“THEY ‘trust me’…dumb ****s,” Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, wrote in an instant message to a friend in 2004, after boasting that he had personal data, including photos, e-mails and addresses, of some 4,000 of his social network’s users. He offered to share whatever information his friend wanted to see.
Mr Zuckerberg may use less profane language today, but many feel he has not yet outgrown his wilful disregard for users’ privacy. On April 11th he testified before testy politicians in Washington about the firm’s latest privacy controversy, first to a joint hearing of two Senate committees that lasted around four hours, and then again on April 12th to a House of Representatives committee. Not since the 1990s, when Microsoft was taken to task for its monopolistic behaviour, has there been such “intense public scrutiny” of a technology firm in Washington, as Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator, informed Mr Zuckerberg.
Some of his inquisitors appeared annoyed by Mr Zuckerberg’s rehearsed responses, but that did not stop many onlookers from being chuffed by his smooth, albeit robotic, performance. Facebook’s share price closed nearly 5% higher after his first day of testimony. Investors may be betting that the worst of “Facegate” could be over, but it is too soon to count on it.
The immediate scandal is the most acute and far-reaching crisis in Facebook’s 14-year history. Last month it was revealed by Britain’s Observer and the New York Times that a researcher from Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan, had obtained information about some 300,000 Facebook users by encouraging them to download an app and take a survey in 2012. He then shared these data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, which reportedly made them available to others, including Donald Trump’s campaign. Some 87m Facebook users are affected, because Facebook’s policies at the time were so loose that people using a third-party’s app often shared details not only about themselves but also about their friends without their knowledge. Facebook changed its policies in 2014.
These revelations are especially damning because Facebook first learned about this problem in 2015 and did little to address it. In fact, instead of focusing on Cambridge Analytica’s bad behaviour, Facebook threatened to sue the Guardian Media Group, which owns the Observer, if it published the exposé. Only after a media backlash and public outcry did Facebook start to take action. It has started making it easier for users to control their privacy settings, reduced the amount of data that are shared with third parties, and promised to audit suspicious third-party apps. But these are things that many users wrongly believed Facebook had long been doing anyway.
