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Sunday, 25 March 2018
‘A grand illusion’: seven days that shattered Facebook’s facade
One expert said the Cambridge Analytica revelations will finally get
people to ‘pay attention not just to Facebook but the entire
surveillance economy’.
Composite: Bloomberg
“Dumb fucks.” That’s how Mark Zuckerberg described users of Facebook for trusting him with their personal data back in 2004. If the last week is anything to go by, he was right.
Since the Observer reported
that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested
from Facebook and improperly shared with the political consultancy
Cambridge Analytica, it has become increasingly apparent that the social
network has been far more lax with its data sharing practices than many
users realised.
As the scandal unfurled over the last seven days, Facebook’s
lackluster response has highlighted a fundamental challenge for the
company: how can it condemn the practice on which its business model
depends?
“This is the story we have been waiting for so people will pay
attention not just to Facebook but the entire surveillance economy,”
said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University
of Virginia.
"They may now regret it but they knowingly unleashed the forces that have led to this lack of trust and loss of privacy"
Since Zuckerberg’s “dumb fucks” comment,
Facebook has gone to great lengths to convince members of the public
that it’s all about “connecting people” and “building a global
community”. This pseudo-uplifting marketing speak is much easier for
employees and users to stomach than the mission of “guzzling personal
data so we can micro-target you with advertising”.
In the wake of the revelations that Cambridge Analytica
misappropriated data collected by Dr Aleksandr Kogan under the guise of
academic research, Facebook has scrambled to blame these rogue third parties for “platform abuse”. “The entire company is outraged we were deceived,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
However in highlighting the apparent deceit, the company has been
forced to shine a light on its underlying business model and years of
careless data sharing practices.
Sure, the data changed hands between the researcher and Cambridge
Analytica in apparent violation of Kogan’s agreement with Facebook, but
everything else was above board. The amount of data Cambridge Analytica
got hold of and used to deliver targeted advertising based on
personality types – including activities, interests, check-ins,
location, photos, religion, politics, relationship details – was not
unusual in the slightest. This was a feature, not a bug.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video
‘Extremely friendly to app developers’
There are thousands of other developers, including the makers of the
dating app Tinder, games such as FarmVille, as well as consultants to
Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, who slurped huge quantities
of data about users and their friends – all thanks to Facebook’s overly
permissive “Graph API”, the interface through which third parties could
interact with Facebook’s platform.
Facebook opened up in order to attract app developers to join
Facebook’s ecosystem at a time when the company was playing catch-up in
shifting its business from desktops to smartphones. It was a symbiotic
relationship that was critical to Facebook’s growth.
“They wanted to push as much of the conversation, ad revenue and
digital activity as possible and made it extremely friendly to app
developers,” said Jeff Hauser, of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research. “Now they are complaining that the developers abused them.
They wanted that. They were encouraging it. They may now regret it but
they knowingly unleashed the forces that have led to this lack of trust
and loss of privacy.”
The terms were updated in April 2014 to restrict the data new
developers could get hold of, including people’s friends’ data, but only
after four years of access to the Facebook firehose. Companies that
plugged in before April 2014 had another year before access was restricted.
“There are all sorts of companies that are in possession of terabytes
of information from before 2015,” said Jeff Hauser of the Center for
Economic Policy and Research. “Facebook’s practices don’t bear up to
close, informed scrutiny nearly as well as they look from the 30,000ft
view, which is how people had been viewing Facebook previously.”
Cambridge Analytica claims it helped get Trump elected by
using data to target voters on Facebook. Photograph: Win Mcnamee/AFP/Getty Images
For too long consumers have thought about privacy on Facebook in
terms of whether their ex-boyfriends or bosses could see their photos.
However, as we fiddle around with our profile privacy settings, the real
intrusions have been taking place elsewhere.
