The Cambridge Analytica scandal puts Facebook under scrutiny

Amid staggering new reports of Facebook both intentionally sharing and unintentionally leaking the private information of its users, questions about how much regulation and oversight Facebook needs are once again surfacing — and many users are feeling the urge to quit the platform altogether.

To say Facebook has had a rough time of it lately would be putting it mildly. Between its inconclusive efforts to tackle Russian bots and other forms of political manipulation, its ongoing “fake news” woes, its controversial politics, its role in facilitating hate speech and exacerbating hate crimes, and its friction with authorities over its many data breaches, the social media giant is caught in a public reckoning that is perhaps long overdue.

Even before her book Lean In was published in 2013, Sheryl Sandberg had become synonymous with a particular brand of female empowerment.

Sandberg’s message, set forth in a commencement speech at Barnard College in 2011 and fleshed out more fully in Lean In, was simple but ambitious: Women should pursue their professional goals without hesitation or apology. By overcoming internalized sexism and a lack of confidence, they could rise to the top of their fields, and they could bring other women up with them. If enough women leaned in, they might be able to forge not just better careers for themselves but a more just society.

On Thursday, at a fashion conference in the UK, Christopher Wylie — the former Cambridge Analytica employee who revealed earlier this year that the political consulting company had harvested information from 87 million Facebook profiles to influence people on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — explained a perhaps surprising area of focus for the company’s data mining effort: fashion choices.

When creating the different types of psychographic profiles on social media to determine where to spread pro-Trump messaging, Wylie told audiences at the Business of Fashion Voices conference that the consulting firm looked for fashion brands whose history and style seemed to appeal to people who would be susceptive to populist and nationalist messaging, with the belief that style choices had direct correlations to political opinions.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had a tense exchange in the Senate hallway during a break of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook and Twitter leaders on Wednesday. Jones, who sat in on the hearing, crashed a scrum Rubio was holding with reporters, and the pair nearly came to blows.

Jones, an alt-right figure with a broad reach online, has complained that social media sites have censored him after multiple platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, banned or removed his content. He attended Wednesday’s hearing, he said, to “face his accusers,” and during the break he approached Rubio while the senator was addressing reporters and broke into Rubio’s comments repeatedly.

Someone is trying to influence the midterm elections by sowing divisions among Americans on social media, according to Facebook — though the company won’t say it’s necessarily Russia that’s to blame.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had removed more than two dozen pages and accounts from its platform because they were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in the lead-up to the midterm elections. While it could not explicitly link the suspicious activity to Russia, Facebook said it is “consistent with” what it saw from the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency before and after the 2016 presidential election.

It wasn’t just Apple, Amazon, and BlackBerry that Facebook gave access to its user data. The social media company also has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including Huawei, which has close ties to the Chinese government and has been flagged by intelligence officials as a national security risk.

The New York Times’s Michael LaForgia and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported on Tuesday that Facebook said it has agreements dating back to at least 2010 with Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL.

“Every time that a person chooses to share something on Facebook, they’re proactively going to the service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a message to someone,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an appearance before Congress in April. “And every time, there is a control right there — not buried in settings somewhere, but right there — when they’re … posting about who they want to share it with.”

But according to a report from the New York Times over the weekend, that isn’t exactly the case when it comes to companies like Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. Facebook reached data-sharing agreements with at least 60 device companies that allowed them to get at a broad range of information users were likely unaware of and might not have agreed to.

It’s the tech bro equivalent of a 1950s B-movie: Evil data scientists betray the simple trust of an unwitting, socially benevolent company to snatch private customer data and turn it against them and the world! Mark Zuckerberg’s apology for what happened at Facebook, in the Cambridge Analytica controversy, more or less followed that script.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure Zuckerberg is very sorry that his share price plummeted (temporarily, it turns out) and that the #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining momentum, putting billions of dollars in shareholder value at risk.

European lawmakers had much better questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg than their American counterparts in the Senate and House of Representatives — but Zuckerberg still didn’t actually answer them.

Zuckerberg appeared before the European Parliament on Tuesday, where members peppered him with a wide range of questions regarding Facebook’s business practices, privacy protections, plans to address fake accounts and news, and more. They had clearly done their homework. Europe has really taken the reins on regulating technology companies in recent years; it has been much more aggressive in antitrust actions and addressing hate speech, and it’s about to enact a major new law to heighten privacy protections.

Cambridge Analytica shut down earlier this month in the fallout from the Facebook data-harvesting scandal, which left the firm bleeding clients and racking up legal bills.

But the Trump-linked political consulting firm’s troubles aren’t over. The New York Times’s Matthew Rosenberg and Nicholas Confessore report that the FBI and the Department of Justice are investigating Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that did work for the Trump campaign and harvested raw data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles, is shutting down.

There is a complicated web of relationships that explains how the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook are tied together, as my colleague Andrew Prokop explains in this excellent piece.

Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-connected data firm that kicked off Facebook’s data privacy scandal, is shutting down, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Nigel Oakes, the founder of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories), confirmed to the Journal that both companies are closing. A person familiar with the matter told the Journal the firm was losing clients and facing mounting legal fees in the wake of revelations that it harvested the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or permission. The company’s CEO, Alexander Nix, was also caught on tape by the UK’s Channel 4 News telling a potential client that he could entrap potential opponents with bribes and sex. He was later suspended.

Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that did digital work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, is reportedly shutting down after recent ethical and legal questions about its business practices.

The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus and Jenny Gross report that both Cambridge and its British parent company, SCL Group, will disband amid a growing series of scandals.

If your Facebook page starts to look different or the platform starts asking you whether you’re okay with having your data shared in the coming weeks or months, you’ll have Europe to thank for it: The company has begun to roll out Facebook privacy changes to comply with a new data protection measure in the European Union.

Late on Tuesday, Facebook announced the first steps it is taking to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, a new privacy law out of Europe designed to make sure users know and understand the data companies collect about them and consent to sharing it. Set to be enacted on May 25, the GDPR is the most sweeping overhaul of online privacy in more than two decades.

Facebook finally released a tool last week allowing users to check if their personal data was compromised by Cambridge Analytica, the shady British firm that used such data to “psychologically profile” potential voters. I took a deep breath, clicked, and was greeted with good news: “Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged in to ‘This Is Your Digital Life’” — the app that the company used to lure Facebook users into revealing personal data. So my data was not compromised.

There’s an aside in that message that ought to alarm every Facebook user: the phrase “neither you nor your friends.” And indeed, many Facebook users who checked their status were greeted by a different message: “You don’t appear to have logged into ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ … [h]owever, a friend of yours did.” That means their data was collected, although they (wisely) had not personally enabled the app.

“He’s one of the richest people on earth. He’s an adult. He’s 30-some years old. He can answer questions if he’s the CEO. ... Stop juvenilizing men here in Silicon Valley.”

That’s how Kara Swisher, co-founder and executive editor of the technology news website Recode, reacted to the treatment Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received from lawmakers during his testimony on Capitol Hill last week. (Recode is owned by Vox’s parent company, Vox Media.)

It doesn’t feel like it was very long ago that I was sitting, legs crossed, on the floor of a nondescript office building on University Avenue in Palo Alto, watching Mark Zuckerberg raise his fist with a slight smile and say, “Domination!” as a way of closing out our weekly Friday all-hands meeting. By the time I left the company in 2011 to become a full-time writer, “domination” was a real possibility.

It was 2005 and the whole world lay ahead of Facebook. I was a former English graduate student turned Facebook employee, where I started working with user issues, then moved into product marketing and managing before finally, in 2009, becoming Zuckerberg’s speech and blog writer. While in 2005 the site was growing rapidly with college users and had some of the best engagement numbers any venture capitalist had ever seen, it had yet to be released to the general public.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has put data privacy on Facebook under the spotlight. The concern isn’t just about who can see what you’re sharing on Facebook. It’s what Facebook lets third parties and advertisers see about you.

In hearings on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed users had plenty of control over their data — from seeing if their data was leaked (his was) to adjusting preferences for targeted ads.

If there’s ever a moment to capture the existential crisis at Facebook, it was these past couple of weeks.

On Wednesday, the CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, testified in front of the House Committee on Energy and Finance, where he faced fierce questioning about Facebook’s role in a range of misdeeds — from ethnic genocide in Myanmar to election meddling.

What’s the right regulation for Facebook? That depends on which Facebook you’re talking about.

The Washington leg of Mark Zuckerberg’s “apology tour,” precipitated by Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, has seen a tense two days of lawmakers grilling the Facebook founder about the extent of the platform’s mounting privacy issues, its role in shaping the global democratic process, and what he is doing to solve its many woes.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg came under fire on Wednesday from black lawmakers for his company’s lack of diversity and its connection to the spread of misleading ads targeting black activist groups.

Zuckerberg was answering questions about his company’s handling of user information and data privacy at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As Vox’s Emily Stewart and Jen Kirby note, he has been criticized in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that left the information of tens of millions of Facebook users exposed and raised questions about how Russia and other groups have used the platform to influence US politics.

Before many people join a network, it may not be so useful. But the more people join, the more useful it becomes. That’s the network effect. Facebook is a step beyond that — it’s the network effect on steroids.

This is what makes Facebook so great: It knows everything about you! That’s also what makes Facebook so awful: It knows everything about you. And while its 2.13 billion monthly users don’t pay any money to use the core service, Facebook makes plenty of money — millions daily — by selling access to users’ data to advertisers. And everyone on the site agreed to this when they signed up.

Mark Zuckerberg really wants you to know there’s a button there for you to decide who among your friends and acquaintances sees the pictures, messages, and news articles you share on Facebook. He’s less willing to talk about how or if you can decide what advertisers and marketers see when you log in to Facebook in the first place.

The 33-year-old founder, chair, and CEO of Facebook returned to Congress on Wednesday to answer a variety of questions about his social media platform before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Among the numerous items on the agenda were data ownership and access and privacy rights. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has put a focus on data sharing at Facebook.

Most of the questions directed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his second day of congressional hearings were high-level. But one of the most important was also one of the most basic: Who gets to decide what privacy is?

Zuckerberg appeared Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in his second day of hearings to address issues with Facebook and privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. During the hearing, Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) asked Zuckerberg a crucial question about privacy: Who’s responsible for defining what privacy is under US law?