It’s not Facebook, it’s the web
The latest Facebook scandal should be a long-overdue wakeup call for internet users — because it is not just about Facebook. Not even close. Cambridge Analytica’s shocking abuse of Facebook users’ data is emblematic of the surveillance-based business models that power much of the web.
It’s time for us to face the deeper problem that haunts our digital interactions: Healthy people and democracies require privacy and dignity, and yet that is exactly what we are sacrificing to use the platforms that are at the center of social and civic life.
To be clear, Facebook is in the spotlight right now for good reason. Facebook’s Graph API allowed a researcher to engage in voracious collection of people’s data without anything resembling informed consent. Then, instead of ensuring that data was siloed and deleted, Facebook stood by while Cambridge Analytica — a known bad actor — subjected that user data to privacy-invasive machine learning techniques for targeted advertising purposes.
But these problems of sweeping data collection, indiscriminate sharing of that data and manipulative advertising are not unique to Facebook. Many of the most popular sites on the internet depend on users trading their time, attention and personal information for the free use of their platforms.
About half of the most popular websites all use the same third-party tracking software to silently spy on users.
The good news is that there is nothing inevitable about this state of affairs. The internet is what we make it, and we don’t have to settle for a status quo that requires us to leave our privacy rights at the door.
But first, we need to shift the way we think about privacy. Privacy means protecting not just the information we actively share, but also the information that is taken from us without our knowledge or consent.
It’s fair to expect users to exercise some responsibility and awareness when they actively share information. When you post a photo on Facebook, for example, you are making an active choice to share it, and you have some meaningful privacy control over what audience can readily see it.
But the bigger problem is when you lose control over information you didn’t even realize you were sharing in the first place.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, the mathematics of Facebook’s social network multiplied 270,000 people taking a survey into 50 million people’s data falling into the hands of a third party — and most of them would never even hear of it until years after the fact.
Cambridge Analytica is only the most visible recent manifestation of this pattern. Indeed, most of the time we spend online, we are unwittingly broadcasting data to advertisers and data brokers with whom we do not intend to share it.
Deeply personal information can be inferred from our every click, whether it’s a “like” or a purchase or simply the act of hovering over a link or lingering on a page. These inferences come back to us in the form of targeted advertising: sometimes uncanny (when an ad for shoes pops up right after you talked about needing a new pair), sometimes clumsy (when you search for a barbecue and ads for it follow you around the web for days), and always creepy.
This bargain has become the digital norm by staying invisible. Indeed, the world’s largest companies and greatest minds have devoted vast resources to making this extractive surveillance frictionless and even user-friendly. But the recent reporting on Cambridge Analytica has brought it out of the shadows, and it is clear that something must change.
Users must not continue to carry the burden of defending against the insidious ways platforms and third parties take their information from them. Changing privacy settings is an error-prone and labyrinthine process.
And while disengaging from or deleting Facebook may make sense for some individuals, it is simply not an option for those who depend on it to communicate with friends and family or make a living. We need to start with defaults that serve the user, not the business model. As long as we are stuck with design that serves data-hungry advertisers rather than users, we are going to find ourselves with the same core problem: We can’t be full participants in 21stcentury social and political discourse without providing advertisers and others a constant stream of our most intimate personal details.
Now is the time to question the surveillance-based digital water we swim in more urgently than ever. We deserve better — not just from Facebook, but from the entire web.