Editorial: Facebook is all power, no responsibility
With great power comes great responsibility. Nobody can deny online giant Facebook is one of the most powerful entities of the internet age, with great global reach and correspondingly enormous wealth and political clout.
Opinion
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WITH great power comes great responsibility.
Nobody can deny online giant Facebook is one of the most powerful entities of the internet age, with great global reach and correspondingly enormous wealth and political clout.
Power it has. But Facebook doesn’t match that power with anything like the proper level of responsibility. Not even close.
Facebook has now confessed to a truly damning catalogue of privacy invasions, admitting it scans private messages, keeps logs of calls made using its app and lets data harvesters use its search feature in the manner of a reverse telephone directory.
Being multinational, Facebook’s intrusions extend to Australia, among many other countries. Australian authorities have now begun a formal investigation into Facebook after it confirmed the data of 311,000 Aussies had been compromised in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Nearly 90 million people globally might be in the same boat. By other estimates, that number could be closer to two billion.
Little wonder, then, many want Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to be permanently “unfriended” from his own organisation.
For the moment, however, Zuckerberg is standing firm and claiming he is still the best person to run the company.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake,” Zuckerberg told reporters in the US.
“We’re broadening our view of our responsibility.”
That would mark a significant change for Facebook, which extremely aggressively broadened the scope of its data harvesting and other invasions.
Yesterday the company outlined an extraordinary number of ways it had collected personal information from unwitting users.
Facebook admitted it “scanned” messages for text and images sent on its Messenger app, supposedly to make sure they complied with its “community standards”.
It also admitted it collected records of phone calls made through the software for users who had downloaded it onto Android devices.
Facebook now says it will delete much of that stored data, but even there it is not going anywhere far enough. Before it is deleted, the data must be more than one year old.
A company founded on the elegant notion of allowing people worldwide to stay in touch through words, images and video now looms as a menace to many millions of its users.
LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL
Caravans are back, baby. Those classic symbols of 1970s dagginess are once again hitting highways and filling parks throughout NSW.
But these parks are a little different to the caravan parks of previous decades, which mostly featured various Millards, Romas and Viscounts scattered around a solitary and faintly dodgy “amenities block”.
Today’s parks cater to the modern caravan enthusiast and offer swimming pools, playgrounds, pet-minding services and other travel lures.
And it is working, with international visitors being particularly taken by the notion of caravan tours in NSW. Roll on, vanners.
OUR GOLD RUSH BEGINS
Mack Horton was a man with a plan heading into the men’s 400m freestyle during the first day of competition in the Commonwealth Games.
He knew that English rival James Guy would be tough to beat — but he also knew Guy’s strategy.
“Yeah, he typically goes out hard in the 400. He thinks it is the only way he can swim it so I know that’s what he does,” Horton said after claiming gold.
Horton’s win exploited Guy’s early speed.
“If you go out that hard, you are going to be hurting on the back end more than I’m hurting, so it is good fun,” he said. “Yeah, it is heaps of fun.”
It sure is.
And just as much fun was had at the Anna Meares Velodrome, where the Australian women’s team easily won the 4000m team pursuit.
Following a controversial — although high-rating, at least in television terms — opening ceremony, this is what the Games are all about: strong competition and wily tactics.
Australia’s Gold Coast gold rush has only just begun.