Until recently, Facebook has been privileged to experience a relatively positive view from the public. As of the last quarter of 2017, there were roughly 2.2 billion monthly active users. On average there are about 300,000 status updates per minute. Suffice to say Facebook has had an active influence on many of our lives.
It is a company and application whose influence spans generations. It would not be hard to say that almost one person from every family has a Facebook account who posts regularly and posts half of their life on their walls. We use Facebook to express ourselves and socialize with others, so it becomes all too easy to fill in the forms they present in front of you when first creating your account. What is your phone number? Education? Address? Friends? Relationship?
Facebook has access to all this data in some way, shape or form. It is because of this sheer amount of data that Facebook has at its fingertips that they find themselves in front of the U.S. Senate today. This past week Owner and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has spent his time at a hearing in the Senate.
This was prompted when it was discovered that a firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 election. Facebook has allowed access to their users through something called Graph API, which is a development kit.
With Graph API 1.0, a developer or app could ask a user to get his or her data and if accepted the developer would have access to copious amounts of data on that user’s profile.
A lot of companies used this data as their business. One of these companies sold their data set to Cambridge Analytica, which was against Facebook’s terms of service.
Facebook discovered this around 2015 and asked both the company selling the data and Cambridge Analytica to remove all data they had obtained. Cambridge Analytica did not delete the data, which ultimately led to the hearing this past week.
Now knowing a piece of the larger background, we can now look at some of what Zuckerberg and various senators discussed this past week. Early into the first day of the two-day hearing a question was posed from Senator Richard J. Durbin, of Illinois:
“If you messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you’ve messaged?”
Zuckerberg denied this request and also noted that he would not do so publicly.
Durbin then went on to state the true matter at hand, a person’s right to their privacy and how much they give away under the guise of “connecting people around the world.”
It is the responsibility of companies whose services we enjoy to keep the information we entrust to them secure. This is especially important when it is not readily apparent that there is a chance that our data may be used beyond what we understand.
In a world that is ever evolving through technology, it becomes ever more important to stay up-to-date within the environment we reside.
A full transcript of the hearing can be found at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c8643dc4d813.
