Facebook’s Problem Isn’t Privacy Settings — It’s Gaming People To Give Up Privacy
In hearings aptly characterized by the New Yorker as “like watching your grandfather ask Henry Ford for a driving lesson,” Illinois Senator Dick Durbin stood out. Stern and incredulous, he leered at Mark Zuckerberg, “Would you care to share with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night.” The Facebook CEO forced a chuckle, stuttered, and through strained laughter declined. Demeanor unchanged, the Senator pressed for Zuckerberg to share the names of those he messaged. “Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.” The Washington Post’s clip of the exchange garnered 1.3M views within a day and won the top spot on a subsection of Reddit dedicated to “murder by words”.
But Zuckerberg’s decision not to make personal details public was not shared by those caught up in Cambridge Analytica’s data gorging, which included only “public profile, page likes, birthday and current city”. Three years ago, Facebook was already adding four million gigabytes of data to its repositories every day and has mined that data tirelessly to find how to make people engage more, connect more, and open up more. The results is a platform where personal and intimate details are readily available to any curious or nefarious strangers, and any regulation, changes to the API, or tweaks to terms of use will fail as long as Facebook measures success against openness and sharing.
Cambridge Analytica’s only violation of Facebook’s rules was to collect the data by machine rather than by hand, a choice of convenience, not necessity. At $4 per hour for 100 offshored workers with an average of 20 seconds to collect public profile, page likes, birthday, and current city for 50M users, the manual, entirely above the board equivalent to Cambridge Analytica’s work, would run $1.1M. In practice, the data collection cost $800,000, a difference amounting to 2% of the firm’s $15M round.
Facebook’s data provides insights on an unimaginable scale into how to influence, meant here the capacity to change others’ behavior. Facebook used their insights to get people to share more, and advertisers to get people to buy more, but politics is a discipline of influence. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook’s data to change votes, merely a means to controlling government, an unparallelled power for changing behavior. That is not a function of the growth of the state or proliferation of regulation, but a near self-evident truth. Laws are orders to change or maintain behavior, backed by social norms or implicit force. Most military doctrine views the struggle to influence as the essence of war, “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will,” as defined by Clausewitz.
Winning elections, legislating, and war are vastly expensive and risky means to exert influence. Understanding psyches and measuring the effectiveness of messaging only achieve a fraction of the influence but at a cost and with associated risk that is meaningless by comparison. The potential has not escaped Russian military leaders, who describe co-opting social networks and other media as a means to “deprive [a state] of its actual sovereignty without the state’s territory being seized”. Facebook’s unceasing work towards openness and connectedness has created a boundless store of potential influence, and as long as their work continues, measures to slow collection or increase resources needed to access that power will do nothing to change the calculus of those seeking influence.
News broke earlier this month of a Facebook vice president writing, “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.” The first sentence is the natural conclusion of the third, and few in Menlo Park would dispute that greater connectedness is a defacto good.
As long as Facebook prods users to share their most intimate details, data privacy will remain out of reach. Facebook can start to show their seriousness by disabling the public option for individual profiles and reserving the option for pages. A shift of focus away from optimizing for most likes and hearts and shares from strangers and instead a focus on depth of connections with real world friends would discourage the sort of behavior that still leaves hundreds of millions of users at risk. Facebook can live up to its goal of building connections, but the focus must be on real connections, and not gaming neurological reward centers for social approval from strangers.
