You’re bored on a Thursday night, your friends are studying or sleeping – looking forward to the weekend. You decide that Facebook is your best choice for some source of entertainment to distract from the research paper due next week. You tap that like button on your iPhone; that little puppy was so cute. Little do you know, everything that you do on Facebook has recently been leaked, from benign likes to very particular private information.
On Tuesday, Apr. 10, Mark Zuckerberg faced a joint Senate committee in Washington DC to defend his massive organization from onslaught following private information leaked to Cambridge Analytica (CA), a political information group.
Facebook originally claimed that they were misled about the overall methods used by CA. According to the suit which implicates CA was used in both the EU referendum politics and in the 2016 US election politics. CA, in total, collected information from 1 million European citizens and 76 million United States citizens. However, CA reports this data as false, claiming that they only received 30 million United States citizens and did not use said data in either the US or EU political agendas.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson (Dem.) spoke on the senatorial committee saying, “If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix these privacy invasions, then we will.”
The blowback from Zuckerberg’s hearing was intense and varied. Many citizens and congressmen alike were appalled by Zuckerberg’s defense of his company’s actions. CA and the two other companies named in the law suit (SCL Group Limited and Global Science Research Limited) have all denied any implication of wrongdoing. Zuckerberg, however, admitted that his company was in the wrong, however that they did not commit any “illegal” activities.
Facebook has had an intense several years, full of various intrusions of privacy and blacklisting of political agendas. Various documented times have conservative political heads been banned from Facebook and have their platforms minimalized or quieted through “policy violations.”
These policy violations having never been explained or defended by Facebook, yet continuously these violations have been applied to popular conservatives. These recent events, however, pale in comparison to the insanity which has occurred in recent days. There is no reconcilable defense for the release of private information, either legally or illegally.
It was inevitable that this would come to pass, as our lives are so involved in internet usage. Zuckerberg echoed this concern when relating to legislating the internet, saying, “the Internet is growing in importance around the world in people’s lives; I think it’s inevitable that there will be some regulation.”
It’s very important to realize what Zuckerberg can gain from this regulation. He would be somewhat more involved in the government than both needed and wanted from his users. It’s also worth noting that government regulation of Facebook and the internet as a whole would be devastating to the internet community which brings us all together.
Zuckerberg is very much in the wrong for both keeping this data and for even partnering with CA or the other two companies. There is good reason for keeping tabs on this information as it pertains to national safety, but it does not give them the right to “allegedly” use this information for political agendas, regardless of the candidates using it.