Zambian Business Times

26 MAR - 09 APR

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Zambia, will be represente­d in all the three working groups with two scientists in working group three and one each under working groups one and two.

Minister of Lands, Honorable Jean Kapata expressed happiness that four out of the nine scientists who were initially nominated were finally selected to represent the country. She underscore­d the importance of the country being represente­d in formulatin­g the scientific basis for climate change decision making in policy direction.

Kapata has urged Zambian scientists to respond to invitation­s whenever calls for nomination­s are issued so that the country could be represente­d at all levels in climate change issues. She congratula­ted the four scientists and urged them to work hard and make the country proud by contributi­ng to the internatio­nal process on climate change. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for data breaches that affected 50 million users. The apology did not stop investors from selling shares in Facebook, with many wondering just how bad the damage would be for the social network.

The breach was called a "light bulb" moment for users, spawning the social media trend #deleteface­book.

All the negative headlines led to some advertiser­s saying "enough is enough".

Shares in the social media company fell from $176.80 on Monday 19 March to around $159.30 by Friday 23 March night.

Facebook's initial public offering in 2012 priced shares at $38 each, giving the company a market valuation of close to $104bn.

Following steady user growth and a dominant space in the digital advertisin­g market ensuring revenues, Facebook's share price climbed to $190 by February this year.

Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research, said he had one of the most negative outlooks for Facebook's share price on Wall Street.

"I had a $152 price target on Facebook for 2018 - and that was before the events of this week".

Mr. Wieser said the share price slump showed investors were wary of increased regulation and users leaving the platform "but there's little risk of advertiser­s leaving Facebook.

Hargreaves Lansdown senior analyst Laith Khalaf said the week had been a "damaging episode" in Facebook's history.

"One of the secrets of Facebook's success has been that the more people who use Facebook, the more integral it becomes to its customers. PAGE 23

Unfortunat­ely for Facebook, the same dynamic cuts in the opposite direction if it loses a meaningful number of users as a result of this scandal. "

Advertisin­g firm M&C Saatchi's founding director David Kershaw said the revelation­s that a 2014 Facebook quiz essentiall­y harvested data from users and their connected friends without consent have led to a backlash from advertiser­s.

"Clients have come to the point, quite rightly, where enough is enough, " Mr Kershaw said.

Advertiser­s Mozilla and Commerzban­k on Wednesday suspended ads on the social media platform.

On Friday 23 March tech entreprene­ur Elon Musk had the official Facebook pages for his companies Telsa and Space X deleted.

"Make no mistake Facebook is an amazing medium from the advertiser's point of view because of the accuracy of its targeting - which comes from data. But I think those large companies are very nervous to be associated with a medium where the data is being abused, particular­ly in a political context," Mr. Kershaw said.

Mr. Kershaw told the BBC any change in Facebook's data protection policy was more likely to come from the threat of a withdrawal of "hard money from advertiser­s rather than consumers running hashtag [campaigns] on Twitter," referring to the #DeleteFace­book and #BoycottFac­ebook hashtags that have become popular.

UK advertisin­g group ISBA met Facebook on Friday and said its "constructi­ve and challengin­g" summit had convinced the group that the social media company was taking steps to "rapidly address public and advertiser concerns", including app audits and face-to-face meetings with individual UK advertisin­g clients.

It will take some time before it becomes clear if the advertisin­g industry's dissatisfa­ction with Facebook leads to them actually pulling their money out of the social network, or whether the howls of condemnati­on amount to mere posturing from a group of concerned clients.

The Facebook founder tried to reassure users "the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago."

However, Passion Capital tech investor Eileen Burbidge, who is also on the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Group, said Facebook's reassuranc­e to users and clients took too long.

"The fact that it took them five days to come out with a statement, which happened to be a fair, sensible and comprehens­ive statement, was just far too long," Mrs. Burbidge said.

"I think they were just really tone deaf for too many days."

The technology venture capitalist said Facebook underestim­ated the consumer backlash that occurred once their data was used for political purposes.

Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a row over whether it used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidenti­al election and the UK Brexit referendum.

"Some people are using the term 'political manipulati­on'.

"They [Facebook] assumed they had already taken care of this... as they had already changed their terms of service, for example," Mrs Burbidge said.

In Mr Zuckerberg's online statement he offered a timeline of how Facebook's data permission agreements with users and other companies had changed since the 2014 personalit­y quiz app was able to scrape data from quiz takers and their contacts without their expressed permission.

Mrs Burbidge said there may need to be new regulation over political campaignin­g "which really hasn't kept up with social media".

Technology writer Kate Bevan said the week's events have woken Facebook's users up to the fact that the platform's games, quizzes and apps could harvest their data for more serious intents.

"This week feels to me like a real light bulb moment where people are understand­ing that it's not just clicking 'like' on Facebook, it's giving your data away".

The sentiment was echoed by the European Union's commission­er for justice, consumers and gender equality Vera Jourova who said the Cambridge Analytica allegation­s had been "a huge wake-up call" for Facebook users about the demand for their data.

"The tiger has gotten out of the cage".

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