Facebook loses trust and market shares
Social media site says it has restricted user data since mining incident
SAN FRANCISCO – Can Facebook be trusted with your personal information?
That’s the question many Americans are asking after revelations that a data-mining firm working for the Trump campaign improperly got its hands on the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users and created detailed profiles that were used to target unsuspecting voters in the presidential election.
For many, the incident raises troubling questions about how Facebook manages third-party access to the sensitive information of its 2 billion users, including what safeguards the social media giant has in place to prevent apps from sharing information.
Facebook said a researcher, Cambridge University’s Aleksandr Kogan, gained access to the data of 270,000 Facebook users in 2013 through a personality quiz app that required Facebook users to grant access to their information, including friends and “likes.”
According to Facebook, he gave that information to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that claimed it helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Citing a violation of its rules, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica on Friday. Facebook announced Monday that Cambridge Analytica had agreed to an independent audit by a digital forensics firm, but the auditors were turned away by the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office, which is pursuing its own investigation.
Facebook said it has restricted how much personal information outsiders can obtain since the incident.
“We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. Kogan’s app would not be permitted access to detailed friends’ data today,” it said.
It’s unclear whether that statement will assuage worried users. It didn’t lower the political heat in the USA and Europe, where calls intensified for new regulations.
Over the weekend, U.S. and British lawmakers and privacy activists slammed Facebook, some demanding that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg personally appear at legislative hearings.
Monday, the markets reacted. A nearly 7% plunge in Facebook shares led to a sell-off in tech stocks.
Cambridge Analytica “is another indication of systemic problems at Facebook,” Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said.
Facebook has come under intense fire since the presidential election, during which Russian operatives used bogus profiles to spread fake news and try to manipulate voter sentiment. The site has also been criticized over its response to racist and violent content.
Wieser said he does not believe the latest public relations nightmare will dent Facebook’s advertising business because advertisers are unlikely to suddenly pull back on spending.
That’s the problem, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
“The Cambridge Analytica scandal gives us a glimpse of how Facebook makes billions of dollars off of our personal information without ever dealing with the consequences,” said Chester, a longtime privacy critic of Facebook.
Tapping the personal information people freely share on the social network to aim advertising is the special sauce that turned Facebook’s business into one of the world’s most powerful and lucrative.
In 2007, Facebook gave third parties who created an app on the Facebook platform access to users’ personal information, including friend lists, interests and “likes.” The social network rose from 58 million users to more than 2 billion.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the Cambridge Analytica incident was a textbook violation of the settlement Facebook reached with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 that required that users give permission before their data are shared beyond the privacy limits they set on Facebook.
Facebook users have shrugged in previous instances when the Silicon Valley company played fast and loose with their privacy.
John McGrath said he rushed to delete his Facebook account when he heard the news of the latest incident, but he ended up not pulling the trigger. He said a 4-year-old photograph of his daughter playing the piano stopped him.
“It feels like the Gambinos have hijacked my family album,” McGrath, 48, a software developer and product manager from San Francisco who works for Amazon, wrote in a Facebook post.
Instead of scrapping his profile, he removed all the identifying information he could: where he lives, works, where he went to school, family relationships, contact information and more.
“You can’t do psychometric profiling with no data,” McGrath said, “so I’m taking my data back.”
“The Cambridge Analytica scandal gives us a glimpse of how Facebook makes billions of dollars off of our personal information without ever dealing with the consequences.” Jeffrey Chester Center for Digital Democracy