In response to Facebook’s global Cambridge Analytica scandal, many are pointing out that data security is antithetical to Facebook's business model — and there is no way to undo it. The latest breach has shone a harsh light on how the social media platform’s casual treatment of user data might be impossible to correct.
Facebook’s eventual response, and the media response to it, have brought up fundamental questions about the company’s business model. On Facebook, the users are the product, and the consumers are advertisers. What we have learned in the past weeks shows that it is too late to look to Facebook to respect users’ rights to their data, as they have been trampling on privacy for a decade as they scrambled to build their platform’s profitability.
The problem revealed in this scandal is even greater than the issue that we often take with with Facebook, that they provide no compensation for the data they sell from users (you) to the advertisers who serve ads on the platform.
The greater issue is the lack of enforcement as Facebook grew in the last decade, when they were offering data as an incentive to apps that they wanted to join the site so that it could grow into the hub it is for many of us today. These apps, often games we’ve completely forgotten about, can pull our data and our friends data, and Facebook is just as powerless to correct it as they were with Cambridge Analytica. One particularly contested aspect of the scandal —collecting data from friends, who never opted in — is a widely known tactic that marketers have been using for years.
There’s a fascinating discussion about this featured on the New York Times’ podcast The Daily. Here is a discussion between host Michael Barbaro and journalist Kevin Roose, who interviewed Mark Zuckerberg after he broke his days long silence about the scandal.
In the interest of radical transparency, it’s a good that Facebook is acknowledging that the Cambridge Analytica breach isn’t an isolated incident. But it leaves users with very few options: they will probably have to wait indefinitely, perhaps for years, to be told that their data is compromised. As Roose states, this is information that Facebook relinquished years ago as it tempted app developers to the site with access to information. And now this data, mostly life-long and intimate personal characteristics, can probably be found for sale on the dark web. Unfortunately, the misuse of data didn’t start with Cambridge Analytica, and it will be impossible to take out of the platform, because that is what Facebook is built on.
This may be the ultimate threat to Facebook’s longevity. Since all they provide is a platform, all they have to sell as a product is their users. When there is a massive breach of trust, we have to question the top-down system that Zuckerberg built providing third-parties access to user profiles and data with very little oversight. We’re working to make sure that users themselves make the decisions about disclosing their data online, and what it should be worth. We believe that other blockchain innovators will soon provide an alternative to Facebook, where we can foster our worldwide relationships without compromising our security.
