Facebook unfriended Zuckerberg feels the heat
Mark Zuckerberg took out full-page adverts in several British and US newspapers this week to apologise for Facebook’s recent data privacy scandal, which has wiped tens of billions of dollars off the company’s market value and given rise to the #Deletefacebook campaign. He said his firm should have done more to prevent the personal information of 50 million users being exploited without their knowledge. A University of Cambridge researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, obtained the data in 2014 via a questionnaire app on Facebook that harvested the details of about 270,000 people who took part in a quiz, along with details of all their friends. Kogan then passed the trove of data to a political consultancy group, Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly used it to target US voters on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg apologised for the “breach of trust” and promised a thorough audit of third-party apps to ensure it didn’t happen again. A former Facebook manager has warned that hundreds of millions of users are likely to have had their private information used by firms in the same way.
What the editorials said
A “reckoning is coming” for Facebook and its fellow tech giants, said The Sunday Times – and “not before time”. The issue in this scandal is not whether harvested Facebook data enabled Trump to steal the US election. “It did not – however much liberals would love to overturn the result.” Rather, it’s that Facebook has failed to protect the personal data of its users. The company has been “unforgivably lax” about third-party use of this information, agreed The Times. It has arrogantly shirked “the responsibilities that come with power”, and been wilfully blind to the consequences of its inaction until problems have reached the headlines.
Facebook did tighten its rules in 2015 so that third-party apps could no longer access data on users’ friends without those friends’ knowledge, said The Guardian. But that hasn’t stopped the network exploiting such data itself, in ways that also raise concerns. The power wielded by Facebook cries out for more government oversight. Thankfully, a new law is on the way, said the FT: the EU’S General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). From May, any firm dealing with information about EU citizens will have to show how it was collected and where it is going. GDPR isn’t perfect, but it’s “a decent first effort and other countries may follow”.