“In this sense, Facebook’s ‘privacy settings’ are a grand
illusion. Control over post-sharing – people we share to – should really
be called ‘publicity settings’,” explains Jonathan Albright,
the research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
“Likewise, control over passive sharing – the information people
[including third party apps] can take from us – should be called
‘privacy settings’.”
Essentially Facebook gives us privacy “busywork” to make us think we have control, while making it very difficult to truly lock down our accounts.
‘The biggest issue I’ve ever seen’
Facebook
is dealing with a PR minefield. The more it talks about its advertising
practices, the more the #DeleteFacebook movement grows. Even the
co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Acton, who profited from Facebook’s $19bn
acquisition of his app, this week said he was deleting his account.
“This is the biggest issue I’ve ever seen any technology company face in my time,” said Roger McNamee, Zuckerberg’s former mentor.
“It’s not like tech hasn’t had a lot of scandals,” he said, mentioning the Theranos fraud case and MiniScribe packing actual bricks into boxes instead of hard drives. “But no one else has played a role in undermining democracy or the persecution of minorities before. This is a whole new ball game in the tech world and it’s really, really horrible.”
Facebook first discovered that Kogan had shared data with Cambridge Analytica when a Guardian journalist contacted the company about it at the end of 2015.
It asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data and revoked Kogan’s
apps’ API access. However, Facebook relied on Cambridge Analytica’s word
that they had done so.
"Left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency"
When the Observer contacted Facebook last week with testimony from a whistleblower
stating that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted the data, Facebook’s
reaction was to try to get ahead of the story by publishing its own disclosure late on Friday and sending a legal warning to try to prevent publication of its bombshell discoveries.
Then followed five days of virtual silence from the company, as the
chorus of calls from critics grew louder, and further details of
Facebook’s business dealings emerged.
A second whistleblower, the former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas,
revealed that he found Facebook’s lack of control over the data given to
outside developers “utterly horrifying”.
He told the Guardian that he had warned senior executives at the
company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach,
but that he was discouraged from investigating further.
At around the same time, it emerged that the co-director of the
company that harvested the Facebook data before passing it to Cambridge
Analytic is a current employee at Facebook.
Joseph Chancellor worked alongside Kogan at Global Science Research,
which exfiltrated the data using a personality app under the guise of
academic research.
Brittany Kaiser, former Cambridge Analytica director: 'I voted for Bernie' - video
Demand for answers
Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic called for answers. In the
US, the Democratic senator Mark Warner called for regulation, describing
the online political advertising market as the “wild west”.
“Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or
extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear
that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to
deception and lacking in transparency,” he said.
The Federal Trade Commission plans to examine whether the social networking site violated a 2011 data privacy agreement with the agency over its data-sharing practices.
In the UK, MPs summoned Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to give evidence to a select committee investigating fake news.
“I think they are in a very bad situation because they have long
benefitted from the tech illiteracy of the political community,” said
Hauser.
The backlash spooked investors, wiping almost $50bn off the valuation
of the company in two days, although the stock has since rallied
slightly.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg finally broke his silence
in a Facebook post acknowledging that the policies that allowed the
misuse of data were a “breach of trust between Facebook and the people
who share their data with us and expect us to protect it”.
The social network is facing calls for answers from
lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Photograph: Josh
Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, added her own comment: “We know that this was a major violation of people’s trust, and I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it.”
The company will investigate apps that had access to “large amounts
of information” before the 2014 changes and audit thousands of apps that
show “suspicious activity”. The company will also inform those whose
data was “misused”, including people who were directly affected by the
Kogan operation.
These actions don’t go far enough, said Vaidhyanathan.
“Facebook has a history of putting on that innocent little boy voice:
‘Oh I didn’t know that I shouldn’t hold the cat by its tail,’” he said.
“I think we’re tired of it at this point.”
These problems were pointed out by scholars years ago, said Robyn
Caplan, a researcher at Data & Society, but Facebook’s response was
slow and insufficient.
“They have been trying to put out a lot of little fires but we need them to build a fire department,” she said.
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