Facebook still reeling over data breach scandal
Publish date: 04 April 2018
Issue Number: 1726
Diary: Legalbrief eLaw
Category: Privacy
Facebook’s handling of how its users' data was harvested to help elect US President Donald Trump gets a major thumbs down from crisis management experts. Public relations specialists questioned by AFP were damning in their verdict of how the world's biggest social network has dealt with the fallout of the revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained users' personal information to try to manipulate US voters. A report on the Fin24 site notes that they say slow and unconvincing explanations have left Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dangerously exposed. While the news that the data of 50m users had been hijacked broke on 17 March, it took Zuckerberg five days to publicly address the firestorm by apologising. That is an eternity in the digital age, said Marie Muzard, head of the MMC communications agency. The manner of Zuckerberg's mea culpa and his attempts to explain the breach have been far from convincing, according to Laure Boulay of the Paris-based L'Atelier de l'Opinion (Opinion Workshop). Instead the crisis has ‘highlighted the kind of smokescreen’ behind which Facebook has worked, she said. ‘You can see they need to restore confidence, but Facebook is in a very weak position because it was not transparent enough before all this happened about how it worked and what its teams were doing,’ she added. The Guardian reports that Facebook has now apologised for storing draft videos which users had filmed and then deleted, saying a 'bug' resulted in them being indefinitely stored instead. The storage was only uncovered when those users attempted to download all the data the company had on them, and were startled to find that Facebook had stored unused draft videos for years. The company is also changing another feature, part of its ad ecosystem that allows third-parties to upload contact lists to target customers on Facebook, in order to better preserve user privacy.
It has emerged that a top Facebook executive wrote an internal memo in 2016 that defended the company’s growth as necessary and justified, even if the social network was used to bully someone to death or help plan a terrorist attack. A report on the HuffPost SA site says the leaked document was written by Vice President Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. In the memo titled ‘The Ugly’, Bosworth roundly defended Facebook’s acquisition of user data, what he calls ‘all the questionable contact importing practices’ and ‘all the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends’. ‘We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified,’ he wrote. ‘Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.’ Bosworth acknowledged that he wrote the memo but said he no longer agrees with the post today and ‘didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it’.
Will you #DeleteFacebook? A South African social media analyst doesn’t think so. ‘South Africans are incredibly accommodating and have a very high tolerance threshold when we are hard done by. We have tacitly accepted incredibly brazen acts of crookedness and corruption with humour‚’ said analyst Surendra Thakur. A TimesLIVE report notes that Thakur, who is director of the National Electronic Media Institute of SA, was responding to the call to ditch the social media site after the data of 50m Facebook users was collected. ‘Also‚ remember that a particular generation of folk use Facebook. This is all they know and have‚ and possibly even need‚ on the social media platforms. ‘So Facebook will survive this in South Africa and indeed the world. The good news is that there will be a dramatic improvement in privacy laws over this‚’ he said.
In other developments, the EU referendum was won through fraud, whistleblower Christopher Wylie has told UK MPs. The Guardian reports that Wylie accused Vote Leave of improperly channelling money through a tech firm with links to Cambridge Analytica. The repory says he told a select committee that the pro-Brexit campaign had a ‘common plan’ to use the network of companies to get around election spending laws and said he thought there ‘could have been a different outcome had there not been, in my view, cheating’. ‘It makes me so angry, because a lot of people supported leave because they believe in the application of British law and British sovereignty. And to irrevocably alter the constitutional settlement of this country on fraud is a mutilation of the constitutional settlement of this country.’ Vote Leave has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion or deliberate overspending. When they first surfaced two weeks ago, Boris Johnson, who fronted the campaign, said: ‘Vote Leave won fair and square – and legally. We are leaving the EU in a year and going global.’
There are also concerns in Nigeria where the government has set up a committee to scrutinise reports that Cambridge Analytica used the data of more than 50m Facebook users to sway elections in many countries, including Nigeria. In 2015, the firm allegedly hacked into personal records of the then opposition candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, in order to sway the outcome of the election in favour of then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan. The Daily Trust reports that a presidential source told reporters that the committee would investigate whether Cambridge Analytica's work breached Nigeria's laws or infringed on the rights of other parties and their candidates. Depending on the outcome of the investigation, he said this might result in the appointment of a special investigator and, possibly, criminal prosecutions by Justice Minister Abubakar Malami.
