CEO of the most famous social media platform, Mark Zuckerberg published full page ads on several American and British newspapers including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. The ad was an apology for ongoing Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. Zuckerberg explained himself by writing “This was a breach of trust and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” and “I promise to do better for you.”
Privacy scandal has been going on for a while on the platform. Few years back, Cambridge Analytica extracted data from researchers who paid to more than 250,000 Facebook users with the help of a quiz created by Alexsandr Kogan. But the quiz did much more than entertainment. It was a route via which information about friends of these Facebook users was gathered too. The number of users which were affected increased to 50 million. Although this time company clarified that third party apps have been stopped from “getting so much information” and Facebook has started limiting the data apps get when user signs up. The statements are not enough when there is no clue about what’s going on behind the curtains.
Due to data leakage, Company’s value dropped drastically to more than $80 billion. The conclusion of the blunder included governmental inquiries and lawsuits. A boycott campaign came up with #DeleteFacebook. All these events led to erasing of $50 billion of company’s market cap. Another aspect was the Trump campaign that paid $6 million to the company during 2016 elections for the same purpose. Even though Cambridge Analytica was known to involve in the same but the campaign has distanced itself from it. Chief executive officer of Facebook was called to testify before congress by two US senators in the wake of the allegations as the data sold was against Facebook’s terms and services.
Facebook delayed its plans to unveil its smart speaker due to data sharing scandal. The event was to be held at F8 developer conference in May. Also company has to face 4 major law suits. One of the lawsuits is filed by Lauren Price of Maryland who claims to be a Facebook user. Lauren did so in San Jose taking step on the behalf of 50 million people who got trapped in the scam. Second and third lawsuit was filed by individual shareholders in Facebook named Fan Yuan and Robert Casey against their own company. Fourth major lawsuit was filed recently by Attorney Jeremiah Hallisey in San Jose. Lawsuit was filed on the behalf of the company’s shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and board members.
Despite of problems that occurred in past due to such series of events, Facebook did not take any bold actions for such scams. This only leads to a conclusion that Facebook makes big profits out of such deeds and allegations for getting paid in Trump’s campaign are nothing but the truth. Although the company promised to find and ban such apps and sources but if it does not take such step seriously then chances of trusting this platform may not exist anymore.
