Facebook Needs Its Own Mueller Investigation
Or maybe it’s time for the tech world to establish its own United Nations
It’s no secret that Facebook sees its users as experimental rats. It feeds one group of us one thing and the other group something else entirely all to see how we might react. It then takes its observations, adjusts its experiment, reinjects us, all while collecting data on their findings.
Up until a few years ago…
Facebook’s great experiment seemed fairly innocuous. But then the issues began. In 2014, Facebook conducted its first mood-manipulation experiment in which they altered the news feed of a half a million randomly selected users to better understand how emotions could spread on social media. And most recently in 2018, Facebook revealed that they knew of the Cambridge Analytica data breach in which that company had harvested the personal data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political purposes.
If you’re wondering what happened to Facebook after word got out that they had been manipulating their users and handling their information with little regard for their privacy, the answer is an apology tour as well as…well actually that’s about it. My point is that when it comes to accountability, Facebook and other major tech companies with access to our personal information go largely unchecked. Think of Facebook like a medieval monarch, sure they may do things that risk the livelihood of millions of people and sure they might make those people really angry but there isn’t a separate branch of governance that could potentially put the king in check.
But what if there was? What if Facebook was governed more like a democracy whereby there were certain mechanisms in place to keep one person or entity from doing whatever they wanted without any oversight? Basically, what would Facebook look like if the people on its executive team — mainly Mark Zuckerberg — were held accountable?
These are the questions I’ve been mulling for the past few weeks as we likely approach the release of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe on the Trump campaign. Now, I’m not here saying that Facebook should be run more like the U.S. government. We all know that the U.S. government has its own separate issues. I am however thinking that the only way for companies like Facebook to be held accountable for their practices is — moving forward — for them to institute their own independent investigation task force that probes past, present and future data breaches.
If you’re thinking that sounds like a dumb idea, considering Facebook could simply tune their own probe to appear to abide by the rules, I urge you to consider the alternative — government oversight. This is a short clip of what that sort of oversight actually looks like:
That’s right, in this clip, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch reveals to the world that he quite literally has no f**king idea how Facebook actually works. Which is why, lack of resources, in the form of intelligent technically savvy investigators, makes the government a bad fit for this job. So how then can we trust Facebook to do what’s right and appoint its own Mueller type investigator to look into what actually happened when shit hits the fan?
My thinking, and I’m warning you, it’s a bit bold…
The tech world needs its own United Nations-like organization. One that incentivizes and attracts the intelligent individuals who currently work at Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple to join it. That way, we can trust that the people appointed to investigate various instances of data overreach, actually understand how the technology works in the first place. Again, the alternative is leaving the job up to people who may think that the internet is “stored in america”.
What I’m saying is…
We need carefully selected individuals who have the bandwidth as well as the respect to not only understand the issues plaguing most large tech corporations — particularly those having to do with data privacy — but also to be empowered enough to directly keep those corporations in check. And sure, this entity won’t be perfect. The U.N. is far from perfect. But symbolically speaking it’s always been the beacon of human rights preservation throughout the world.
And since privacy is a human right. It’s time to take the necessary steps to appoint a capable entity to protect it.
