HOW CALLS FOR PRIVACY MAY UPEND BUSINESS FOR FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE
People detail their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen.
Now, 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.
The recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company that had worked with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, harvested data from 50 million Facebook users, raised the current uproar, even if the origins lie as far back as the 2016 election. It has been many months of allegations and arguments that the internet in general and social media in particular are pulling society down instead of lifting it up. That has inspired a good deal of debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. At the furthest extreme, some dream of the companies becoming public utilities. More benign business models that depend less on ads and more on subscriptions have been proposed, although it’s unclear why either company would abandon something that has made them so prosperous.
Congress might pass targeted legislation to restrict consumer data use in specific sectors, such as a Senate bill that would require increased transparency in online political advertising, said Daniel J. Weitzner, director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are other avenues still, said Jascha KaykasWolff, the chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the nonprofit organisation behind the popular Firefox browser, including advertisers and large tech platforms collecting vastly less user data and still effectively customizing ads to consumers. “They are just collecting all the data to try to find magic growth algorithms,” KaykasWolff said of online marketers. This past week, Mozilla halted its ads on Facebook, saying the firm’s default privacy settings allowed access to too much data.
The greatest likelihood is that the internet companies, frightened by the tumult, will accept a few more rules and work a little harder for transparency. And there will be hearings on Capitol Hill. The next chapter is also set to play out not in Washington but 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, said Vera Jourova, the European Union commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, was not just a breach of private data. “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 the ads they saw, the latest controversy starkly exposed the machinery. Consumers’ seemingly benign activities — their likes — could be used to covertly categorise and influence their behaviour. And not just by unknown third parties. Facebook itself has worked with presidential campaigns on ad targetting, 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 University.