Ethical Issues Faced by Facebook
Facebook, officially META has been in people’s hearts since its launch by Harvard students. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 and made public in 2004, Facebook is one of the most used websites in the world. With over 2.91B monthly active users, Facebook generates an enormous amount of sensitive user data every day. Facebook with its other services like Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger has appealed to every possible demographic in the world. Being a social media platform, Facebook has access to users’ personal pictures/videos, their location, their friends, their private chats and much more. Facebook uses this data to show relevant ads to users and generates billions in ad revenue each year.
It has been the centre of various scandals and has been chastised for a variety of ethical issues over the past years. Most of Facebook’s ethical lapses involve its handling of this data.
Having this much sensitive data comes with great responsibility. Facebook is a popular target for hackers because of the enormous amount of data available. Not just that, privacy concerns also arise from the way Facebook might use your data.
One of the most famous and talked about examples for Facebook’s failure to protect user data is “The 2016 Cambridge Analytica Scandal”. The data of tens of millions of Facebook users was leaked online. This was one of the biggest leaks in Facebook’s history. Cambridge Analytica was found to be using that data to create psychographically analyzed ads. These ads were created for the benefit of Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign of 2016. There has been a lot of research about how this might have affected voters’ and their choice in the election. Donald Trump had won that election despite all odds and became the 45th President of the United States of America. Numerous concerns were raised about Facebook’s security including popstar ‘Cher’ quitting the platform saying it was not safe.
Mark Zuckerburg, the Founder and CEO of Facebook, responded to the scandal in a Facebook post. He said that although Facebook has taken multiple steps to stop something like this from happening, they still have some changes to make. He said that Facebook will take on a three-step program to get to the root of this scandal.
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook intends to review all applications that had access to users’ data
Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company is going to review each and every app connected to Facebook that could access any of the users’ information before the updates created by the firm in 2014 made changes to the way the application could access the data. It also stopped apps from doing the same. Companies who deny getting involved in the process will be forever be restricted from the platform the concerned customers will be informed about their leaked information. Apps that haven’t been accessed by the users in over 3 months will lose data access rights and will face charges in the process of accessing data. New restrictions will be put in place for these applications. Last but not least, the company created a new feature that enabled the customers to see their data access and limit, restrict or remove it entirely as they please.
After it had already been found that Cambridge Analytica was in control of the information that was accessed by an application known as ‘Thisisyourdigitallife’ invented by Cambridge University research person Aleksandr Kogan, Facebook’s user data privacy problem got exposed to the public and media. Kogan broke Facebook’s terms of service by sharing the information with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that claimed to have helped Trump win the election. According to Zuckerberg, the app was downloaded by over 300,000 individuals when it was originally released in 2013. Because thisisyourdigitallife didn’t simply acquire the data of users who downloaded the app, it also gathered data from people on their friends’ list, Cambridge Analytica was able to access information from 50 million users using Kogan’s app.
Zuckerberg was summoned to appear before Congress in the United States, and a parliamentary inquiry in the United Kingdom had asked him to face questions about the topic.
Let’s take another example from real life and take a look at the privacy issues that occurred in 2011. In November Facebook was accused to leak the personal information of its customers without their consent. Facebook’s claim that other applications could have had only the information they strictly need to work, was said to be false by the regulators. In actuality, every application had access to all the data that could be used to identify a particular customer. Even if a customer’s friends had allowed access to one of these apps, even their sensitive information and their pictures could be provided to the application. Facebook was also said to be sharing data with advertisers. As a result, a settlement was proposed and according to which, Facebook must take various steps to ensure that it keeps its commitments in the long term, namely providing customers with clear and visible notice and seeking consumers’ prior permission before their data is released. Jon Leibowitz, then chairman of the FTC, said at the time,
“Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its hundreds of millions of users”. During the next 20 years, Facebook will be subjected to an impartial privacy assessment every other year. Making false statements about the confidentiality or security of customers’ personal information is prohibited by the settlement. It is also obliged to build and maintain strict privacy programs to handle safety risks connected with the creation and management of old and upcoming products and services, as well as to safeguard the privacy and confidentiality of customers’ data.
Facebook has to pay 16000 USD every day as a fine if they don’t comply with the rules set during the 2011 settlement deal. Yet to date, even after making a lot of promises, users face the same issues which actually have risen vigorously. Ethically, the more information you collect from your customers, the more you need to secure it and maintain goodwill. The data that stores the way a customer behaves changes and should be stored for a small amount of time unless it is stored as a whole.
The company was considered to be a wrongdoing for a number of reasons. The basic rule which states that your actions are reciprocated and treating someone as you’d want to be treated was not followed by FB. Even though there are a lot of issues and users have been given false pretences every time, the company has become a huge monopoly and has somehow managed to maintain its reputation in the market.
