Before 2014, my company built tens of apps on the Facebook platform. It was a very different world. You approved one permissions box, and you had data not only on the user, but also the users friends. Facebook platform was quite early stage, and they meant well - open the data to the world, and they correctly stated that the world should be a more open state. But Facebook at the time didn't, and probably couldn't predict where they would get, and that companies like Cambridge Analytica would start using this data and start selling it.
This is exactly what they did. Cambridge Analytica bought data from a small app from a Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan (read his Guardian interview here) - and sold the data to Cambridge Analytica. There aren't exact details of the data that was being sold, but we could only assume what was possible on the platform before 2014 - these guys had your friends lists, likes, and maybe even their feed (if Kogan's app had "read stream permission" - which today is generally not available to apps on Facebook).
Now after knowing this, should you #DeleteFacebook?
Well, of course thats your choice, but in my opinion to do it for this reason would be quite a naive move. Why?
- First of all a majority of the users are still publishing posts pretty publicly
- The bigger trend is actually publishing more publicly - look at the recent rise of Instagram, the ability to actually keep the stories on your profiles
- For this to work - a majority of users would have to delete their social media accounts - this is just not going to happen
- The things that were possible back before 2014 are just not doable at scale in the Facebook ecosystem today
So deleting Facebook here would be a pretty pointless move.
Data breach? Not really!
Now one thing that shocks me is how this case got communicated. Any journalists calling this "stealing", "data breach", or even a "leak" are not labelling this event correctly. This was a company that operated on old social media rules, and used misplaced trust of people and sold intelligence from this data to third parties.
Should users panic? No, but be vigilant.
If you are super paranoid user, don't use shitty quiz apps or use them with something different than your Facebook login. The amount of data that you can obtain these days is very limited (and Facebook said they will limit this even further). You can really not do much damage with the data today.
Just exercise caution and if you really care about your privacy, use only authorised apps. Of course, anything can be further hacked, but the data they get these days are honestly pretty limited.
There will be 100 Cambridge Analyticas out there
This is not an isolated event, I believe there are 100+ Cambridge Analytica style companies out there, I believe governments and politicians around the world are getting better at using data. Unfortunately, this creates many propaganda machines.
Bigger problem and threat? Facebook News Feed...
The thing that is not being discussed very much is actually where the damage was done. The damage was not done by profiling these users - but on advertising and content which appears in the Facebook news feed.
We should be asking ourselves is not how and why was this done - this is pretty obvious (how we know, why for influence and revenue) - but how it was then used. Now this is where facts get a bit thinner with Cambridge Analytica case, but we can probably figure out the method used. The data was used to find people and pair them with content and messaging that would work on them (read: influence them), and help influence their opinions to vote for someone and something specific. Now if this is done systematically, the content you are being fed every day can really change your opinion. And this is where politicians have learnt not to use facts, but have learnt the amazing skills on using something in the middle, and also creating different cases to create panic - criminality, immigration, and other fears that users might have - and flipping it to the politicians advantage.
Unfortunately, also outside players and countries are now coming in and influencing election as it serves their agenda. So while your politician might not even be using these practices, there might be bigger forces playing here - and in the era of social media, we might just not see them.
What social media companies and society has to figure out is how to create good defense around this. Right now Facebook's idea around fixing the news feed is to rate media companies on their trust worthiness. This is really not good enough, as users and their behaviour (likes, shares, comments) got us there in the first place. As a society, we have to fight this propaganda by using facts, data, opening, sharing more information, exercising a lot more common sense, or for example using political satire.
By Socialbakers co-founder Jan Rezab