Facebook is hardwired not to change

DESPITE what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says about tightening privacy controls and preventing apps accessing users’ data, the platform’s very business model is predicated on taking advantage of its users for its own financial imperatives.

Facebook is an opt-in service whose customers are not, in fact, its users but the advertisers who market to those users.

What Cambridge Analytica did – by exploiting the personal data of 87 million users, mostly US voters – may have been euphemistically dubbed “spinning an election”, but it’s what used to be called “propaganda” before Facebook became the biggest media platform in the world.

It’s no different to how Facebook has for years been harvesting our personal preferences to better target users for advertising.

As Zuckerberg said in a recent conference call: “The vast majority of data that Facebook knows about you is because you chose to share it, right? It’s not tracking. There are other internet companies or data brokers or folks that might try to track and sell data, but we don’t buy and sell.”

But ultimately there’s little difference, as Facebook uses that personal data for its own purposes. The more it knows about you, the more it can target advertising to you.

Researchers discovered they only needed a single Facebook “like” to determine a person’s psychological profile, which could be used to tailor “persuasive appeals to the psychological profiles of large groups of people . . . [and] influence their actual behaviours and choices”.

Several university studies found this resulted in “up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalised counterparts”.

Arthur Goldstuck, MD of research group World Wide Worx, says Facebook’s users should have known better.

“Facebook has had a legitimate intention, and its users are naive if they don’t realise that something has to pay for the incredible functionality Facebook has added to their social lives,” he said.

“However, Facebook has revealed itself as still functioning in a Wild West style, with a laissez-faire attitude to its users’ data. Even now, the arguments it gives on its site for the permissions it requests when its app is installed suggest it has learnt little.”

Goldstuck thinks Cambridge Analytica has “done us a favour by showing how easy it is to exploit user data” and alerting users that a “Bell Pottinger-style of subverting democracy and damaging social cohesion is not an isolated event” but an ever-present threat.

There is a critical nuance, however, in this instance.

Cambridge Analytica didn’t ask permission to use the data it gathered for its own purposes, and it didn’t disclose that was its intention all along.

Worse: Facebook knew in 2015 this was what Cambridge Analytica was doing, but it conspicuously failed to tell any of those users they could be manipulated.

It seems it may well have been part of the standard Cambridge Analytica playbook.

In Kenya and Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica also tried to influence elections, but failed.

As The Globe & Mail’s renowned Africa correspondent Geoffrey York wrote, their tactics failed there because “African voters were protected by their own distrust of the tactics of their politicians”.

How ironic.

Facebook is also well aware of the consequences of its strategy to attract more users.

This seems evident in a notorious memo titled The Ugly written in June 2016 by Facebook vice-president Andrew Bosworth, which surfaced last week thanks to BuzzFeed.

Discussing how Facebook’s growth strategy depends on how it can “connect more people”, “Boz” wrote: “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

Bosworth went on: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”

Last week, Bosworth said the memo was designed to provoke debate, and he disagreed with it.

Zuckerberg, too, said he disagreed with the sentiment.

Even more scary are the comments by Facebook employees, which lay bare the toxic internal culture and its ominous overtones of a paranoid cult.

One staffer wrote: “Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a oneoff bad decision,” and “Imagine that some percentage of leakers are spies for governments”.

Another Facebook employee wrote: “How f***ing terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some God complex that jeopardises our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?”

As for deleting your Facebook profile, Goldstuck thinks it’s too late already.

“Why do you want to delete Facebook? You knew all along that anything you put on social media was on a public stage,” he says.

“Your credit cards give away far more information. Cut them up first.”

It may seem improbable, but Facebook’s biggest threat might come simply from a lack of interest.

Researchers eMarketer found in February that “Facebook is losing younger users at an even faster pace than previously expected”.

For the first time, this year fewer than half of US Internet users aged between 12 and 17 will use Facebook at least once a month. Users aged 12-24 will decline, as will users 11 and younger.

It’s worth remembering that Facebook, the current top dog, was the second-largest social network only a decade ago.

The leader back then? MySpace. “Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly,” The Guardian asked in 2007.

“In social networking, it is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are.”

How quaint that sounds now. Facebook be warned.

Your personal data is what social media uses to target you with advertising, where a single ‘like’ is enough to determine your psychological profile