From WBUR:
Mark Zuckerberg will explain his company’s handling of user data before Congress next week. The Facebook CEO also took questions from reporters Wednesday, acknowledging the company’s missteps and announcing new privacy provisions.
Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep), a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who researches the impact of social media, tells Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd she would “be shocked if there aren’t a lot more cases” of data scandals like the one involving Cambridge Analytica.
. . . .
On criticism of the company in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal
“It has a record of being very data-hungry, in that it scoops up an enormous amount of user data — not just what you do on the site, it even purchases data about you and merges it with its own data. And I have to say, unfortunately I wasn’t surprised as much by the current scandal, because what happened was until 2015, Facebook allowed these kinds of apps to harvest not just your data on Facebook, but your friends’ data. So even if you’d never downloaded this app or any other app, some random Facebook friend of yours did, they got your data, too. So the current scandal is focused on the fact that one of those apps was fronted by an academic who apparently passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, which then became Donald Trump’s firm. But there were thousands and thousands of apps scooping up people’s data. I’d be shocked if there aren’t a lot more cases of this.”
On Facebook maintaining “shadow profiles” of nonusers
“Even if you’ve never been on Facebook, what happens is, for example, on Android phones, if you downloaded the Facebook app or the Messenger app, it turns out Facebook’s been uploading to its own servers and keeping a copy of your text messages, which means even if you’ve never been on it and you were texting with somebody who’s on Facebook or who uses the app or who uploaded their contact list — which is a very common way people connect with Facebook — it means that it kinda knows who your friends are. It can place you in a network. And Facebook keeps these ‘shadow profiles’ of its nonusers so that it can identify and profile and sometimes even target them. It’s kinda hard to exaggerate what a data-hungry company this is.”
. . . .
“The thing I wanna emphasize is rather than focus on the dystopia, what people need to understand is there’s nothing inevitable about the way the data retention and surveillance and digital technology works at the moment. If we change this, it’ll be good for innovation, it’ll be good for technology, it’ll be good for business models and it’ll be good for us. So let’s do that, rather than focus on the spectacle side of things. It’s so very early.”
Link to the rest at WBUR
While the obsessive focus on the last US presidential election has given Facebook’s missteps a huge publicity boost, PG thinks the huge backlash against the company will have a beneficial social effect.
PG has worked at some tech startups and the euphoria that accompanies rapid growth can lead to hastily-considered management decisions. Regardless of whether the future tech entrepreneurs who are laboring in college computer science classes are paying close attention to Facebook, the somewhat less-impulsive venture capitalists who will be funding the tech startups of the future are.
PG suspects a thorough review of the security of and the uses to which personally-identifiable information will be an integral part of any VC due diligence process prior to funding in the future.
That said, even very smart people sometimes do stupid things. The United States seems to have quite a lot of examples of this behavior in recent years.
Read the books by Daniel Suarez:
– Daemon
– Freedom
The heart of the story is how all the data that is generated by business is routinely used to create a vast profile of each person.
Then watch the BBC mini-series:
– The Last Enemy
The story is where a private company creates a system that gathers all of your public data together, and they offer the service to the Government, for a fee.
All these came out long before Edward Snowden blew the whistle and warned about the Government watching people. They don’t mention that virtually all of the data was gathered by companies as a standard business practice and sold to other companies and to the Government.
Facebook was awash in that mindset from the beginning. Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg and you have a clueless reporter like Judy sounding outraged and Sheryl playing repentant. BTW, This is how both of them make their money.
Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook ‘made big mistakes’ on protecting user data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zoMt3ev_Zc
The fact is, everything that we post online, all our email, all of our phone calls, everything that we do is collected and used to make somebody money.
Everybody wave to the Watchers. *wave*
Yes…:(
I’d heard about data mining, as a term, without having a clue what it really meant. At least the Cambridge Analytica revelations woke me up to the reality of the digital world.
Sadly I’m sure billions of others are still clueless about what’s going on. They don’t have enough tech knowledge to understand that computers now routinely find needles in haystacks, and they don’t understand how lots of tiny, innocent bits of information – like their geo-location – can be harvested and assembled to create an eerily accurate picture of who and what they are. And of course, they don’t know that this digital picture can be used against them.
I just wish people would start naming Google and all the others as co-conspirators in this legal theft.
I wonder how often, the personality traits that make tech people so good with tech are the very things that cause them to overlook or mis-judge how other people will react to features or use them in ways the creator didn’t consider?
I ask because I had a fascinating conversation with a computer-engineering grad student a decade ago. A friend and I suggested some ways his project might be used, and he stared at us, blinking and puzzled. Because he didn’t think that way,neither did his advisor, and had never considered that other people might not process things the same way he did.
I know exactly what you mean. For a dozen years, I worked around a lot of civil engineering types. On top of that, I had a couple of good friends who were married to aerospace engineers. The stories those women have! Engineers’ brains really do work differently from the rest of us. Don’t know why tech people (who are a brand of engineers) would be any different than their brethren.