Facebook And Its Honey Pot

I assume you are a Facebook user and at various points of time you have ‘liked’ many things which come on your feed. You may also have taken few of those enticing quizzes which promise to tell you how intelligent you are or which Harry Potter character you resemble. It may have never occurred to you that you are perhaps being hoodwinked, that someone is collecting data about your likes, your demographic details and those of your friends and using them to create your and your friends’ psychographic profiles and then send you adverts (mostly pandering to your emotion of fear) to mould and discreetly influence your behaviour towards meeting a goal which you are unware of.

By now, you would have heard of the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. If not, continue reading.

Cambridge Analytica is a UK based firm and it worked with researchers on a 120-question survey that seeks to probe personality. They rolled this out to hundreds of thousands of Facebook users. Having received responses on these questions, it scored people on traits like openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, traits commonly referred to by the acronym OCEAN (or CANOE) – aspects of the "big five" personality traits. They were able to collect data of over 50 million Facebook users and without their consent build voter profiles by combining the psychographic results along with the demographic data.

They used this data to influence the 2016 US presidential election in Trump’s favour. They have also helped secure the victory for the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta in 2013 and 2017, and have reportedly successfully managed four election campaigns for the BJP in India. They were hired by the ousted Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to rescue his political career and to make sure PML-N win in an upcoming general election.

How did they pull this off?

It’s what Facebook made possible. Facebook's stock plunged 7% the day the news about the data abuse broke.

Yes, this is a data abuse, not a data breach. It is how Facebook had architectured its data policies. It allowed its users to not only share their data, but those of their friends too. This loophole was exploited widely by developers.

Facebook found out about the wrongdoings and had asked both the researcher and Cambridge Analytica to delete the data. But that obviously didn’t happen. It is one thing to allow sharing of data to developers and another to hope for the best that it is not used unethically. Once the data has fallen into the hands of swindlers and cheaters, there is precious little Facebook can do. It is quite clear now that Facebook’s data policy was not well thought through.

Facebook has changed its policy since, but they had kept their findings about Cambridge Analytica under wraps until it came out in the open. It’s not about one company misusing the data. Facebook has let such a huge amount of data out in the world that it’s now impossible to put all those back in the bottle. Of course, they think they did nothing wrong here. For them, their security was not compromised and that’s what mattered to them. But they are in the barrel along with Cambridge Analytica. #DeleteFacebook is trending!

The problem is not in sharing of personal information (which in the era of open internet has become a norm). The unease is about the loss of control on that information after we have shared them (Are the tech giants robbing you?). Data is used to sell ads even by Google and Twitter. The business of showing online ads basis data is an old concept and dates back before Facebook was born. But it was Facebook which told and taught people that freely sharing data to get targeted ads was the price of being in a social network. It has worked spectacularly for the honey pot they have built.

But this bargain seems good in the short run where in-your-face targeted ads are the outcome of the data you shared. In the long run, this sacrifice leads to handing over enormous amount of power to forces beyond our control. Since this cost is hidden and occurs in the future, it is easy to miss. But when you think about it, the colossal success of Facebook starts appearing smaller. That Facebook has kept maturing with every data abuse which has surfaced does not exonerate it from the way it has managed itself till now.

Mark Zuckerberg ultimately broke his silence, a full 5 days later, and accepted that Facebook needs to put stronger safeguards on customer data. He told CNN, “we have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” Technically speaking, there was no data breach, which then makes Zuckerberg’s statement kind of a structural lie. In spirit though, there was a breach since the data was abused freely after it moved out from its source.

It’s increasingly hard to feel sympathy for Facebook. There have been nearly a dozen instances over the years where it has launched products with inadequate safeguards. It’s hard to say that it has been willful but this quote from Zuckerberg at a forum in November sums up the multiple crises that it has faced: “If you think something is going to be terrible and it is going to fail, then you are going to look for the data points that prove you right and you will find them. That is what pessimists do. But if you think that something is possible, then you are going to try to find a way to make it work. And even when you make mistakes along the way and even when people doubt you, you are going to keep pushing until you find a way to make it happen”.

All that sounds good to keep the investors happy and raking in the profits, but its time to stop this pie-in-the-sky ‘fix the whole world’ dream and fix the leaky company first.

----------

Enjoyed this article? Share it with your network.

----------

In case you missed

Are Autonomous Car Makers In A Hurry To Reach A Driverless Future?

Amazon Wants To Open Checking Accounts. What Does It Mean For The Banks?

I invite you to browse all my LinkedIn articles archived here.

----------

About the author

Anindya Karmakar has led multiple initiatives at the cutting edge of digital connectivity, IoT, robotics, AI, analytics, paperless branch and remote advisory. He is passionate about the digital revolution which is underway. He simplifies and de-clutters digital jargons and concepts and presents them in layman's language.

----------

The views and opinions expressed or implied herein are my own and do not reflect those of my employer, who shall not be liable for any action that may result as a consequence of my views and opinions. The pictures used have been taken from the open internet and I don't claim any credit for them.