The Real Scandal Isn’t What Cambridge Analytica Did It’s what Facebook made possible. By WILL OREMUS
The plot was made for
front-page headlines and cable-news chyrons: A
scientist-turned-political-operative reportedly hoodwinked
Facebook users into giving up personal data on both themselves and all
their friends for research purposes, then used it to develop “psychographic”
profiles on tens of millions of voters—which in turn may have helped the
Trump campaign manipulate its way to a historic victory. No wonder Facebook is
in deep trouble, right? Investigations are being opened; calls for regulation
are mounting; Facebook’s stock plunged 7 percent Monday.
Sensational as it
sounds, however, the Cambridge Analytica scandal doesn’t indict Facebook in
quite the way it might seem. It reveals almost nothing about the social network
or its data policies that wasn’t already widely known, and there’s little
evidence of blatant wrongdoing by Facebook or its employees. It’s also far from
clear what impact, if any, the ill-gotten personal data had on the election’s
outcome.
In short, the outrage
now directed at Facebook feels disproportionate to the company’s culpability in
this specific episode. But that doesn’t mean people are wrong to be outraged.
For Facebook, the larger scandal here is not what shadowy misdeeds it allowed
Cambridge Analytica to do. It’s what Facebook allowed anyone to
do, in plain sight—and, more broadly, it’s the data-fueled online business
model that Facebook helped to pioneer.
The Facebook tools and
policies that allowed researcher Aleksandr Kogan in 2014 to obtain information
for the political-data firm Cambridge Analytica—via an app called Thisismydigitallife—were
public and well-known. They were also quite permissive, allowing developers to
collect data not only on users who signed up for their app, but also on those
users’ Facebook friends. (Facebook has since changed that policy.) As the
Washington Post points out, entities ranging from Tinder
to FarmVille to Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaignused the same tool
to collect many of the same kinds of information. As late as 2015, this was
simply how
Facebook worked... read more:
