Facebook is rotten from the head down

I’m not the best person to opine on Facebook: during its original meteoric rise I believed its momentum would slow and it would be overtaken by something less obviously dismissive of its users. After all, this was a business built on the belief that its users were “dumb fucks”, as Mark Zuckerberg famously said.

So you can probably ignore my feeling that Facebook’s current privacy scandal may actually do serious damage to the company.

But you might want to pay attention to Jean-Louis Gassée, because he is someone worth paying attention to: his career has encompassed important roles in Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Be. His Monday Note newsletters are always worth reading. and this week’s one is about Facebook.

From the headline – Mark Zuckerberg thinks we’re idiots – on, it doesn’t pull any punches.

“Your privacy is important to us”. Yes, of course, our privacy is important to you; you made billions by surveilling and mining our private lives.

He’s writing amid yet more revelations about Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy. For example, we now know that Facebook has been logging details of every phone call and SMS message made or received by many Android phone users. And we know that Facebook’s incorporation as a system-level app on some devices means it’s been able to avoid privacy protections built into system software.

A company’s culture emanates from the top and it starts early. In 2004, the man who was in the process of creating Facebook allegedly called Harvard people who entrusted him with their emails, text messages, pictures, and addresses “dumb fucks”. Should we charitably assume he was joking, or ponder the revelatory power of such cracks?

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Facebook isn’t sorry that it invaded people’s privacy and made it incredibly easy for people’s personal data to be abused. It’s sorry that we’ve found out about it.

We don’t know what the fallout of all of this will mean just yet. But it’s much more than just a technology story. Facebook is part of our lives, and as we’re beginning to discover, a very important part of politics. Facebook data wasn’t just weaponised by the Trump campaign but by the Leave.EU campaign too (with some really dodgy money moving around: Private Eye has done some excellent reporting on the links between Conservatives, the DUP and Leave.EU funding). We’re only just beginning to appreciate how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

And that’s why I’m probably wrong that we’ll see a big effect on Facebook, let alone a rethink of the value of privacy and personal data in the digital world. There are some very powerful vested interests who really don’t want us to know what they’ve been using our personal data for.

Put it this way: on the Monday immediately after the Cambridge Analytica story broke, the its London offices were visited by a team of specialist digital forensics experts who came to audit its servers.

Not from the Information Commissioner’s office. They had to wait another four days to get a warrant, an extraordinarily long delay when we’re talking about a company storing digital information.

The forensic experts were from an organisation you don’t want anywhere near servers that might contain damning evidence about Facebook.

Yep.

Facebook.


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