According to The New York Times at the end of 2018, internal documents generated at
Facebook in 2017 showed that the company “gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and
others far greater access to people’s data” even after having raised a privacy
wall than Facebook had disclosed.[1] That is, Facebook
effectively exempted some of its business partners from the company’s privacy
rules without notifying users. In
many quarters, this would be called lying, which in turn would suggest a sordid
management at Facebook. The more subtle astonishment, I submit, is that 2.2
billion users had stayed with Facebook after the hidden use of personal data
for political purposes. The partnership between Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica had hardly been made in heaven. Why such enduring trust in spite of
external data being clear grounds for losing trust and giving up using
Facebook? How many betrayals would be necessary? In literal marriages, trust
can be lost “like that!” Similarly, when a child even unconsciously loses trust
for her parents, the solid basis of trust in a normal parent-child relationship
is lost most likely forever. Why has Facebook—a distant business punctuated by
lies—get a pass?
The
newspaper’s valuable discovery offered the fullest picture yet of the wide
extent, or scale, to which personal data was traded through at least 2018 “by
some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.”[2] In fact, The New York Times
points in its investigative reporting to the “extraordinary power over the
personal information of its 2.2 billion users—control it has wielded with
little transparency or outside oversight.”[3] The lack of transparency
should be a giant red flag concerning the unethical climate at Facebook’s “upper”
management levels. Betrayal drips off the screen in Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to
allow “Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all
Facebook users’ friends without consent” and give “Netflix and Spotify the
ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”[4] Facebook also “permitted
Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends,
and [Facebook] let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts . . . despite public statements that [Facebook] had stopped that kind of
sharing years earlier.”[5] Specifically, in the wake
of revelations (not from Facebook!) that the company had allowed a political consulting
firm, Cambridge Analytica, to use user data to help Donald Trump’s 2016
presidential campaign, Zuckerberg publicly claimed that his company was
instituting stricter privacy protections for users. Therein lies a lie, for he
said nothing about permitting gaping exemptions.
Even
so, how many of Facebook’s users left because of the Cambridge Analytica
scandal? Astonishing, or maybe not!, because
over two billion users remained, which implies that plenty of users behaved as herd animals, going on as
usual in spite of having reason to delete their accounts. Many of the users must have sensed, even if unconsciously, that their trust in Facebook
no longer had a viable foundation (i.e., a basis in fact). With the subsequent revelations
of the New York Times detailed here, would what was by that point a squalid track record
register in the minds of the 2.2 billion users? If not, a gap would still exist between users including personal information and pictures and trust that Facebook would not betray those users yet again. In a perfect market, viable competitors to Facebook would exist and consumers would--especially given the low barriers to entry--readily switch over. Perhaps Facebook's practice of buying up potential competitors early (and for a lot of money) had rendered the market oligarchical. Yet even this would not explain why the status quo had been favoring Facebook rather than the naive, oblivious, or neutral users. I submit that this case represents a market failure from the standpoint of competitive, free-market Capitalism.
Lest it be assumed that the U.S. Government would increase oversight on Facebook (and other social-media companies), would any action really come from government (including regulatory oversight) even as wealthy mega-companies like Facebook (and its “partners”!) could doubtlessly make very substantial political campaign contributions? Given this conflict of interest, at least in the U.S., relying on the users to protect themselves seems naive. On this problem, I submit that the explanation lies in psychology. Are human beings--or most humans--too prone to act on an instinctual urge to act as herd animals rather than as trend-setting individuals? Nietzsche thought so, and he argues in his books that such people are herdish because they are weak. Can 2.2 billion people be weak, or is the problem external, such as a dearth of information or simply a calculation that what comes free in a Facebook account is worth more than the company's betrayals?
Lest it be assumed that the U.S. Government would increase oversight on Facebook (and other social-media companies), would any action really come from government (including regulatory oversight) even as wealthy mega-companies like Facebook (and its “partners”!) could doubtlessly make very substantial political campaign contributions? Given this conflict of interest, at least in the U.S., relying on the users to protect themselves seems naive. On this problem, I submit that the explanation lies in psychology. Are human beings--or most humans--too prone to act on an instinctual urge to act as herd animals rather than as trend-setting individuals? Nietzsche thought so, and he argues in his books that such people are herdish because they are weak. Can 2.2 billion people be weak, or is the problem external, such as a dearth of information or simply a calculation that what comes free in a Facebook account is worth more than the company's betrayals?
See also the booklet, Taking the Face Off Facebook, available at Amazon. On Nietzsche's moral philosophy applied to business ethicists and managers alike, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, available at Amazon.
1. Gabriel Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore, “As
Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants,” The New York Times, December 18, 2018.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., italics added.
