing its services in a company case study as “influencing voters.”
“People are upset that their data may have been used to secretly influence 2016 voters,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon Univer- sity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “If your personal i nformation can help sway elections, which affects everyone’s life and societal well- being, maybe privacy does matter after all.”
Some trade group executives warned that any attempt to curb the use of consumer data would put the business model of the ad-supported internet at risk.
“You’re undermining a fundamental concept in advertising: reaching consumers who are interested in a particular product,” said Dean C. Garfield, chief executive of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter.
In May, the European Union is instituting a comprehensive new privacy law that treats personal data as being owned by an individual and not able to be used without permission written in clear language, not legalese.
The United States does not have such a law, but privacy groups said that after years of pushing for similar legislation, recent events were giving them new momentum, and
Curbs on the use of consumer data are in the works.
that they were looking to Europe for inspiration.
“With the new European law, regulators for the first time have real enforcement tools,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “We now have a way to hold these companies accountable.”
The business practices of Facebook and Google were reinforced by the fact that no previous privacy flap lasted longer than a news cycle or two.
If the current furor passes without meaningful change, critics worry the problems might become more entrenched. When the tech industry follows its natural impulses, it becomes even less transparent.
“If Facebook and Google were merely interested in maximizing profits, we could regulate them,” said Maciej Ceglowski, who runs Tech Solidarity, a labor advocacy group. “But well-intentioned people can break things not easy to fix. It’s like a child running a bulldozer. They don’t have any sense of the damage they can do.”