Facebook case lets privacy experts say: ‘I told you so’
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Doc Searls met with a group of fellow internet privacy experts one recent afternoon here at the Computer History Museum. On a whiteboard were the words “OUTRAGE” and “MAKE HAY.”
For the first time in years, their field of expertise was front and center. Facebook had just come under intense scrutiny over how the political data firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the information of up to 87 million of its users.
Members of the group excitedly discussed what they could do next.
“A lot of geeks in the world are looking at Facebook as a redwood that’s starting to fall,” said Searls, whose given name is David and who created ProjectVRM, a program at Harvard University that seeks to empower internet users to protect personal privacy. “They’re saying, ‘OK, it’s barn-raising time.’ ”
The scandal swirling around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica has begun to usher in a new era for this once-ignored community of privacy researchers and developers. After years of largely disregarding their warnings about exactly what companies like Facebook were doing — that is, collecting enormous amounts of information on its users and making it available to third parties with little to no oversight — the public suddenly seemed to care about what they were saying.
The outcry over data privacy has been so strong that it pushed Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, into testifying on Capitol Hill this week over the company’s failures to protect users’ information. Protesters rallied outside the Capitol during his testimony.
In their own lives, privacy experts are now fielding a spike in calls from their relatives asking them for advice about protecting their personal data. Engineers are discussing new privacy projects with them. Even teenagers are paying attention to what they have to say.
For many developers, this is the right time to push ahead with testing more privacy solutions, including more advanced advertising blockers; peer-topeer browsers that decentralize the internet; new encryption techniques; and data unions that let users pool their data and sell it themselves. Others want to treat tech giants more as information fiduciaries, which have a legal responsibility to protect user data.
And for the first time, many privacy experts think internet users will be more willing to put up with a little more inconvenience in return for a lot more privacy.