Facebook is the problem

I don't think my previous post quite made this clear, but there's a very simple reason why I've been posting about the of the Cambridge Analytica story here, on my tech blog, rather than over there, at my political blog. It's because the political angle of this never struck me as being the most important part of the story; because the problem here really isn't Cambridge Analytica, per se.

Yes, Steven Bannon was (and probably still is) a real piece of work, and the company to which he was attached did do some very bad things, but Cambridge Analytica didn't do anything that Facebook didn't allow them to do, at the time. Yes, CA scraped waaayyy more data from FB than Zuckerberg's crew expected, and clearly abused it, and then behaved in almost cartoonishly villainous ways, but the real problem is that FB had the data available to sell in the first place.

To get a real idea of how big, and bad, the problem is, consider the following hypothetical scenario:

1. You "friend" or "follow" your doctor on Facebook. This is useful; it allows you to book appointments more easily, and keeps your doctor's contact info readily available if you need it...
2. ... and you do need it, because you've just been diagnosed with something that's chronic, serious, and both difficult and expensive to treat. Your doctor mentions a few different medications that he might want you to try, and tells you who makes them, so you...
3. ... follow those pharmaceutical companies online. After all, they make medications that you're now intensely interested in.
4. Meanwhile, your doctor has reached out to some of their colleagues via a professional FB group. Your name is never mentioned, of course, just the basic fact that they have "a patient" with a difficult and unusual diagnosis, and they'd appreciate some advice.
5. Facebook now know (a) your name, (b) your doctor's name, and (c) your interest in companies that make medications to treat (d) the condition that your doctor now also wants advice about, because it's a rare diagnosis and they're never seen an actual case before.
6. ( a + b + c + d ) = details of your medical history, which you never divulged to anyone, but which Facebook now has in their database, access to which they now sell to...
7. (e) anyone who might have a financial interest in knowing about the sudden increase in medical bills that you're about to incur. Have you applied for a mortgage recently? Or a job? Or extended medical insurance coverage? Would any or all of those companies maybe appreciate a solid cost-saving heads-up about your circumstance?

This may sound like a far-fetched hypothetical, but it's not. The data that Cambridge Analytica scraped from Facebook's database was of exactly this kind, and you'd better believe that they weren't the only firm to buy access to the data profile that Facebook has built of you, with neither your knowledge nor informed consent, and then sold to God knows who.

This is a problem because data, once sold, can't be un-sold; once Cambridge Analytica had scraped FB's data trove onto their own servers, there was nothing FB could do about it anymore. Do you know how many criminal organizations might have gained access to personal information about Facebook's users, and then re-sold it on the darknet? Because I don't, and neither do Facebook. The fact that they've just recently stopped/are about to stop doing these evil things doesn't begin to un-do all the previous evil they've already done... the effects of which their products users (i.e. you) will now be living with for years to come, at the very least.

The only way to stop the bad actors of the world from using and abusing data to which they have no legal right is to prevent them from getting access to that data in the first place. Not only did Facebook fail to do that, or notify their users once they realized what Cambridge Analytica had done, they didn't even cut off CA's access to their database until the news broke publicly about what happened. Which only happened because one of CA's employees couldn't live with the guilt of what he'd been involved with, and blew the whistle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he did, and it's probably not a bad thing that CA can't access FB's data anymore. But while multiple official investigations get started on figuring out who they can prosecute over the whole fiasco, it's worth remembering that root of this problem wasn't Cambridge Analytica; guaranteed, they're not the only ones doing this sort of thing, they're just the ones that got caught.

The reality here is far more serious. The root of this problem was, and remains, Facebook itself... a company that never stopped figuring out whether they could do these things long enough to worry about whether they should be doing them, and who have no idea how they're going to stuff this evil genie back into its broken, poisonous bottle.

There are people at Facebook who signed off on a business plan that involved collecting legally protected information about people with neither their knowledge nor their consent, and selling that data to third parties; people who then decided not to notify users when it was crystal clear that the whole shady business had gone very, very wrong. Those people will not just be facing lawsuits; those people will be facing jail time... in addition to the lawsuits.

Speaking of which... the parade of class action lawsuits is also just getting started, with Facebook's users (i.e. their product) now joining in.

From CBC News:

Facebook Inc. and the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica have been sued in the United States for obtaining information belonging to 50 million of the social media company's users without permission.

The proposed class-action complaint filed late Tuesday night by Lauren Price, a Maryland resident, is the first of what could be many lawsuits seeking damages over Facebook's ability to protect user data, and Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of that data to benefit President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

"Every Facebook user has an interest in this lawsuit, and the enforcement of their privacy rights," John Yanchunis, a lawyer for Price, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

It will be a while before the effect of #deleteFacebook will be fully known, but "every Facebook user" meant roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide as of January. That's a lot of users, all of whom are affected by the terrible, terrible decisions that Facebook has made over a period of years. If you're thinking that Facebook is big enough to weather this big a shitstorm... well... they are big, but I don't know that any company is big enough to survive being buried under this much shit.

UPDATED: MARCH 22nd:

It looks like some in the media are starting to see the Facebook forest, instead of focusing on the Cambridge Analytica tree: