Facebook data breach Scandal and Why do you need to care about it?
It’s all over the internet. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO has been summoned in front of US Senate and questioned for 2 days about a recent data breach which was reported through the Cambridge Analytica incident. This event has really opened up the ever so important question about sharing your personal information through social networks like Facebook. MZ has faced a lot of tough questions from the US senators given the fact that recent incidents had a direct relationship to the 2016 election campaign in which the Americans selected a president whom they don’t like in most cases.
I don’t want to talk about what has happened in the past, but wanted to write about why you need to care about your personal data at the spotlight of this event. Facebook is publicly accepting that they are using people’s personal information to earn money by selling them to 3rd party companies. As a result of that, you will get context-sensitive advertisements which can be helpful at sometimes, but most of the time, they are useless and rather annoying. According to Zuckerberg, he believes (based on the responses he got from the facebook users), these advertisements help people most of the time (exact opposite). One of the most important outcomes of the Senate hearing of Zuckerberg was that this kind of data breaches happened in the past and are happening at the moment either Facebook knowing about it or not. So the bottom line is that, it is surreal that your personal information are used for commercial purposes without your consent.
While it is the people’s responsibility to protect their personal data, governments can also play a major role when it comes to data protection and privacy. European Union (EU) is taking the preliminary steps towards data privacy through regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) by making sure that any organization which is dealing with Personally Identifiable Data (PII) needs to get the proper consent from people before using that data or storing them within their systems. Also, it allows the users to delete this information at any given time.
As a conclusion, this scandal has exploited several vulnerabilities of this social network concept and data security and opened up the doors to the people and the governments and the companies to look at these problems in a more serious manner. Hopefully, it will result in a better data privacy and protection in the future. As a general practice, the normal users also need to be aware of how their personal data is been used by these companies.
