Why quitting Facebook is easier said than done
It wouldn’t be a month in tech news without some sort of security snafu from Facebook.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that as many as 600 million users’ passwords were stored in plain text and accessible to more than 20,000 employees. The issue reportedly dates back to 2012.
What’s more, Facebook found out about the situation back in January but opted to keep the problem concealed until an inside source leaked the details to KrebsOnSecurity, which forced Facebook to share information about the issue publicly.
“As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems. This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” explained Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, security and privacy, in a company blog post.
In the blog post, Canahuati maintains that the plain text passwords were “never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.”
Canahuati goes on to state what has now become familiar verbiage from the tech giant: “There is nothing more important to us than protecting people’s information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook.”
Canahuati’s blog post leads to more questions than it does answers. Like if the company performs routine security reviews, as Canahuati claims, why did it take seven years to find such an obvious error?
But what’s most concerning about Facebook’s latest security breach is how commonplace such news has become. While the situation is reigniting calls to delete Facebook, it’s also spurring discussions on why that’s easier said than done.
Company growth
It’s become the same old story. Another month, another security breach.
With security breaches and scandals becoming ordinary, the majority of us go on using Facebook as we always have.
In fact, reports about Facebook’s improper storage of passwords came days after the one-year anniversary of the now infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that the company shared the personal information of as many as 87 million users with a political data firm.
And there have been several other problems since then. In September, hackers discovered a vulnerability that allowed them to access the private profile information of nearly 50 million users. A few months later, in December, Facebook announced it exposed private photos from 6.8 million users without their consent.
Despite all the negative news that has plagued the company, Facebook has seen growth in both users and revenue.
According to the company’s 2018 fourth quarter earnings, more than 1.52 billion people were using Facebook every day in December 2018, a 9% increase from the year prior. Monthly active users were also up 9% year over year, at 2.32 billion by the end of 2018.
If almost any other company (save for a few of the other big tech enterprises) had the scandal-fueled year Facebook just experienced, it would undoubtedly see significant impacts to its bottom line. But that’s the crux of the issue — Facebook isn’t like any other company.
Why it’s hard to quit Facebook
There’s no question that many continue using Facebook despite its security problems because quitting the platform is a lot easier said than done.
One reason for that is Facebook has become so entrenched in the digital ecosystem. Facebook is increasingly used on third-party sites and apps as a means for authentication, and in some cases, a Facebook login is a mandatory requirement for using online services. Take the dating app Tinder as one such example. Up until recently, Tinder’s 50 million users were required to have a Facebook account to use its services.
“Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider,” said Bernie Hogan, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, in an interview with BBC.
Quitting Facebook is also difficult because of the relationships we can quickly lose without the platform. The connections that Facebook offers can be especially crucial for individuals who are socioeconomically underprivileged and don’t have the means to readily visit friends and family who live in another part of the country — or another country altogether. And eliminating those connections can lead people to feel like they are left out and isolated.
For some individuals, no matter how frustrated they are with the way Facebook operates, leaving the platform just isn’t a feasible option. Such is the case with small business owners, many of whom rely on the platform for marketing and engagement.
54% of B2B marketers say that Facebook is their most important platform, and 78% of Americans have discovered retail products they want to buy through Facebook.
It comes down to this: People stay on Facebook because so many other people are on Facebook; the idea of deleting Facebook and using another social media platform to maintain connections is all well and good, but it only works if other people move there as well.
Facebook has become so embedded in our daily lives that quitting the platform just isn’t possible for every person or business. Because Facebook is no longer just a social network, it has become an integral part of our culture.
There’s another issue with the sentiment “Why don’t you just delete Facebook” — it unfairly shifts the social responsibility of Facebook’s failings with privacy and security away from the company and onto users.
As April Glaser aptly noted in her article “The Problem with #DeleteFacebook”: “Deleting Facebook is a privilege. The company has become so good at the many things it does that for lots of people, leaving the service would be a self-harming act. And they deserve better from it, too. Which is why the initial answer to Facebook’s failings shouldn’t be to flee Facebook. We need to demand a better Facebook.”
In the meantime, you might want to change your password.
