Facebook’s crisis: a world trend from Petro to Data

Recently, Facebook caused widespread concern due to leaking customers’ private information. According to New York Times’s report, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company, harvested private data from millions of Facebook users in 2016. Those data were used in Analytica President Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

Leaking data is never a new story.

People feel scared and angry about Facebook’s disclosure of data. However, this is not the first time people panic in data leaked. Not long before, Yahoo was facing data breaches crisis. In Nov. 2017, People found that Uber concealed huge data breach. The breach was due to a hack that affected 57 million customers and drivers since 2016. Even the educational platform Edmodo got trouble in exposing over 77 million unique users’ data last year.

What kind of world are we in? Does it seems like we all live in glass houses? Data technology makes it the best time for government, business, and advertiser, but also makes it the worst time for everybody’s privacy.

Does big data era means no privacy?

Question: what’s the most popular and simplest way to communicate with others online? Absolutely, a “Like”. The “Like” button was first used by Facebook and then quickly became popular in any other platforms. Facebook users click on it more than 6 billion times per day, which more than the times of people searches on Google per day. The button is a brilliant design. However, it is also a devil scissors which cut our fig leaf into pieces. I did not try to sensational. The truth is that people used to ignore the power of a “Like”. According to University of Cambridge and Stanford University’s research, through analyzing Facebook “Likes”, computer could predict one’s personality better than family and friends.

Nowadays, not only Facebook’s business model is like that, but also other companies. The essence of this business model is to acquire users data (including background, work, income, personality, hobby, etc.) as much as possible. Then become “Know you more accurately then your family and friends”. Thus means, websites could provide you better service based on what you like. Also, companies, like Facebook, could sell this information to advertisers, campaign teams, etc., so that they can place advertisements more accurately, affecting users’ thoughts and behaviors. Just like what Cambridge Analytica did during election.

Technically, we do have private, because all of the data collectors need our agree to collect our data and the privacy rules are clearly. Ethically, we don’t. We will never know exactly where our data be used and whether we are protected well under this more and more transparent world.

Data becomes future Petro?

It has been decades that petroleum became the economic core of the world. However, as technology development, it’s possible that data became the future Petro in this Information Age.

Actually, Facebook’s incident is indeed not a technical data leak, but it is more scary than leaking data because it is almost an inevitable consequence of the Facebook business model. As I mentioned above, this model is not unique to Facebook. It has become the basic survival rules for many Internet companies around the world. Most of the apps you have on your mobile phone are based on this business model. Therefore, user data has become the basic resource of the Internet today, just like petroleum.

It’s hard to say that this business model is wrong. However, when user data gradually becomes “Petro”, we may see a lot of violations of ethical boundaries in order to compete for data, just like what countries do to compete for petroleum.

Is there any method to avoid your own data leaked?

Few months before, I uninstalled one of my favorite social media apps, Weibo. One day after I updated Weibo, It asked me to allow its privacy policies. Usually, I won’t even glance it and agree to the terms. But I don’t know what happened to me that morning. I read all these terms carefully. The more I read, the more creepy I felt. Finally, one sentence broke me. It said like that, if necessary, we will make all your information public. All of these terms are strict and if I don’t accept these terms, I couldn’t log in my account or read any information on Weibo. But I still have choice. I uninstalled it.

Does other apps not have the same problem? From a broad perspective, do I still have choice? Definitely no. I cannot uninstall all of the apps. That’s a sad truth, but I have to accept it.

 

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