Facebook and the Great Data Breach

Facebook is quickly approaching 2 billion users. Last year, Facebook pulled in over $40 billion in revenue and earned $16 billion in profit. That’s one heck of a lot of cute grandkid photos and crazy cat videos.

Their profit margin (40%) is the envy of nearly every American business, whose average net is 7.5%. This highly successful company pulls in $20 in annual revenue and earns a net profit of $8 for each and every user. While any one of us isn’t all that valuable to Facebook, 40 billion of us are enormously so.

That is why Facebook is very concerned that many users are considering deleting their accounts following an infamous user data leakage fiasco.

You may have heard of that fiasco, and you may be considering the deletion of your account; but hold on. Let’s understand what happened and how you might reach a compromise with your principles.

The latest news is that the personal information of 50 million Facebook users was used by a British political research firm, Cambridge Analytica. They had been hired by the Trump campaign to identify potential voters. Now before you rage into a high partisan dudgeon, please realize that this behavior is common to political campaigns. In fact, Barack Obama’s successful 2008 effort was strongly supported by data mining.

As reported by The Atlantic in 2009, “How Democrats Won the Data War in 2008,” the successful Obama campaign relied heavily on analysis of voter data.

“Get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and progressive organizations mobilized more than one million dedicated volunteers on Election Day. But it was buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never before participated in. In 2008, the principal repository of Democratic data was Catalist, a for-profit company that acted as the conductor for a data-driven symphony of more than 90 liberal groups, like the Service Employees Union -- and the DNC -- and the Obama campaign. The Catalist data was crunched by the Analyst Institute, a DC-based organization that was set up to perform rigorous experiments like these on progressive voter contact methods.”

Now that doesn’t let Cambridge Analytica off the hook. Here is what they did wrong.

The initial foray into the Facebook user base was by an application developer that offered a “personality quiz” to Facebook users, 270,000 of which accepted and allowed access to their personal data. But at that time in 2014, the Facebook programming interface allowed access not only to those 270,000 users data, but also to all of their friends. This is how the information of 50 million users was eventually recorded and analyzed, an average of 185 friends for each of the 270,000 agreeable users.

The key point is that the other 50 million users had not given their permission, only the base 270,000. Facebook, properly chagrined, have since changed their programming interface to require that each and every user must give permission before their data can be gathered by an application. They are dopey, but learning.

Here are a few points to ponder and some simple tactics you can employ to protect your personal information.

• 1.       Facebook is “free.”
• 2.       But nothing in the universe if free. This is assured by the laws of physics which cannot be repealed.
• 3.       If Facebook appears to be “free,” something is going on.
• 4.       And that is that you are not a customer of Facebook. You are its product.
• 5.       The customers of Facebook are companies running advertisements, tailored to your interests by using Facebook data.

Now tailored advertisements are not all bad. Your erstwhile columnist would much rather see an advertisement on skiing in Italy versus one extolling the virtues of womens’ hair conditioner. But the cost is that we must share some of our data.

Here is how you can share a minimal amount of data with Facebook, but enough to continue enjoying pictures of cute grandchildren and crazy cat videos for “free.”

• 1.       Never play a Facebook game
• 2.       Never take a Facebook quiz
• 3.       Never take a Facebook personality test
• 4.       Simply use Facebook to share photos and comments with friends and relatives.

All of this is relatively new. No one of us can be blamed for not being an expert. After all, our grandparents were still dealing with telegrams and expensive long distance phone calls.

Here is one timeless tactic that will always help. Be skeptical. Always.