By Christopher Mims
The mountain of evidence piling up this week exposes the rot at
the core of Facebook Inc.
Facebook's troubling relationship with personal data, and the
way that data has been repeatedly exploited, show the precarious
nature of a business dependent on knowing everything it can about
its own users. For a company whose very existence depends on its
users turning up regularly, recent events threaten to give people a
reason to reduce the amount they share on Facebook -- or leave it
all together.
The latest revelations are all related to this: Facebook was,
for a time, a vehicle for exfiltrating massive amounts of data
about its users to developers and data miners of every stripe.
Outside developers could build games, quizzes and other apps
that funneled personal information from accounts of users who
willingly installed them, as well as pretty much everyone who was
their friend.
Facebook allowed this data access, hoping to build a business
like Apple's iPhone App Store. But the collection of Facebook data
by outside developers became such a concern that Facebook
eventually restricted the practice. In cases where Facebook
discovered developers were using that data outside of
Facebook-approved apps, the company demanded those developers
delete the data.
Cambridge Analytica, the data-analysis firm that is suddenly all
over the news, has worked for a number of political clients
including the Trump campaign. It allegedly obtained data from the
makers of one of these apps and improperly kept the data for years,
despite telling the social network the records were destroyed.
"When developers create apps that ask for certain information
from people, we conduct a review to identify policy violations and
to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data,"
according to a statement from Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice
president of global operations. "Three years ago, we changed the
product so that developers can't access the information of people's
friends."
A Facebook spokeswoman says the company continues to improve its
product and policies to prevent further abuse.
In the midst of this new scandal, we've been reminded that
Facebook is having internal debates over how to handle revelations
that Russians used the site to influence the 2016 presidential
election. As the turmoil builds, politicians and regulators in the
U.S. and Europe demand that Facebook make a full accounting of the
abuse of its often-mysterious platform.
It won't be long before Facebook's soul-searching becomes more
than an occasion to self-police and prompts users and regulators to
act on their own.
A Troubling History
Again and again, we've seen two disturbing problems throughout
Facebook's history. The first is that the company is unable to
anticipate the ways its platform, and the incredibly powerful trove
of sensitive data it produces, can be misused. In 2007, it was the
way Facebook's Beacon advertising system shared users' shopping
behavior and, indirectly, their life choices, with their friends
and family.
Personalization in advertising is sometimes nearly
indistinguishable from surveillance, and personalization is at the
heart of how Facebook makes money and captures so much of the
online advertising pie.
The second recurring problem with Facebook, only recently made
apparent, is that the company has a powerful, often negative effect
on our psychology. A variety of studies have shown that the way
Facebook encourages people to passively consume friends' posts can
make them unhappy. Facebook has admitted this is the case, but says
it has modified its algorithm to encourage other kinds of sharing
that, at least in theory, are better at positively connecting
people.
Other work has shown that Facebook has the power to reinforce
our biases. We think that, because our friends online espouse a
view that we share, it's what the majority of the population
believes. The company has contested this.
By virtue of using algorithms to target the most "engaging"
content, including lucrative ads, Facebook and its ilk have become
vehicles for spreading disinformation and sowing division.
Earlier this year, in an act of contrition, Facebook suggested a
pivot toward individual interactions and groups would be of greater
value, psychological and otherwise, to its users. But it's now
apparent that even its group features are fraught with the same
spammers and potential influence operations that bedeviled its news
feed.
"[Facebook Groups] are how Facebook radicalizes everyday
Americans," says Renee Diresta, an researcher and analyst at Data
for Democracy, an independent group of data scientists. She says
Facebook's algorithm for recommending groups pushes someone
interested in, for example, the antivaccination movement into
groups that espouse extreme political ideologies. "It's precisely
because Groups facilitate trust between participants and a feeling
of belonging and camaraderie that they're very powerful tools in
the wrong hands," she says.
In light of these issues -- and particularly the alleged misuse
of data that has pummeled Facebook's stock and reputation -- the
company's options are limited. And any potential solutions could
have a significant impact on the company's bottom line.
It could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to employ human
moderators to police potential abuse and misuse. It could hand over
its data to outside researchers, who could independently study the
impact on society. It could overhaul its data strategy to radically
shrink the amount of data it gathers and stores -- and
monetizes.
And if it doesn't fix itself quickly, Facebook could face
intrusive regulation, and even antitrust litigation.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 20, 2018 17:20 ET (21:20 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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