Question of the Fortnight Should you delete your Facebook account?
Fifty million people had their data abused in one of the biggest ever web scandals
The young, fresh-faced man in the interview was adamant: his website would never share your content without your permission. You own this content, he stressed, not us. It was Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg talking to BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan in 2009. We doubt he’ll be ‘liking’ it any time soon.
A video of the interview (which you can watch at www.snipca.com/27394) spread through social media in the wake of revelations that personal data collected from Facebook was used by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to target people with personalised adverts. The company’s bosses were recorded undercover boasting that their ads helped swing marginal states to Donald Trump in the 2016 election, although it has officially denied this.
Here’s what happened. In 2013 about 270,000 Facebook users took a personality test built by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University data scientist. His firm collected (or ‘harvested’) the users’ data, though that’s not the scandal: such data collection is commonplace on Facebook. Those taking the test would have agreed to it, albeit perhaps without realising the implications or reading the small print.
What they also agreed to – almost definitely unwittingly – was letting Kogan gather data about their friends. This increased his dataset to 50 million people, making it irresistible to marketing companies. The information was detailed enough to create ‘psychographical’ profiles of people, which are based on beliefs, values, attitudes, interests and characteristics. Firms like Cambridge Analytica analyse these to work out which adverts would persuade people to vote a certain way.
Christopher Wylie, who quit Cambridge Analytica in 2014, broke the story to The Observer. He said: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons”.
Remarkably, none of this violated Facebook’s rules. Kogan was free to collect what he wanted. But he wasn’t allowed to sell it to another company. Facebook said it knew about this in 2015, and supposedly received confirmation from Kogan and Cambridge Analytica that the data had been erased. But in March newspapers claimed it was still available online.
Both companies now face intense scrutiny, as regulators around the world decide whether to take action. Zuckerberg has refused a request by MPS to appear before a select committee, though he has agreed to testify before the US Congress. Don’t expect him to look as fresh-faced.
His company’s response since the story broke has been a case study in gross incompetence. First it passed the buck to Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, then
it took Zuckerberg over a week to apologise. Finally, as its share price plummeted, it announced new privacy settings that are “easier to find” ( www.snipca.com/ 27396).
Other companies have better solutions: Mozilla’s new Facebook Container extension for Firefox ( www.snipca. com/27395) isolates your Facebook activity, making it harder for the site to exploit your web browsing to send you targeted adverts.
Alternatively, you could ditch Facebook for good. To do this, visit www. facebook.com/help, hover your mouse over Managing Your Accounts at the top, then click ‘Deactivating or Deleting Your Account’. Next, click ‘How do I permanently delete my account?’, then the ‘let us know’ link at the end of the first paragraph (see screenshot). We suspect it’s been one of the web’s most-clicked links in the past month.
We exploited what we knew about people to target their inner demons