Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is no stranger to receiving backlash for privacy issues, but this one has to be one of the biggest yet. Over the last few weeks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal has unfolded and all eyes are on him.
Zuckerberg testified before Congress on April 10 and 11 regarding the scandal in which millions of Facebook users had their data sold improperly to the political research firm, Cambridge Analytica. This is a big deal because the company uses this personal data for “psychographic” modeling, a method used to target voters, and Cambridge Analytica is known for assisting candidates of the Republican party in their campaigns.
The data was obtained by Aleksander Kogan, a Soviet-American researcher from Cambridge University. He developed an app called “thisismydigitallife” where Facebook users could take a personality quiz that would be used to expose their personal information, but users were unaware of that fact. Although it wasn’t a hack, the information was conceived through a “loophole” in Facebook’s API, or application program interface.
The reason why Facebook is getting most of the heat, rather than Cambridge Analytica itself, is because this highlights the issue of whether users can actually trust Facebook not to allow a third-party application to gather and exploit their data through a loophole. It’s especially disturbing that Facebook has known about this problem for a while and is only now choosing to acknowledge its mistake.
Courtesy: The Hill
Zuckerberg was asked by one congressman if he was going to be taking legal action against the members involved in this scandal, and his response was, “It’s something we’re looking into.” The Facebook CEO did not forget to mention that he was also a victim of the scandal on his second day of testifying. He also stated that both Kogan and Cambridge Analytica have been banned from Facebook. The team behind Facebook plans on further investigating the details of how exactly this all happened.
Courtesy: NBC News
The scandal has brought much attention to privacy issues and how these developers plan on making these sites safer or at least making their users aware of where their information is going. Many are hoping that some changes will be instilled soon. As an internet-dependent society, the whole situation does make one wonder what else could be going on that we may not even know about.