Mar. 18-Mar. 24: The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal
This week, Facebook found itself in yet another controversy after user data was found within Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-aligned data-mining firm.
Welcome to the Zeitgeist Chronicle. Every weekend we catch you up on the past week’s most noteworthy current events. Sometimes it’ll be what everybody’s talking about, other times it may be something we’d like to bring attention to. Our goal is keep you informed enough to be able to have a conversation about any of these current events. This week:
What Happened
Last weekend, Facebook announced it was suspending the accounts of Cambridge Analytica after they discovered that Facebook user data Cambridge Analytica previously acquired had not been completely deleted like the consulting firm led Facebook to believe.
How This Happened
Where this revelation turns into a controversy is when we get to that user data. That data was first acquired in 2015 by Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, through a Facebook quiz app he created. He then passed that data along to Cambridge Analytica. That app, like most apps today, allowed users to log-in using their Facebook account, which, assuming you do so, is consent for the app to gather data.
This gets dicey because back in 2015, when you gave an app that kind of permission, it not only allowed that app to gather data about you, but also data about your friends. (That “feature” was changed in 2015.) And because Facebook exists to facilitate networking, a bunch of people who didn’t give consent had data gathered about them because a Facebook-friend did. That’s how Cambridge Analytica turned 270,000 users into data about 50 million.
Who and What Is Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica is a consulting firm based in Cambridge, England. Visit their homepage and it’s immediately clear what they’re about. “Data drives all we do”, it says. “Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behavior. Visit our Commercial or Political divisions to see how we can help you.” Cambridge Analytica is, in essence, a data-mining firm. (They also do some “honey-trapping” on the side.)
Again, things get a little dicey because, as if Donald Trump wasn’t tangentially-related to enough controversies, Donald Trump is involved, and that’s because Cambridge Analytica consulted on Trump’s presidential campaign (the firm insists they’re the brains that won him the election), made possible in part by his former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who helped birth the firm, along with Robert Mercer, a known right-wing benefactor.
Why Facebook Is In Trouble
To be clear, Facebook is less in trouble in the court of law than it is in the court of public opinion. What’s drawing most of the ire is Facebook’s mishandling of the situation back in 2015. At the time, Facebook learned Kogan passed the data he acquired to Cambridge Analytica, which violates the academic research grounds he used to get access, as well as Facebook policy, but after Cambridge Analytica claimed that the data wasn’t as useful as they thought and had gotten rid of it, Facebook took them at their word and did not conduct any audits, which is naive at best and plain stupid at worst.
Facebook is now set to conduct a data audit for all the apps who had similar access to Facebook user data, which is a lot. Pundits think government regulation may be happening sooner rather than later, and Facebook stock took a nosedive this week. Facebook comes away from this looking bad, which is familiar territory for the company, which has had a tumultuous two years, between being manipulated by Russia to sway an American election and former executives calling Facebook nothing short of a danger to society.
It certainly doesn’t help that one of the first responses we got from Facebook was an executive pointing out that this was not a “breach”, which is true because the data was initially acquired by Kogan through legitimate methods, but it’s still a bad look to be playing semantics. To make matters worse, Mark Zuckerberg took half a week to address the situation, and once he did, to the tune of several interviews, he was not a pillar of confidence.
“Facebook’s response to the data harvesting reveals a company that not only has lax privacy protections and an existential aversion to transparency, but also one that is publicly in denial about what it is selling.” — New Republic
How To Proceed
Nobody likes their data and privacy violated. Yet, this seems to be a concern that stokes fires only when things go bad. #DeleteFacebook is not only easier said than done, it’s not the right approach, because Facebook isn’t the only app collecting data about you. No, what we should be doing is talking about these practices and making sure we know what we’re signing up for, literally.
Facebook may have been birthed as a way for people to connect, but that’s not what it is anymore. Now, at the very core of what it does, Facebook is not a social media platform, Facebook is a data-driven advertising business disguised as a social media platform. The sooner we realize that, the sooner this stops happening.
3 Tips Going Forward
- See which apps have access to your data (Facebook>Settings>Apps) and remove what you don’t recognize or don’t use anymore. (I guarantee you there are plenty.)
- Learn about what data of yours Facebook is using to advertise to you by going to Facebook>Settings>Ads. (It’s better than using an ad-blocker.)
- Anytime you sign up for a new service or download a new app, spend some time looking through the settings so you know what it actually does.
