Facebook is an American social media company providing social networking services to people around the world. It was founded in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg is the Chairman and CEO of the company. People use Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family and to share and express their views. Recently Facebook’s data privacy scandal came into limelight where Facebook members’ data were improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data mining and political strategy firm. These data were accessed during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica accessed the data for more than 2 years. This is the biggest public relation crisis Facebook has faced.
In April 2010, Facebook launched a platform called Open Graph to third party apps. This allowed the external developers to reach out to Facebook users and request permission to access their personal data. In the year 2013, Cambridge University’s researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created an App called “thisisyourdigitallife”. The app prompted users to answer questions for a psychological profile. About 270,000 people downloaded the ‘app’ and shared their personal information. This gave Aleksandr Kogan to access data of not only Facebook users but also of the users’ friends. However, Facebook’s design allowed this app to not only collect the personal information of people who agreed to take the survey, but also the personal information of all the people on those users’ Facebook social network. These information were shared with Cambridge Analytica and used to know about the personality of the people and to effectively target political advertising on people. Cambridge Analytica obtained the information in total violation of Facebook’s rules and didn’t tell anybody that the data will be used for political campaigning.
In the same year Facebook was made aware about this violation of accessing data of not only who installed this app but also of their friends. Facebook demanded Cambridge Analytica to delete all the data and they agreed to delete all the data. Aleksandr Kogan in reality never deleted the data and later on Facebook never investigated whether they have deleted the data as promised. In 2014 Facebook changed their rules for external developers and restricted them from accessing user’s friends’ data without taking permission from them.
With the approaching 2016 Presidential elections, Cambridge Analytica did not have time to create its own data for election campaign. It went to Aleksandr Kogan who created Facebook app that paid users to take a personality test. In the year 2016 “The Guardian” reported that Cambridge Analytica is helping Ted Cruz’s presidential election by sharing psychological data based on their previous research. Christopher Wylie, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, told the Guardian that: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.” Moreover, the New York Times verified that the user information possessed by Cambridge Analytica could be found online. Although the scandal began in 2014, Facebook failed to take responsibility until it became a global outrage in 2018. Facebook waited for more than two years before suspending Cambridge Analytica even after knowing about the data breach.
In mid – March 2018, this scandal was exposed by The Guardian and The New York Times. Moreover, by 2018, Facebook had still never informed people on the breach regardless of it being aware that Cambridge Analytica had had this information for more than two years. As a result, Facebook violated several principles of technology ethics, which primarily include breaking the terms and conditions it has with its users. Facebook admitted that it did not read the terms of the app that accessed the data of 87 million people and apologized for the “breach of trust”. After the scandal broke out worldwide on news media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the situation with Cambridge Analytica on CNN, calling it an ‘issue’, a ‘mistake’, and a ‘breach of trust’. Mark Zuckerberg’s apologetic statement evidenced this gap in Facebook policies. In his interview with CNN, he stated that: “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.” Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer told U.K. lawmakers that Facebook did not notify the U.K.’s data protection watchdog after it learned of the sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica and it was their mistake.
As a consequence of their negligence, some Facebook users were angered and they deleted their accounts. There was a mass deletion of accounts, and this was also supported by influential people in the society, for instance, Brian Acton, the founder of WhatsApp. In addition, a hashtag trend, that is, #DeleteFacebook#, emerged and this exacerbated the deletions. Facebook’s stock prices also declined. To attend to the problem, Mark Zuckerberg went on CNN, and in his interview, he mentioned that Facebook had already revised some of the rules. He said: “We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
According to U.K.’s data protection law, sale or use of personal data without user’s consent is banned. In 2011, after Federal Trade Commission complaint, Facebook agreed to get clear consent from the users before sharing their data. The FTC now started investing whether Facebook violated privacy protection of their users. The U.S.A. and U.K. lawmakers are investing in their own way. Mark Zuckerberg apologized on behalf of Facebook by publishing a personal letter in all major newspapers and make changes and reform the privacy policy to prevent such kind of breaches. By doing this Facebook has breached the trust of users and privacy policy law. A customer or user shares information with a company trusting that personal details are safe. A company’s name and reputation makes people to trust on them. Quality of the brand is very important in building and growing a company.
Facebook is a very well know networking site and it has monopoly in the market. People joined Facebook and disclosed their personal details knowing that whatever information they share about themselves and their friends will be confidential and will not be disclosed anywhere outside without their consent.
How Facebook Responds to the Above Issue?
Mark Zuckerberg came up with several solutions to reduce and at most, eliminate the problem. After a five-day silence since the public announcement of the scandal, Mark Zuckerberg began by taking full responsibility for the scandal and apologized to Facebook users, stakeholders, and the community at large. Secondly, he took steps to ensure that breaches similar to Cambridge Analytica’s never occurred.
As of 2014, Facebook had already put policies into place that barred developers from gaining access to user information. However, after the 2018 scandal, Facebook went a step further to strengthen its policies. For instance, if a user goes for three months without using an application linked to Facebook, the company is going to discontinue developer access to any data about the person. Thirdly, for developers who did have prior access to all user data from way back in 2014, Facebook is going to request that they submit an audit or get removed from the platform.
Fourth, Cambridge Analytica was requested to delete all the data is collected from the “Thisisyourdigitallife” app after thorough auditing by cyber-crime experts. Fifth, Facebook announced changes in its privacy settings that enable users to delete any data collected by Facebook’s network. Though these were initially present, the company wanted to remind its users of the power they still had on their data. Last but not least, Facebook claimed that it would open a public archive that will contain all advertisements associated with political labels.
The archive will show the public the amount of money spent on advertisement, demographic data for the audience reached, and the number of impressions it attracted. After creating and implementing these solutions, the question that arises is whether these revisions would successfully prevent a similar case from occurring in the future. On one hand, it is a start. This is because restricting developer access to user data could help Facebook start to rebuild some trust. On the other hand, technology is dynamic and ever-evolving; therefore, the solutions may only apply to the current situation, but they may not have a long-term effect.
Although Facebook has faced many data privacy issues, how Mark Zuckerberg handled the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal portrays his embodiment as an ethical leader. The several behaviors likened to an ethical leader that Mark Zuckerberg possesses include taking responsibility. He swiftly acknowledged that he was clearly at fault, apologized, and took full responsibility for Facebook’s unethical actions. Secondly, concerning his public apology, he portrayed humility, an attitude of wisdom, and a willingness to learn. The third attribute is honesty and straightforwardness. In addition to his apology, Zuckerberg gave a direct and clearer plan on how Facebook will fix the problem at hand. Most of Zuckerberg’s solutions were enacted early this year; therefore, the overall impact of the solutions cannot be effectively evaluated. Nevertheless, so far, Facebook is more stringent on data privacy, and there have not been any related concerns arising. Furthermore, the likelihood of another breach of privacy is unknown since technology is always developing; hence, such glitches are inevitable.