The revelations of the past week regarding Facebook and the use of the personal data of more than 50 million of its users through third-party political huckster firm Cambridge Analytica has finally prompted the behemoth’s founder to offer works of apology. Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence after four days of revelations that have shattered confidence in the social media firm’s terms of conditions and privacy, to say that Facebook erred and should have done more to protect the trust placed in it by the two billion people around the world who ‘like’ and ‘share’ gossip, news, pictures and videos.
That is true, but it should never have been allowed to become so big a fiasco in the first place. And Facebook too has purposely made it difficult for most average users to be able to fully understand the consequences of joining the platform. In particular, Facebook is guilty of obscuring plain speaking and has used convoluted terms and conditions to cover concerns over the way it shares our personal data.
As the effects of the sharing of personal data and the manner in which Cambridge Analytica was able to mine that data to political ends begins to sink in, there is now a realisation dawning that Facebook data may have been used to manipulate electoral contests the world over. There are reports that data from Facebook was used to target voters in the US elections in 2016, in Nigeria, Sri Lanka and during the United Kingdom general elections and referendum on Brexit. If indeed these are the cases, then every effort must be made to hold companies such as Cambridge Analytica and others, who mine and manipulate personal data, to full account and to ensure that their transnational and geopolitical meddlings must be prohibited once and for all.
There is a reality now too that Facebook has become simply too big, too all-consuming, too powerful and too removed from its start-up days as a pure social media platform for friends to keep in touch. Perhaps it’s time that laws against monopolies that exist in the United States are used to break up the conglomerate into component parts: One for social content, one for news provisions and one for advertising and marketing.
In this age of instant communication, where technology companies profit from our desire to constantly stay in touch, the least any of us can expect is a right to what little privacy we can reasonably expect. That right needs to be fully protected — from Facebook and others.
