#DeleteFacebook: The Social Network Comes Under Scrutiny, Again

If in 2017 came Uber's unraveling (#DeleteUber seems so distant now, doesn't it?), 2018 might as well belong to Facebook. In what's yet another sobering reminder of surveillance capitalism and of the fact that free services are mere conduits for extensive user tracking, the social network found itself in a maelstrom of controversy and perhaps had a humbling moment or two when it came light that a third-party personality test app called Thisismydigitallife built by psychologist Aleksandr Kogan "bamboozled" over 270,000 Facebook users into giving up personal data on both themselves and all their 50 million friends for research purposes, only to be sold to a data-analytics firm called Cambridge Analytica, which in turn used it to develop psychographic profiles of millions of voters in an attempt to sway U.S. Presidential Elections in 2016.

While Facebook was quick to contest the incident being classified as a "data breach," it has come under harsh criticism for the sneaky manner it tried to preempt the disclosures and arm-twist its way into buying silence about the matter by threatening to sue the publications involved. Compounding the scandal further is Cambridge Analytica's failure to delete the said harvested data of millions of users despite assuring Facebook to the contrary, and on part of the social network itself for taking the company at its word and not actively enforcing its privacy policies, thus leading to misuse of user data on a grand scale.

Catch up on the developments here:

• The Cambridge Analytica Files - The Guardian
• How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions - The New York Times
• Here's How Facebook Got Into This Mess: A Timeline - Buzzfeed
• User Data Leaks at Facebook Pull Tech Further into Political Debate - TechCrunch
• Facebook and the Endless String of Worst-case Scenarios - TechCrunch
• Facebook's Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Explained - Ars Technica
• All the News About Facebook's Data Privacy Scandal - The Verge
• How Facebook Made Its Cambridge Analytica Data Crisis Even Worse - Bloomberg
• The Real Scandal Isn't What Cambridge Analytica Did - Slate
• What Took Facebook So Long? - The Atlantic
• Yet Another Lesson from the Cambridge Analytica Fiasco: Remove the Barriers to User Privacy Control - Electronic Frontier Foundation
• The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard
• All the Ways Facebook Can Track You - F-Secure

Facebook stock price is 10 percent lower than it was on Friday

Since the revelations, many events have unfolded, ever so quickly, matching the lightning speed at which news spreads on social media:

• Facebook lost over US$ 60 billion in market cap, more than Tesla's entire market cap, in just two days.
• Facebook drew intense scrutiny from United States Federal Trade Commission, Canada and U.K.'s privacy watchdogs, in addition to states of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts over the company's lax handling of confidential user data.
• Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was suspended in the wake of the scandal.
• Facebook was sued in San Francisco federal court by shareholders in a class action who said they suffered losses after the disclosure that Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based firm that aided Trump, improperly obtained profile information on 50 million users.
• Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, toldThe Guardian that "he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach."
• Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp who sold the app to Facebook for US$ 16 billion in 2016, called for #DeleteFacebook.
• Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist at the centre of the scandal, said "Facebook is making him a scapegoat to distract from bigger problems it faces," adding "using users' data for profit is their business model."
• "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as 'surveillance companies'," said Edward Snowden. "Their rebranding as 'social media' is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense."
• "Mark, Sheryl and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward, because they understand the seriousness of this issue. The entire company is outraged we were deceived. We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens," said Facebook in a statement to The Daily Beast.
• Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief information security officer, quit the company after reportedly advocating for "more disclosure around Russian interference of the platform and some restructuring to better address the issues" and encountering stiff "resistance by colleagues."
• United Nations investigators blamed Facebook for spreading hate speech and inciting violence against Rohingya minority in Myanmar, calling the platform "a vehicle for ‘acrimony, dissension and conflict."

How to protect your privacy on Facebook?

• Delete Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for good, or even better, game it.
• Turn off location access to these apps on Android and iOS.
• Disable Platform integration that makes it easy to unlink third-party apps from Facebook.
• Fine-tune privacy and sharing settings.
• Tweak ad preferences to limit ads based on websites you visit and apps you use.
• Read the privacy policies before signing up for any free service. (Read about the Unroll.me fiasco here.)

More tips on privacy can be found here: Online Privacy 101, Smartphone Privacy 101