Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement 
7B
Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement 
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or decades, Wall Street has been viewed as an 
antagonist of the American people. Banks are con-
tinuously under scrutiny for irresponsible money 
management, with the notorious Public Eye “Award” dishon-
ors frequently being bestowed upon them. This narrative was 
only solidified by the 2008 subpar mortgage crisis, largely 
credited to the Street’s blend of inadequate due diligence and 
austere greed. But now, data is the currency of our business 
world, and it is one that we pay forward to use free services 
like social media. Tech companies have taken on the pres-
sure that was once placed on Wall Street, and are now under 
the spotlight with an even larger obligation: using our credit 
card, address, contact info, social network, and purchase data 
responsibly.
One of the largest offenders of data irresponsibility is 
Facebook. While it is most known for its Cambridge Ana-
lytica data scandal, there is far more that may have missed 
major headlines. Let’s take a deep dive into what has 
happened over a tumultuous 12 months in Facebook’s 
rocky relationship with user data privacy:
March 2018: Facebook suspended Cambridge Ana-
lytica, a data analysis firm, when they violated Face-
book rules by collecting 87 million Americans’ data for 
hyper-targeted advertising, and lied to Facebook about 
deleting the data. Facebook had learned about the data 
collection back in 2015, but did not follow-up on the 
data deletion until 2018. The three-week aftermath 
of the news? An 18 percent drop in its stock price, the 
stepping down of former Security Chief Alex Stamos, 
and an FTC investigation. Although #deleteFacebook 
started trending nationwide, many started to realize 
that #TooBigToFail also applies to tech companies.
April 2018: “Senator, we run ads.” As Facebook’s 
stock began to recover, Facebook co-founder Mark 
Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of the Senate was filled 
with apologies and optimism for the firm. The company 
began taking action, too, revamping its privacy tools to 
allow users easy insight into the comprehensive data 
that Facebook has from them. The bad news? Zuck-
erberg isn’t the only one with problems on his hands. 
Regulators have a hefty task of figuring out how to cre-
ate legislation that can reign in an entity more powerful 
and complex than Congress itself.
Late April-May 2018: Deleting about 200 suspicious 
apps, 800plus million spam posts and rolling out an 
apology ad during the NBA Playoffs, Facebook began 
cleaning up its act. Apologies turned from words to 
action, as Facebook agreed to comply with the Europe-
an Union’s revolutionary data-privacy General Data Protec-
tion Regulation law.
June 2018: Spring cleaning, however, didn’t last long. June 
began with a New York Times accusation of Facebook shar-
ing excessive user data with device manufacturers like Apple, 
Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry. When users accessed 
Facebook on these devices, tech manufacturing firms alleg-
edly gained access to Facebook user data as well as users’ 
friends’ data. And when it rains, it pours: Days later, Facebook 
found a software bug that caused about 14 million private 
accounts to become public.
July 2018: Privacy stayed center stage for Facebook. The 
month kicked off with yet another apology from Zucker-
berg, as a six-day software bug that allowed blocked users to 
temporarily access and view the accounts of those who had 

blocked them. To wrap up the month, when dismal second 
quarter earnings revealed shockingly low revenue growth, 
Facebook saw the largest one-day loss in stock market his-
tory. The record-breaking abuse of data privacy had finally 
caught up to the company in a serious way.
October 2018: October wasted no time in spooking Face-
book. News surfaced that hackers were able to access 
information from roughly 29 million accounts — including 
Zuckerberg’s very own. Just six months after the Cambridge 
Analytica disaster, Facebook had once again found itself at 
odds with user data privacy. In hopes of making progress 
through tumult, Facebook made a bold move in their play-
book a week later, launching Facebook Portal: an in-home 
hardware device that functions like FaceTime, but with a 
wider screen and a camera that follows users during the call. 
With the chronic misuse of data preceding the launch, many 
viewed the in-home device with skepticism. And while still 

dealing with the data breach from the start of the month, 
Facebook announced a few days after the Portal launch that 
they had fixed a bug found in August that had allowed hack-
ers to hijack users’ WhatsApp accounts when they answered 
an incoming video call. By mid-October, major investors 
expressed their exhaustion with the company’s irresponsi-
bility, and called for Zuckerberg to step down from the com-
pany’s Board of Directors.
December 2018: Facebook wrapped up the year solidify-
ing itself as the enemy of responsible data utility when the 
Parliament of the United Kingdom released a slew of inter-
nal Facebook documents, revealing that Facebook created an 
entire marketplace with its user data. 
It gave companies such 
as Netflix, Microsoft and Amazon special access to Facebook 
user data, while limiting this database access to Facebook’s 

own competitors. Mid-December, Facebook continued what 
began to feel like empty apologies when they released news 
that a bug may have exposed unshared photos of roughly 7 
million users to up to 1,500 third-party apps. A few days after, 
Facebook received news that the Washington, D.C. attorney 
general, was finally suing the firm for the Cambridge Ana-
lytica data scandal.
January 2019: Mark Zuckerberg rang in the New Year with 
one resolution: fixing Facebook. But toward the end of the 
month, news broke that Facebook had been secretly paying 
people between the ages of 13 and 35 to install a “Facebook 
Research” VPN, letting the company acquire the entirety of a 
user’s web activity. The compensation? $20 per month. With-
in hours of the news breaking, Facebook shut down the iOS 
Facebook Research app. Despite the uneasy news, January 
concluded with a strong earnings report, sending the stock 
up nearly 12 percent.
February 2019: Facebook turned 15, but leaders 
worldwide were doing everything but celebrating. Ger-
man antitrust officials wielded their gavels and ordered 
Facebook to stop merging the data it collects on users’ 
activities across the internet without their consent. 
Weeks later, the UK Parliament released a 100 plus 
page document accusing Facebook of their beyond-the-
law behavior and recommended that the UK create a 
watchdog to oversee tech companies. Soon thereafter, 
New Zealand hinted at taxing multinational internet 
companies up to 3 percent.
March 2019: This month, while Facebook Coin is 
stirring conversation among cryptocurrency skeptics, 
Facebook made a colossal change to their blueprint that 
may just redefine the company as we know it: pivoting 
their strategy toward private communication. After 
a long year of broken privacy promises, this may look 
like a hollow tactic at face value. However, Zucker-
berg’s lengthy blog post begs to differ. He is revamping 
the company on one big bet: the movement from public 
posting to small-group sharing. What does this really 
mean? Perfecting the art of encrypted messaging.
While action is yet to follow his words, this new 
strategy ultimately means leveraging its less-than-ideal 
reputation in privacy, and strengthening it to the point 
of focal purpose. How do we know that this is the real 
deal? Just last Friday, Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief prod-
uct officer, stepped down, calling the shift a “big proj-
ect” that demands leaders who are “excited to see the 
new direction through.” As one of Facebook’s first 15 
engineers, it sounds like encryption didn’t sit too well 
with the executive.
The year 2018 was everything but kind to Facebook users, 
but the U.S. government is yet to properly penalize the tech 
mogul. While data privacy is a direct issue that all users equi-
tably seek resolve from, the fact of the matter is that lawmak-
ers and the FTC do not have the resources to suitably regulate 
companies of such massive size. The FTC’s largest fine to 
date is $22.5 million, charged back in 2011 to Google after the 
company tracked userson Apple Safari without their consent. 
For a multi-billion dollar company, this is less than a slap on 
the wrist.
For now, users and legislators can only hold out hope that 
the move to private communication is a move toward data 
responsibility on Facebook’s chessboard.

BY ROMY SHARMA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

Facebook and privacy: from 
antonym to ally in 12 months

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

