Arun F Xaviour

Do you trust Facebook? Here is why you shouldn't. In 2018 Facebook launched its biggest ever ad campaign "Here together". If you have seen it, you would understand that Facebook is saying sorry, but not really. The social media conglomerate has been plagued by such scandals and accusations since its launch in 2004. Let's look at the timeline of some of its worst Privacy abuses and data scandals. The early 2000s Even before Facebook got a chance to celebrate its 2nd anniversary, rumors regarding user privacy violations were already emerging. In 2006, Facebook users started protesting against the new feature, News Feed, which shared personal details of the users without their knowledge or consent; there was no option for the users to choose either. In late 2007, a program called "Beacon" was launched which illegally shared users' online purchases from third-party sites on the News Feed, once again, without the users' knowledge or consent. This resulted in a lawsuit that the social media giant settled for $9.5 million. But the program didn't stop running until 2009. 2009 to 2014 - Enter the Federal Trade Commission In early 2009, Facebook changed its terms of service stating that its users cannot delete their data if they choose to leave the platform. The following protest forced Facebook to revise its privacy policy and privacy settings, and by doing so made a large range of personal information public by default. Towards the end of 2011, Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for privacy charges. The FTC'S eight-count complaint states that the social media giant falsely claimed that third-party apps were only able to access data that was strictly needed, but the sinister truth was all the users' data could be accessed and Facebook was also openly sharing user information with advertisers. Most of the complaints filed by FTC involved Facebook lying to its users about who could access their data and giving users a false sense of privacy. Facebook finally agreed to undergo independent privacy evaluation every other year until 2031. In 2013, a bug exposed private user information. Even though Facebook caught it themselves, the bug shared the phone numbers and email addresses of 6 million users. Anyone who knew at least one piece of the contact information or who had some type of connection to the person could access the data. In 2014, The infamous mood manipulation experiment was run on Facebook. The experiment involved showing users negative or positive posts deliberately. The purpose was to show how the mood change impacts the way users interact on Facebook. Once the study was published there was a severe backlash obviously due to the users unaware of the study being performed on them and were treated as guinea pigs. 2018 - The Cambridge Analytica Scandal To truly understand the extent of this, let's go back to 2014. A company named GSR run by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, signed a data-licensing contract with the political firm Cambridge Analytica to supply the company with the psychological profiles of US voters. Throughout the summer over 200,000 Facebook users downloaded the app and the personal information of as many as 87 million people were harvested. Facebook learned about this only in 2015 and banned Kogan from the platform. Cambridge Analytica took legal action against GSR and Kogan fo selling illegally acquired data. Facebook didn't inform its users about this and assumed that the problem had gone away. But a whistleblower by the name of Christopher Wylie came forward in 2018, and The Guardian and The New York Times both exposed the scandal to the general public. 2019 - The trust is lost Facebook made a renewed pledge to protect users' privacy and in May 2019, Zuckerberg stated "the future is private". However, the words feel hollow in the minds of the people. Protect ourselves The first thing to learn is that none of your online information is private or safe. The best we can do is limit exposing our private lives to the public even if your account can only be viewed by your family or close friends.