Same old excuses in Facebook’s news feed
There was a reason the makers of The Big Short put the actress Margot Robbie in that bubble bath. We all remember this reason.
The Big Short was the filmic adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book about the financial crisis, which, in its more painful details, was a movie about collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps.
Robbie, sipping from a bottomless flute of champagne as she soaked in all those bubbles, offered up some helpful shorthand that reduced the complex world of manufactured high-risk finance built on the backs of vulnerable home owners to its essence: “Whenever you think subprime, think s—-.”
The scene comes to mind in the aftermath of Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony, which chewed up two days on Capitol Hill this week and triggered an outpouring of social media mockery aimed at the “elderly” senators (that was Day 1) asking “grandpa” questions of the Facebook CEO.
Should there ever be a Social Network ll, perhaps Robbie could be enticed to perform a précis of how Facebook works and how far its reach extends. It will not be amusing. For all the misplaced criticisms aimed at lawmakers’ attempts to unpack Zuckerberg’s brain — or push him off script — the CEO’s testimony told a chilling tale of an immature company seemingly untended and out of control, scrambling to establish mechanisms aimed at preventing the bad stuff from ever happening again. Are you reassured? You should not be.
Anyone who bothered to watch the Congressional marathon may, in fact, have walked away wondering: Do I really know as much about Facebook as I think I do?
Consider this exchange between Rep. Joe Kennedy III and Zuckerberg. “Can advertisers in any way use non-public data — so data that individuals would not think is necessarily public — so that they can target their ads?” Kennedy asked. Here’s Zuckerberg: “Congressman, the way this works is — let’s say you have a business that is selling skis, OK, and you have on your profile that you are interested in skiing.
“But let’s say you haven’t made that public, but you share it with your — with your friends, all right?”
“So, broadly, we don’t tell the advertiser that — ‘Here’s a list of people who like skis.’ They just say, ‘OK, we’re trying to sell skis. Can you reach people who like skis?’ And then we match that up on our side, without sharing any of that information with the advertisers.”
Kennedy: “So does — essentially, does — the advertisers that are using your platform — do they get access to information that the user doesn’t actually think is either, one, being generated, or, two, is public? Zuckerberg: “Yes.” Kennedy: “I think one of the rubs that you’re hearing is I don’t understand how users, then, own that data. I think that’s part of the rub.”
The “rub,” as Kennedy calls it, was at issue throughout the two days, with Zuckerberg repeatedly clarifying that Facebook does not “sell” data. “We get paid when the action the advertiser wants to happen, happens,” he told the joint Senate hearing on Tuesday.
A snapshot of the success of that model: across an eightyear period, advertising revenue exploded from $764 million (U.S.) to approximately $40 billion. Last week, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak added his voice to the “with Facebook, you are the product” chorus. Wozniak said he would be deactivating his Facebook account, writing in an email to CNNMoney that “It should bother all of us how much data they had access to, like profile info that we think is private.”
Zuckerberg wanted us to believe that the company was built with paramount considerations for the user, and user protections. “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he wrote in the company’s mission statement.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was only the latest reminder that this was not true. The broken-promises settlement the company reached with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cites too many allegations to mention, but a few stand out.
“In December 2009, Facebook changed its website so certain information that users may have designated as private — such as their Friends list — was made public. They didn’t warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance.”
Here’s another: “Facebook told users they could restrict sharing of data to limited audiences — for example with ‘Friends Only.’ In fact, selecting ‘Friends Only’ did not prevent their information from being shared with third-party applications their friends used.”
And this: “Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did.”
Yes, there have been lockdown changes since. (Users can bring with them only their own data, and not that of friends, when they sign up for an app.) But it’s the behavioural pattern I’m pointing to here, one that clearly does not place the privacy interests of users first, but that makes advertisers very happy.
As for Cambridge Analytica, only now is Facebook launching an investigation into apps created at a time when the company was promising “easy access” for app developers, including Aleksandr Kogan, whose This Is Your Digital Life quiz app created the data set that was then sold to Cambridge Analytica. This is a disturbing time line. Such an investigation, or audit, should have been triggered 2 1⁄2 years ago, after Zuckerberg learned of the improper transference of personal data. “I expect we’ll find some things,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. Given that Zuckerberg has already acknowledged the “abuse” of data via other apps, he had better.
Did he notify the FTC? No, Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “In retrospect it was a mistake.” Were users notified? Nope.
Gallingly, only at the bottom of last week’s corporate update on restricting data access did the company add as a near footnote: “In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the U.S. — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.” In newsrooms, this is known as burying the lede.
Through all this, no one asked: Where was the board? What did it know and when did it know it? Where was the oversight?
There will be a constituency of readers who will scan this account breathing a sigh of relief for not signing up for Facebook in the first place. The exchange between Rep. Ben Lujan and Zuckerberg will set you straight on this point. Under questioning from the Democrat from New Mexico, Zuckerberg did admit that Facebook, “for security purposes to prevent this kind of scraping you were just referring to,” collects data on people who have not signed up for Facebook.
There were many pointed questions through the day from all lawmakers of all ages. But perhaps Lujan’s interpretation of Lewis Carroll takes the cake. “Can someone who does not have a Facebook account opt out of involuntary data collection?”
We need to be reminded of such absurdities to think this through.
Zuckerberg has been apologizing for years. None of those apologies offers any real answers.