Cambridge Analytica screwed us too
We’re building an app with a noble intention to help parents combat cyberbullying, but Cambridge Analytica made it harder for us to do good on Facebook
We are a 2 month old startup building a digital service to keep kids safe from cyberbullying and other forms of dangerous content online. We do this by giving parents more visibility and control into their kids’ online activities.
As we were preparing to launch our app to our first set of beta users, we realized (to our horror) that the Cambridge Analytica incident has had directly impacted us as a startup. When we tried to submit our app for a review, we were met with a message at the top of the page saying
We are not reviewing apps at this time due to changes we are making to the Facebook Platform. Learn more
Which effectively translates to that we are indefinitely stranded to release our well intentioned app to help parents detect cyberbullying.
There are few parts of this story.
What is a Facebook App review
If you are building any kind of integration with facebook, example a simple facebook login on your website (or app) or an app which needs to fetch a facebook users data you need to register it as an app on facebook.
An app registered on facebook needs to tell facebook what all facebook user data it intends to ingest from facebook. For example an app might require user likes and posts on facebook for it to make suggestions to the user in their own apps.
Facebook allows for any new registered app to launch with some basic permissions like user public profile, email and friends without any review. For any other user data like user posts, user likes you need to tell facebook how you plan to use this data in your app using a screen cast and incases demo accounts showing the use.
Facebook would then based on their guidelines approve these permission. It typically takes 1–3 business days for facebook to approve a review.
Just a note that the facebook user will still be asked to confirm these permission when they grant app access to their facebook data. The above process is to even enable the app to be able to ask user for the above data on the first place.
Why we need user posts and user likes
One of our core functionality is to give parents access to their kids online activity and flag anything which might be cyberbullying, a lot of which happens on facebook (facebook is one of the top 3 platforms for cyberbullying)
The way we do it is fetch all posts from a child’s account and use artificial intelligence (fancy word for machine learning and nlp) to flag any potential post, comment, like to parents.
You can see the flow in the video below, which ironically we created for facebook review.
What did Cambridge Analytica do
This article explains it simply, but put in a sentence, Cambridge Analytica and people associated with it harvested data on 50 million facebook using a quiz app and a loophole in facebook api and then violated a non enforced policy of facebook by selling the data and using it for a political campaign.
What is the noble intention part
We are a startup (public benefit corporation), with a sincere mission to solve cyberbullying. We do not hold any illusions of solving this massive problem but we do plan to make a dent on it. We have done multiple surveys and parental interviews before we started building a solution. You can read about our full solution here.
Why are we complaining
We are not really complaining. We did understand the risks of building an app which depends on data from other platform before we started building anything. Think of it as a rant!
We are just highlighting how misuse of data by one player in the ecosystem and by not having enough checks in the system (by facebook) on the first place, is seriously impacting a very well intentioned startup. We are left stranded with an indefinite timeline from facebook on when they will start review again.
Facebook claims in the link they shared that
Protecting people’s information is the most important thing we do at Facebook. What happened with Cambridge Analytica was a breach of Facebook’s trust. More importantly, it was a breach of the trust people place in Facebook to protect their data when they share it.
but it is equally important for someone like facebook, which is a fundamental fabric of or online society, to not do a knee jerk reaction to something which is systematic problem flaw in facebook. This kind of reaction prevents startup like us to fill other shortcomings of facebook.
Aftermath
We are still going to release the product but a couple of weeks late by releasing instagram monitoring instead of facebook in the MVP.
We still need facebook to make our solution effective as facebook is still one of the top 5 social networks used by teens and kids.
A delay in few months on our core feature might mean life and death for us.
Leave me any comments on what do you think?
