Facebook: The Precedent we Need to Act on
As technology has improved in the last two decades, social media has become more of a dominant part of every-day life. The younger generations have only known life where there exists social media. Most social networking platforms are free to use, so how do these companies make money?
The main answer is through ad revenue, which relies heavily on big data from their users to make targeting ads. However, is it ethical for these companies to sell your data? Is it ethical for these companies to show little transparency with how our information is used and what results from it?
Facebook has been under much scrutiny from the public after their 2018 scandal involving the breach of up to 87 million Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica, due to Facebook failing to keep its personal data secure. The data was used to provide analytics to Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, allowing them to target swing voters more easily. Additionally, they deny ever selling users’ data. They have been known for sharing its users’ data with other companies, including Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon. They didn’t sell them the data, but rather shared it to them to benefit their own agenda. This is essentially a loophole that allows them to not get in trouble legally, which needs to be addressed by more formal and strict regulations. None of this information was known to the public until years after and they were in legal trouble.
As Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford demonstrated in their article “Critical Questions for Big Data”, we know very little of the ethical implications resulting from the use of big data. Pattern recognition algorithms may take the original data out of context or that the author of a post didn’t want their data going towards something they didn’t support. They also pointed out how more data doesn’t necessarily mean better data. More data doesn’t necessarily mean it is representative of a larger population and can lead to having correlations without causation.
Facebook is an example of the issues in regulations and understanding of big data in the social media industry. Big tech companies need to disclose what they do with the information they collect, but also need to consider if they should mine every piece of data possible. As Boyd and Crawford said, “It may be unreasonable to ask researchers to obtain consent from every person who posts a tweet, but it is problematic for researchers to justify their actions as ethical simply because the data are accessible”.
