Facebook is not the victim, it’s the perpetrator in a privacy nightmare

IT’S more than a bit rich for Facebook to play the victim in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, writes Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson. Their lax attitude to privacy makes them co-perpetrators.

IMAGINE Cambridge Analytica wasn’t a well-funded data analysis firm, but just a man.

Before that man had ever met you in person, he would know your name, your birthdate, where you live, the places you visit, who you call friends, what you tell your friends, what sort of things you like, how you vote, and how he could change your vote.

That man, let’s call him Cam, would even know what you look like, your race, your gender, and almost 5000 things about you, according to his own count.

And how did Cam learn so much? His mate Facebook, who probably knows even more about you.

Facebook is suffering one of the worst crises in its 14-year history this week after revelations 50 million of its users had personal information harvested, sold to a third party, and allegedly used to alter the result of the US presidential election.

The great majority of users who had information “scraped” from their Facebook accounts had no idea it was happening and certainly didn’t consent to handing over their likes, friends lists, and private messages for the financial and political gain of others.

But, before you get angry about what appears to be a gross and widespread invasion of privacy, Facebook wants you to know that it’s a victim in all of this too.

No, seriously, that’s what the company is trying to sell you.

“Mark (Zuckerberg), Sheryl (Sandberg), and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward because they understand the seriousness of the issue,” the company said in a statement.

“The entire company is outraged we were deceived. We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens.”

There are so many problems with this tone-deaf comment that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Firstly, while Cambridge Analytica used Facebook users’ personal information to influence their behaviour, Facebook was already doing that. It does that every single day.

Facebook gathers this information — and more — from users and successfully leverages it for financial gain. After all, the company is now worth $633 billion, even after you consider the $52 billion in value it’s dropped this week.

Mark Zuckerberg is trying to position Facebook as a fellow victim of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it’s as much to blame. (Pic: Paul Marotta/Getty)

It’s enough to make you wonder whether Facebook is ”outraged” that users’ information was sold, or angry they didn’t receive the proceeds of the sale.

Secondly, these users did not have their information “stolen” from Facebook. This was not a “hack,” it was a sanctioned siphoning.

Facebook allowed a university researcher to gather personal information from its members who consented to an app, and harvest personal information from their friends who did not consent to use his app. This behaviour was fine with Facebook.

Dr Aleksandr Kogan was not operating outside the law, or even outside Facebook’s terms of service in this scenario. The only thing he did wrong, according to Facebook, was to sell the data to Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg has now said he’s “very sorry”, but that’s cold comfort to Facebook users exploited in this saga.

The members who had their likes and dislikes, their communication and their social ties exposed, mined, and sold.

They didn’t even contact affected individuals to make them aware of this data breach.

It’s hard to imagine that any company thinks this is acceptable behaviour, much less one with 2.13 billion customers.

Several academics I’ve spoken to this week say the situation could prove a “turning point” for the social media giant — a MySpace moment, if you will — and the current #DeleteFacebook movement could see users leave in substantial numbers.

If they do, unlike those who had personal information stripped from their accounts, Facebook can’t say it wasn’t warned.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson is News Corp’s national technology editor.

@jendudley

Originally published as Facebook is not the victim, it’s the perpetrator in a privacy nightmare