Stealing Privacy: Facebook's Data Breach
"Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits," Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook had posted on his Facebook account in November, 2017. However, it seems as if recent events like the case with Cambridge Analytica are questioning that very statement. Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm and has been involved in countless scandals before. It mines data and then provides it to third parties. Recently it has been involved in another scandal, this one having to do with personal data that it got from Facebook. This has led to investigations both in the US and around the world as it turns out that the data has been wrongly obtained and utilized.
What happened?
Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American student at Cambridge, got permission from Facebook to obtain data via an app that he created on Facebook. The app named “thisismydigitallife," was a personality quiz and had been answered by more than 270,000 people. The trick however, was that in order to use this app, users had to give consent to access their own and their friends Facebook profile. This allowed Kogan to obtain the personal data of around 50 million people. Cambridge Analytica put 7 million dollars into Kogan's research and therefore got access to all the data. This was not permitted by Facebook since it is reported that Kogan had only been allowed to use the information for academics and not commercial purposes. In 2015, Facebook was made aware of this and had asked Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to delete all the data that was collected and both assured Facebook that the information was deleted. Facebook believed them until recently, when a former employee from Cambridge Analytica revealed that he had seen that the information is still present on the company's database.
What has been done with this data?
"It is a full-service propaganda machine," Christopher Wylie, a former employee at Cambridge Analytica had said referring to the company. While Christopher may sound like he is exaggerating, Cambridge Analytica's actions have been no less than immoral and unethical. "The company itself was founded using Facebook data," Christopher said in an interview. The data obtained was then used to create algorithms that would be able to tell what kinds of message would an individual person be susceptible to. This allowed Cambridge Analytica to influence the way the people think and manipulate the decisions they make. Cambridge Analytica had been hired by the Trump campaign during the 2016 elections and is said to have had a hand in the electing of the US president. It is also said that Cambridge Analytica had influenced the brexit vote in the UK. However, Cambridge Analytica has denied using the Facebook data and still maintains that it no longer has the data. The company's influence is extensive and a lot of what is being proposed is not as difficult to believe. Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix, has been filmed boasting about ways to put any political opposition in compromising positions with bribes and other unethical means. He has been suspended, however the incident has shed a light at the inside clockworks of Cambridge Analytica.
How has this impacted Facebook?
US senators have called upon Facebook to testify in congress as to how they plan to protect their users. The head of the European parliament said that they would investigate whether the information was "misused". All this growing pressure has gotten investors worried leading many of them to sell their shares. Facebook saw its shares drop by around 10 percent and lost around 40 billion dollars. Facebook's structure allows it to only make major profits by letting advertisers use its platform. The Cambridge Analytica incident comes at a time when investors have already been vary of Facebook as Zuckerberg pledges to make Facebook better for the users but maybe not as desirable for advertisers. The incident has also had a huge impact on the amount of trust that people put on Facebook (the users' trust is something that Facebook can't afford to lose). Mr. Zuckerberg has said that "This was a major breach of trust. And I'm really sorry that this happened." He also said that Facebook's priority now would be to make sure that this doesn't happen again. It is easy to tell that much is at stake here since Facebook has taken out full-page adverts in several UK and US newspapers apologizing for the data breach.
Is it time to say goodbye to Facebook?
This will not be the first time Facebook is under hot water. A recent example would be when Facebook had been in trouble (in 2017) when it admitted that Russians bought ads on Facebook with intent to manipulate the US elections. It is therefore highly unlikely that Facebook will be banned or that it will go out of business. Investors may be worried now but, sooner or later Facebook would regain its value. Advertisers will come back and so will the users. That is because they have nowhere else to go. Facebook is a huge platform which provides access to more than 2 billion people. That is a type of market that not many advertisers would turn down and the people will stay on Facebook since it provides us with an effortless way of socializing. After all, we are social animals. That is not meant to imply that Mr. Zuckerberg can just sit back and relax. Facebook needs to face many issues before it is able to regain the trust of its users and investors. Zuckerberg needs to show that Facebook is a company that can keep the interest of its users in mind and make a profit at the same time. With Facebook's structure that may be tricky.