With friends like these
Direct message to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Come out of hiding. Now. Your 2.2 billion active users globally, 230 million of them in the United States, deserve an accounting from you personally of how a data firm tied to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was able to mine information from more than 40 million profiles on your social network without their permission.
Why this happened despite a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission binding Facebook to obtain individual consent before sharing any users’ data with outsiders.
Why a Cambridge University psychologist was able to buy access nonetheless through a backdoor to 270,000 accounts, paying users to sign up for a personality quiz that accessed not only their profiles but those of their Facebook friends — and assuring them the information would be used for academic purposes.
Why, after British journalists exposed in 2015 that the presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz targeted voters online using the resulting 40 million-plus psychological profiles — acquired by the firm Cambridge Analytica, backed by megadonor Robert Mercer — Facebook did not follow through on a pledge to ensure the data destroyed.
That left Cambridge Analytica — Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, vice president — free to mine the information trove on behalf of Trump’s presidential bid once Cruz dropped out, notwithstanding a convoluted denial.
And meanwhile, herds of Russian-sponsored trolls infected Facebook and other social media with inflammatory posts supportive of Trump, as detailed in an indictment of 13 ringleaders by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller is rightly probing the Cambridge operation, too.
And Facebook’s CEO, who’s gotten gobs of media training amid speculation he might run for President someday? He hides under his hoodie, the behemoth he built forever blackened as host for virulent political infection that may be inextricable from the webs of interpersonal connections, tied to ad sales, that make Facebook Facebook.
His company’s failure twice over to batten down the hatches well merits the announced investigations by the FTC and by New York and Massachusetts Attorneys General Eric Schneiderman and Maura Healey.
Facebook no longer lets apps grab user profiles willy-nilly — but it has blown its chance big-time to prove it can be trusted to put user privacy over shareholder profits without outside oversight.
Not even the sweetest baby picture can take the sting away.