Cambridge Analytica: How will it play out for Chatbots?
We all have heard about #deleteFacebook campaign and seen posts from users who swear to delete their accounts and never come back. But what made the users so angry and scared them away?
In 2015 “Cambridge Analytica”, a political marketing firm, obtained data from 50million facebook users in an unauthorized way, by using a personality quiz, which was initially approved by Facebook for research purposes.
Since this scandal came to light, Facebook is on a “damage control mode” and Mark Zuckerberg after apologizing to facebook’s users and admitting his mistakes, announced some new measures that will prevent from anything like this to happen again.
But how are those new measures going to affect chatbots?
Chatbots and Messenger were working “hand in hand” until those new initiatives were announced. Developers have been using Messenger to create chatbots, because it is one of the most popular messaging app with over 1 billion daily active users worldwide. In the same time, users prefer chatbots on Messenger, as they are easy to use and it feels like “talking to an actual human.”
However, due to the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal, Facebook stopped temporally its app review process, which means that developers are no longer able to launch new apps or chatbots. This measure will last only a few weeks and it is part of a bigger audit that Facebook is conducting to all of its apps that had access to large amounts of information and to apps that might be “suspicious.”
Of course, this is happening to protect users’ information, but there are speculations that these changes might affect the relationship between chatbots and Messenger.
Firstly, even though this “embargo” is going to last a few weeks, it has raised concerns not only to the users but also to the developers and investors. Since the privacy scandal came to light, Facebook’s stock might be down 16% (according to Business Insider). This means, that people might start losing their trust on Facebook and eventually “ghost it”.
Moreover, this plan will bring two possible outcomes: either it will pause the development of new apps and chatbots, either it will make developers try a different platform for their chatbots. This is because if a business was planning to upload a chatbot now, it has to wait for some weeks, until further notice. But for most businesses time is money and they might have no other choice but to create their chatbot in some other platform.
Furthermore, there are speculations that Messenger will try to remove the 3rd party chatbot developers and motivate users to create bots on their own, in order to earn directly the profits without the interference of the developers.
However this is not as easy as it may seem; chatbot developers on the contrary of users, have the means and the tools to create a unique chatbot experience and create products that have diverse and creative features. So, even if users have the directions to create bots, the products will lose on quality and the results will not be the same as “bot experts” would do them.
Regardless the changes Cambridge Analytica might bring, chatbots and messenger need each other and will probably continue having a healthy coexisting relationship.
