Cambridge Analytica and Facebook
Personally, I feel as though Facebook should have been more attentive to what happened with their data. After the agreement was made, they should have at least followed up and made sure that Cambridge Analytica did as they agreed.
The problem, as I see it, is that Cambridge Analytica has ties to the Trump campaign. As a Facebook user who did not want to see Trump elected, I have major misgivings at the idea that my data could potentially have been used to make him President. That being said, it does not appear that Cambridge Analytica has a very good reputation in the political community, so the odds that anything they did having a substantial impact on the election is unlikely.
For Facebook, while I don’t believe that they had any sort of sinister intentions with user data, after this came out there was unfortunately an extreme loss of trust between Facebook and its users. Trust, of course, being the very foundation that social media is built off of. If users cannot trust their social media, then that platform has failed in their very purpose for existing.
Then again, when you sign up for social media, you are always asked to confirm that you have read all of the terms and conditions.
As we all know, no one ever reads the terms and conditions on anything. For millennials and Gen Z-ers, we grew up with adults telling us to watch ourselves online. My mother in particular loved telling me that I needed to be careful online because I could easily “buy something on accident.” It’s been 7 years since we got an internet connection and I’ve never even come close to purchasing something over the internet that I didn’t intend to buy, but I digress.
The same woman who was so worried about my internet use is the same woman that gleefully signed herself up for all the different kinds of social media. She’s got a Snapchat, a Facebook, and an Instagram so far, though she’s expressed some interest in Twitter as well. She was especially upset about the situation with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. She felt as though her privacy had been invaded, that she “never agreed to that when she joined Facebook.” When I asked her if she looked at the terms and conditions to see if that were true, she didn’t even know what I was talking about.
She has 3 different social media platforms and has no idea what the terms and conditions is. So I suppose the issue I have with that argument is that Facebook users freely gave responsibility for their data away when they first created their profile. Yes, Facebook should have made sure that data wasn’t used for alternative purposes, but they cannot be blamed necessarily for using data that their users gave to them willingly.
