WHY FACEBOOK CAN’T CHANGE

Your personal data is what social media uses to target you with advertising, where a single ‘like’ is enough to determine your psychological profile

Despite what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says about tightening privacy controls and preventing apps accessing users’ data, the platform’s very business model is predicated on taking advantage of its users for its own financial imperatives.

Facebook is an opt-in service whose customers are not, in fact, its users but the advertisers who market to those users.

What Cambridge Analytica did — by exploiting the personal data of 87m users, mostly US voters — may have been euphemistically dubbed “spinning an elec- tion”, but it’s what used to be called “propaganda” before Facebook became the biggest media platform in the world.

It’s no different to how Facebook has for years been harvesting our personal preferences to better target users for advertising.

As Zuckerberg said in a conference call last week: “The vast majority of data that Facebook knows about you is because you chose to share it, right? It’s not tracking. There are other Internet companies or data brokers or folks that might try to track and sell data, but we don’t buy and sell.”

But ultimately there’s little difference, as Facebook uses that personal data for its own purposes. The more it knows about you, the more it can target advertising to you.

Researchers discovered they only needed a single Facebook “like” to determine a person’s psychological profile, which could be used to tailor “persuasive appeals to the psy-