USA TODAY International Edition
Facebook has a habit of promising more privacy
Despite CEO’s track record, users give him benefit of the doubt
SAN FRANCISCO – Mark Zuckerberg has promised to protect people’s privacy before. Will this time be any different?
That was the question looming as the Facebook CEO made an appearance on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and pledged to lock down the personal information of the social network’s 2.2 billion users.
“I am committed to getting this right,” Zuckerberg said during his testimony before a joint hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Facebook users have become increasingly numb to privacy incursions in the age of big data. But revelations that the personal details of 87 million users, most of them in the United States, were improperly harvested by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and that Facebook’s search tool allowed bad actors to scrape nearly all Facebook profiles have shaken public confidence and drawn hard scrutiny from lawmakers.
“I think most online-savvy Americans knew and understood that everything they put online was subject to review by analytics, but now everyone has gotten a big wake-up call,” says Ava Roxanne Stritt, 54, a Facebook user and writer from Columbia, S.C.
Each time the social media giant has been called out for mishandling people’s data, Zuckerberg smoothed things over by promising to give users more control over their personal information. Yet, for more than a decade, the 33-year-old billionaire tech executive has pushed Facebook users to bare more about themselves, cashing in on the thousands of pieces of data Facebook collects on each user.
“Facebook wants us to forget that it has been explicitly and openly in favor of every one of us exposing ourselves maximally for years,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of an upcoming book on Facebook, Antisocial Media.
Facebook has apologized for privacy blunders before, starting in 2006 when users protested over the introduction of News Feed, which suddenly began blasting people’s personal lives to all of their friends. A year later, it launched Beacon, which broadcast information about users’ activities and purchases elsewhere on the Web.
The current Facebook crisis began in 2014 when some 300,000 users downloaded an app called This Is Your Digital Life. The researcher behind the app collected data not just on those users but on their Facebook friends and passed the data to Trump campaign connected Cambridge Analytic a.
Stritt says her faith in Facebook is wavering. “I would say that I did not have much trust in the beginning,” Stritt said, “but now that has dwindled down to almost none.”