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.

I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it.

As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote:

Social media abuse is probably doing more long term harm to young women/girls, and they don’t have a voice in media. Some of the stories I’ve heard are frightening and I don’t think I could have coped with it as a teen. As adults we have a huge responsibility to fight this.

This isn’t remotely surprising to anybody who’s been paying attention. Social media can be toxic, and it can be especially toxic for young women – even more so if those women are from any minority group.

So naturally a complete stranger charged into my Twitter mentions to post widely-debunked Men’s Rights Activist nonsense: women are really the villains, men get more online abuse, lesbians are wife-beaters and so on.

I’ll spare you the ins and outs of my replies – executive summary: there’s tons of data that shows the significant difference in what men and women experience online; men are more likely to be told to piss off or called a cockwomble while women are more likely to be threatened with sexual violence – and present an anecdote instead.

I’ve been using social media since 1994*. I’ve been a journalist since 1998. And I didn’t come out online as trans until 2017.

That means I was a guy on social media for 23 years and a male journalist with publicly available social media and email for 19 years.

During that period, lots of people called me names and told me to fuck off. Some people made a hobby of it.

But the total amount of actual abuse I experienced in total over 19 years is less than many women experience in one day.

* CompuServe forums FTW! <g>

This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg.

Observer: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.

The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the Trump campaign.

The algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.

A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without an need for delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds.

Meet the data whistleblower.

How Likes became a weapon.

The same company was used by the Leave side during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

The data in this scandal is a tiny proportion of the data Facebook has on everybody.

Here’s your regular reminder that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, plans to run for President of the USA.