Have you ever received an add on Facebook or other popular social media sites that seem like they are directly targeted at you? This makes you wonder if these social media sites are hearing all our conversations, how else would they precisely know about all my likes and interests? This has been an ever-growing concern in the social media industry.
Facebook has been one of the, if not the most popular social media platforms for well over a decade. It was one of the first social media sites that radically transformed how people send and receive information. Users had the ability to have a friends list and chat with them while also having the mobility to post any picture, video or thought and share it with those friends. This was a revolutionary idea at the time which got all the credit it deserved. However, the mastermind behind the creation of this site, also current CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has recently come under fire for being responsible for the leak of information of millions of his site’s users.
It all started mid-march when Cambridge Analytica, a London-based data-mining firm harvested information from close to 87 million Facebook users and sold it to the Donald Trump campaign for micro-targeting voters in the 2016 US presidential election. This sparked outrage with users all around the globe deleting their accounts, which in turn, led to Facebook stocks plummeting as much as 22 percent over concerns about slow growth and the impact of privacy issues. Moreover, anxiety and tension grew for Facebook users when Facebook said that most of its 2.2 billion users profiles have been exposed to “malicious actors” this leads to bigger problems like identity theft and scam artists.
After this incident, Facebook has tried to be more transparent with its users by creating a privacy policy that restricts access that third-party apps can have about your profile. Even though this is a step in the right direction, the damage is already done. This incident has solidified the ongoing theory of Facebook’s unethical use of consumer data and has only caused more apprehensions among users. A multi-billion dollar company like Facebook will assess and correct the damage done to their value in no time, it is the trust of the previously loyal users whose security has been breached that will be hard to regain. If there’s one silver lining to this story, it has made users more vigilant and wary about what social media platforms they use and how much personal information they let them access.
CITATIONS:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/facebook-privacy-scandal-explained-1.3874533