In: Operations Management
Summarize the article and answer the following questions in your answer:
1. What specific metrics are being used?
2. What value is the company getting from using this data?
Was this similar to what the Obama campaign did on Facebook?
Sort of. The Obama campaign did collect a similar level of data from its app, which includes both your information and your friend's information.
But as Politifact notes, users were willingly giving up that information and knew it was going to a political campaign. The Obama campaign used your friend's data to figure out who may or may not be willing to vote for him, and sent messages to users to persuade their friends.
That's different from the Cambridge Analytica situation, since most users taking the digital life quiz had no idea that the data would be used for political purposes.
What's Facebook doing about this?
After five long days, Zuckerberg broke his silence on March 21 with a nearly 1,000-word post on his Facebook page. (C'mon, did you really expect it to show up on Twitter?) The post was his first since since March 2, when he shared a photo of his family celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had made mistakes with users' information. "We have a responsibility to protect your data," he wrote. "And if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you."
He's since sat down for several media interviews, and on April 4, held an hour-long conference call with journalists. "Life is learning from mistakes," Zuckerberg said. "At the end of the day, this is my responsibility. I started this place, I run it, I'm responsible."
The company, he said, is now facing two central questions: "Can we get our systems under control and second, can we make sure that our systems aren't used to undermine democracy," Zuckerberg said.
"It's not enough to give people a voice, we have to make sure that people are not using that voice to spread disinformation," he added.
And, specifically, he acknowledged that Facebook has "to ensure that everyone in our ecosystem protects people's information."
We have a responsibility to protect your data. And if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
He's promised to investigate apps that had access to "large amounts of information" before the company made changes to how much information third-party apps could access in 2018. Facebook will conduct a full audit of apps that exhibit suspicious behavior and bar developers who don't agree to audits.
On April 6, Facebook said it was banning AggregateIQ, another political analytics firm that's reportedly tied to Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL. (Aggregate IQ denies this connection.) Facebook said it instituted the ban out of concern that AggregateIQ may have improperly received Facebook user data as well.
Facebook's public missteps have brought up other concerns about Facebook too. One example is a memo leaked to BuzzFeed penned by Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a top Facebook executive. The 2016 memo advocates growth above everything else, regardless of whether people use Facebook to bully and harass one another.
"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," he wrote at the time. He's since said he was trying to stir debate, and didn't agree with what he'd written.
Facebook is also planning to restrict how much access developers have to your information, limiting the information it gives apps to your name, photo and email address. It'll also revoke an app's access to your data if you haven't used it for three months.
The company is also planning to further restrict political advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, said in an interview with Bloomberg. "If you were using hate-based language in ads for elections, we're drawing those lines much tighter and applying them uniformly," she said.
Last, Facebook will begin displaying a gauge at the top of your News Feed that lets you know which apps you've used and let you revoke their permissions.
Are people bailing from Facebook?
They are, though it's still too early to know if that'll have a substantial effect on Facebook's gargantuan user numbers. Right off the bat, the hashtag #DeleteFacebook flared up on Twitter -- backed by, notably, Brian Acton, WhatsApp's co-founder who sold the messaging service to Facebook for $19 billion.
We're also starting to see some action that could hit Facebook in the wallet. Within days of the scandal erupting, Firefox maker Mozilla said it would no longer advertise on Facebook because of data privacy concerns, and it launched a petition to ask the social network to improve its privacy settings. Meanwhile, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken a different kind of stand. Prompted by an inquiry from a Twitter user, he quickly deleted both companies' Facebook pages. So did Playboy, for what it's worth.
Beyond those high profile moves, a recent survey from the anonymous employee social network Blind found that 31 percent of tech workers plan to delete Facebook too. Coverage of Facebook has turned negative too, a survey by BuzzFeed found.
Still, Zuckerberg said in a call on April 4 that the larger #DeleteFacebook campaign hasn't had a noticeable effect on its active user counts.
Ultimately, reform is what's needed, said former Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser. "For many years, I never questioned it," Kaiser said. "That's the way that the political system works. That's the way that advertising works. That's the way that every single industry that exists in the entire basis of digital communications works. I do really understand the industry, and I have the ability to be a voice for change."
The case talks about Facebook and the use of its data. While in some cases like in the political campaign of Obama, the users knew that their data was captured for political purposes, later in the Cambridge Analytica case, they were not informed. The case also talks about FB taking steps to protect the user's data and eliminate the exploitation of it. Due to the widespread controversy, Fb also had to face campaigns that were meant to encourage people to delete it.
1. The specific metric is related to the user base of FB and the
impact that it had due to the controversy. For example, a lot of
popular pages(like Playboy, Elon Musk company pages, etc) and other
user accounts. It was also speculated that 31% of the tech workers
are also planning to boycott the platform, post the controversy, or
data misuse. The company also had to face a reduction in revenue
due to the loss of marketers like Mozilla.
Also, the case mentions about the conditions in which data was used for political campaigns, while in Obama, users were aware of the usage, in Cambridge Analytica, they were clueless.
After finding himself in the controversy, Zuckerberg reinstated the rules and banned a few apps, that could misuse the data, apart from taking full responsibility
2. Due to the huge size of FB and billions of users. It is able to capture data that can be used to influence them if misused. Like it was used for political campaigns, it may even be used to spread hate or bullying. Companies using data as a new fuel are getting profited from it. Like political campaigns were organized that were instrumental in influencing people's opinions. Other than that, many other businesses used it to generate profits. Data can be used for the promotion of a product or changing people's buying behavior. It can also be used by certain groups to spread hatred among people
This data exploitation or breach without the consent of people is illegal and that is what FB found itself into.