Facebook privacy crisis: Cambridge Analytica scandal is a ‘wake-up call’ for social media users
THE world’s biggest social network has faced a colossal crisis, with experts saying it’s a wake-up call for anyone sharing personal info online. You could be doing it without even knowing.
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WHO hasn’t done a personality quiz on Facebook?
From the seemingly harmless ‘What kind of dog would you be?’ to the morbid ‘When will you die?’ these apps are among Facebook’s most popular time-wasters.
But, unbeknown to many of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users, their creators were also playing a game.
They were using these apps to harvest your personal details and that of your friends, and work out your gender, your ethnicity, your marital status, whether your parents stayed together, whether you’re depressed, if you’re at risk of substance abuse, how you might vote in an upcoming election, and whether they can change that vote or convince you to stay home on polling day.
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While Facebook has been gathering this information for years, many of its users did not realise it until this week when a whistleblower revealed data firm Cambridge Analytica had been using the information to target and influence voters in the 2016 US presidential election — an allegation the firm denies.
What’s not in dispute is that it bought the personal details of 50 million Facebook users — most of whom did not consent to having their information mined — to create alarmingly accurate personality profiles that it aimed to sell to political parties, including those in Australia.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who went to ground for five days following the scandal, has since said he is “really sorry that this happened” and pledged to investigate whether other app developers have exploited users’ personal information.
But Australian privacy and social media experts say the crisis was “a turning point” for social media users who had not considered how their information was being used, and many of whom were now considering whether to delete their Facebook accounts or if it was safe to share personal information online.
Despite its impact this week, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was not new.
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The firm, funded by billionaire Donald Trump campaign supporter Robert Mercer, bought the personal details of more than 50 million Facebook users in 2015, paying psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan for information he’d gathered from a personality quiz on the site.
His app had gathered information from 270,000 participants but, controversially, also stripped personal information from their friends’ profiles, including status updates, the brands, websites, and information they’d ‘liked,’ and even their private messages.
This information, according to former Cambridge Analytica research head and now whistleblower Christopher Wylie, was used to create exacting portraits of Facebook users’ personalities, from their political persuasions to correlations about their personalities — liking curly fries, for example, indicated intelligence.
When Facebook discovered Cambridge Analytica had bought the information — against the social network’s terms of service — it demanded the data be deleted, but Wylie says Facebook never checked and the company continued to use it to target voters in the recent US election.
“It was a grossly unethical experiment because you are playing with an entire country, the psychology of an entire country, without their consent or knowledge … in the context of the democratic process,” he told The Guardian.
Former Victorian Privacy Commissioner David Watts, now a professor of information law and policy at La Trobe University, says the news is a “wake-up call” for social media users, who may not have realised their personal information was being used by third parties, whether academics or political lobbyists.
“These revelations are of the same significance of the (Edward) Snowdon revelations and they possibly mark a turning point in our addiction to social media sites and platforms,” he says.
“We’re reaching a turning point. There’s a change in the Zeitgeist and we won’t be looking at these internet giants as if they’re pure forces for benevolence any more.
“We’ll be making decisions about whether we want to share information with them and whether the convenience of being able to post photographs of your meal or your puppy is a sufficient trade for your personal data.”
The impact of Facebook’s biggest crisis to date is already obvious. The hashtag #DeleteFacebook began trending on rival social media site Twitter on Monday, and Google reveals web searches for the phrase spiked to their highest level in five years this week.
Watts says the scandal significantly damaged Facebook’s reputation, and it needs to recover users’ faith to avoid becoming another AltaVista, Netscape, or MySpace.
“Facebook relies on intangibles like trust to keep operating,” he says. “The ability of Facebook to say ‘you’re safe with us, we won’t misuse your information,’ they need that message to work.”
Despite the risk, and $50 billion wiped off the network’s value in just two days, Zuckerberg waited five days to publicly comment on the crisis.
The 33-year-old chief executive admitted failing to check Facebook users’ information had been deleted was “clearly a mistake,” though he stopped short of apologising to the users involved.
Facebook will “review thousands of apps” to see if they have harvested and sold similar information, he says, will limit what data app developers can access from users, and will create tools for Facebook users to check apps and discover whether their information was scraped and sold.
But Australian social media strategist Meg Coffey says Zuckerberg’s announcement “took too long” and gave users plenty of time to consider what information Facebook stored and shared about them, and whether they should continue using it.
At the very least, she says, the scandal will make Facebook users more reticent to share intimate details of their lives online.
“Some of this scandal is very complicated but it will make users think about what they share on Facebook and what they allow to access their information,” she says. “You see people say, ‘oh my God, I had no idea’. People will think twice.”
10 ways to limit your data risk on Facebook
— Check what Facebook apps you’ve installed, delete all but the apps you currently use, and limit the information they can access
— Check the information your friends share about you in a setting called “Apps others use”. You could be sharing information like your current location through their accounts.
— Consider turning off “Facebook Platform,” which will stop sharing your activity from other apps with Facebook. You will no longer be able to login to third-party websites with your Facebook details, however.
— Edit your “Ad Preferences” in Facebook’s settings. You can remove “interests” the social network has gathered about you, and choose to turn off customised ads that use your websites you visit outside Facebook to serve you advertisements
— Ensure only friends can see your posts in privacy settings. This only affects future posts, however, and you’ll need to select “Limit Past Posts” to secure older photos and information.
— Do not use your Facebook account to log into public wi-fi hot spots. Your personal information could be mined and used by marketers
— Do not give Facebook your mobile phone number or let the app use the contacts stored in your phone
— Do not let Facebook constantly track your location
— Do not make your birth year public on Facebook to prevent identity theft
— Do not complete Facebook quizzes that ask for information that they should not need, such as your location or access to your friends list
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Originally published as Facebook privacy crisis: Cambridge Analytica scandal is a ‘wake-up call’ for social media users