Rant #3 of 2018: Facebook is history.
This week Facebook announced that it would roll out its new privacy laws for the European Union. But this doesn’t come as a surprise because Europe has been on top of internet privacy since the 90s. Meanwhile, us “users” in the US are still dealing with who “misused” our data to skew the results of the 2016 Presidential Election.
Let me rewing to the moment I got annoyed...
It all happened on a calm Thursday evening when a notification from NBC News sounded off on my phone with the headline reading “Without data-targeted ads, Facebook would look like a pay service, Sandberg says. “ Like, Seriously? You know what's following... If Facebook offers a paywall, this could honestly be the cure to my unabiding Facebook scrolling addiction. So thanks!
Facebook found themselves in a pot of hot water. They got in tRoUbLe this month for violating our 4th Amendment right to privacy by manipulating our 1st amendment right to free speech, and finally, our lawmakers have managed to summons the jack of all trades without a diploma, Mark Zuckerberg. (Side note: I've written about Revenge Porn from a first-person witnesses perspective and I was utterly disgusted Read here. ) For two days, 10 hours in total, congressional committee members, grilled Zuckerberg on what exactly Facebook does with our data once we click on stuff and merely write words we think is meaningless on our "status." For those who don’t know about Cambridge Analytica, it is essentially a digital marketing agency that Trump used for his political campaign, apparently, they also worked on the Obama Campaign too. They have an office in New York and according to their website, they have since deleted the data they received from another third party called GSR. But nothing is really deleted... Cambridge Analytica is also claiming that they did not violate any terms and conditions of whatever opt in pop up message window they are referring to. DO YOU THINK THEY DID? Which is the precisely the reason why I’m pissed off? I feel like they did! We need someone to blame for why Trump is sitting in the Oval Office. What are we opting- in to anyway? Where is our precious user behavior report really going? And why is it that so many people seem to have access to it? These social media sites weren’t built with any type of morals. Social media platforms only care about feeding our EGOs and which is earning them millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue.
Anyone with talking points could have said what Zuckerberg said to the dozens of Senators who just logged onto Facebook for the first time last week. Someone on the news has the same opinion. Literally, I laughed at every Senator stumble to ask appropriate questions that would someone how nail Zuckerberg. But the technical terms are just too beyond their generation to comprehend. In addition, Zuckerberg couldn’t define“ internet cookies” which I find highly suspect!! We all have the same Google. Which is another reason why I’m pissed off? Take us back when you could actually delete your Facebook, and hide your Facebook posts from certain groups, and also back when there was only one inbox per user!!!
With the exception of Cory Booker ( D- NJ) and Kamala Harris ( D- CA), every Senator struggled to ask a question that was somewhat related to the issue at hand: Data. There was this one Senator who asked a question about how Facebook segments data into different buckets, which she called “categories.” Don't ask me her name because I totally ignored. I think she was trying to ask what happens to the data once it’s inputted into Facebook, how is it stored, who has access and is it really deleted, etc. But the lady Senator just couldn't get out the aforementioned words. Furthermore, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to help her decide what she wanted to ask him. And why would he?
This was a time for all those millennials working on The Hill for these Senators for dirt cheap to actually help their bosses stick it to the man. In this case, the man is Mark Zuckerberg.
Friends, I am truly concerned with the state of our privacy and the lack of security protecting who we are as a society. If data can manipulate human behavior, the future has a lot in store for us, Re: the NYT article below. We’ll be carrying around terabytes like diamonds on our fingers and stuck in a real-life black mirror episode that won’t end if we don’t wake up.
Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/democracynow/videos/10156267054878279/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/opinion/zuckerberg-testify-congress.htm