Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
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Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement
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F
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