Facebook follies
Facebook is under fire on two continents. Following weekend reports that Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest private information from tens of millions of Facebook users without those users receiving an alert from the social network, Facebook needs to stop denying its failures and start fixing them.
Cambridge Analytica is a political data firm owned by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and headed at the time of the breach by Steve Bannon, a former top adviser to President Trump.
In 2014, Global Science Research paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app that scraped private information from their profiles and those of their friends’. The company told Facebook it was collecting the information for academic research.
Instead, it shared the information with Cambridge Analytica, which went on to run data analytics for President Trump’s presidential campaign.
Facebook has responded to the backlash by suspending Cambridge Analytica — as well as data expert Christopher Wylie, who blew the whistle on the misuse of data — from its platform.
That’s not good enough.
In both Britain and the United States, lawmakers are demanding answers from Facebook about how this happened. The company’s lack of disclosure may be a violation of the laws in both countries. The Massachusetts attorney general has opened an investigation, and more states are sure to follow.
The company’s role in this misuse of data is sure to encourage more countries to consider adopting a wide-ranging set of personal data protections, like the ones the European Union will begin enforcing in May. (Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, has introduced AB2182 to establish a data protection agency for California.)
Technology companies, including Facebook, dislike these kinds of privacy protections. The hard truth is that social networks rely on data mining to build advertising revenues and other critical aspects of their business models.
User information may be highly profitable — but it can also be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes, including psychological manipulation. If social networks don’t start taking these kinds of abuses more seriously, they’ll have to find a new way to do business.