IT’S TIME TO REIN IN MARK ALMIGHTY
WHEN Mark Zuckerberg once declared himself to be an atheist, it must have left God wondering if the Facebook creator was after his job.
For, ever since 2004 when the social media site was founded, the nerdy Harvard alumni has gone on to become an omnipotent billionaire who increasingly, it seems, answers to no one.
For years he has shunned attempts by governments around the world to rein in his power, while in the UK he arrogantly snubbed two requests to testify to a Parliamentary committee investigating online disinformation.
It tells you pretty much all you need to know about where the balance of control lies in the global game of (basically unregulated) US technology giants against (basically powerless) foreign governments.
But if Westminster couldn’t get Zuckerberg’s attention before, it certainly has it now.
MP Damian Collins’ release of more than 200 pages of internal Facebook documents and communications was not only damning but extremely worrying for the site’s 2.23 billion users around the world.
British authorities obtained the records after serving several orders on Ted Kramer, founder of the app company Six4Three, while he was on a business trip in London.
Kramer eventually handed the documents, which were sealed during a US court case, over to Collins after Parliament’s sergeantat-arms personally delivered an order at his hotel.
Six4Three filed a lawsuit against Facebook in California after its bikini photo-finder app shut down.
The app relied on users’ friend data, but the social media firm restricted this information to third-party apps in 2015.
Developers who built on top of the Facebook platform used to be able to access the data of users’ friends, which this particular app took advantage of to identify swimsuit photos.
Cambridge Analytica bought data acquired in the same way.
The problem is, Facebook continued, for a variety of reasons, to allow some developers to see data that was closed to others.
Six4Three alleges this was done to extract advertising revenue from those who wanted special privileges. The documents reveal the US company routinely rewarded friendly firms with access to users’ data while withholding it from other organisations that were seen as potential threats.
The revelations add to already mounting reports of Facebook’s questionable practices and show the company cares less about user privacy than it does about its own growth.
This is hardly surprising news about a company whose goal is to make money. Basically, Collins’ release of the Facebook papers suggest the company’s motto to be “You connect and tell. We collect and sell”.
But his move does strengthen the case that governments need to act and take a hard line on firms’ ability to hand user information over to third parties.
Facebook is not the only tech company that requires regulatory scrutiny but it has, perhaps uniquely, demonstrated a staggering lack of corporate responsibility and civic duty in this crisis.
Real accountability is not forthcoming.
Even in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was no shake-up in the upper echelons of Facebook.
Despite ongoing and escalating controversies, Zuckerberg is unlikely to be ousted as CEO. He is, after all, both the majority shareholder and the chairman of the board.
But what the latest documents do serve up are serious questions over Facebook’s benefit to society, which are becoming increasingly outweighed by the damage it has done and is doing.
For me the answer is simple. Delete your account.
Of those I know who have, they say they have become happier, with more time spent doing what is important than worrying about how many likes they may have.
More importantly, they no longer worry about having people mine their data before psychoanalysing it for profit.