Even with all the outrage, and a few million profiles deleted, I feel this will be like a speeding ticket for FB in the long run. That's how it has always happened. Pardon my pessimism.
That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...
How big is the group of US citizens that dislike both Trump and Hilary and would have been similarly outraged regardless of who would have used this tactics.
With Obama in power and the GOP "in opposition" you have this "low brow" story around Obama's US citizenship. With Bill Clinton you had a "low brow" scandal around sex and Monica Lewinsky. These seem to provoke the GOP base on nationalistic and religious levels.
Meanwhile, with Trump in power and Dems in opposition, you have a "high brow" story around fake news and Russian-manipulated elections, despite Hillary also have a "Russian scandal" in the closet https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174.... Seems this story appeals well to the Dem base.
So I'd expect if Hillary had one, a Chinese hacker story would be too "high brow" to create outrage with the GOP base. You'd probably have some other low brow story being echoed by Fox News e.g. Pizzagate.
The Daniels case just ended, with her pretty much admitting there's no evidence. Another case of trolling IMO; first we had fake news, lately we have trolling, where a SHOCKING! revelation is announced and talked about for a week (remember that memo?), everyone in the media focuses on it and makes a lot of possible scenarios, aaand then it turns out it wasn't a serious thing. But there's been an impact already.
Had it been Hillary, I don't think there would've been this kind of outrage. She was the "obvious" choice for president. It would be hard to believe a story about Chinese hackers since she didn't need that kind of help anyway. If it did come out that there was some kind of foreign influence, it would've been much easier to downplay it as negligible since the election of Hillary wouldn't have been much a surprise.
Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.
First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.
This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.
I still use FB because I have a lot of international friends, but removing the FB app and replacing it with the site.
I only use Messenger for about 3 people right now, so that's going soon too.
There are browser plugins which automatically delete cookies when a tab is closed. They work wonderfully as automatic log out by default.
I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore...
I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...)
Is there a good alternative for these 2 things:
- Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends? - Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)
For discussing plans, you have the following options:
1. Group email thread
2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption)
3. Conference call
4. Slack group
5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy)
6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)
They track you whether you join or not.
There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.
Source: Deleted my FB account 8 years ago
To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.
49% of Facebook's 2017 worldwide revenues came from the U.S. and Canada [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118... page 37
All users are just product to Facebook.
It could well be that Facebook's American corporate customers are more interested in worldwide product than domestic product.
My dad, who is 50+ years old, knew about Cambridge Analytica few months from now because of a documentary related to Donald Trump's win; he deleted his Facebook then and there.
However, I'm not sure that a majority of the people in India really care about the shady privacy permissions Facebook has slyly made them accept.
And I use the word "exploiting" in a neutral sense here, because it can be good, in the sense of using all this data for your benefit to give you relevant and timely updates about your friends and surroundings, and let you know about things that interest you (i.e. why most people use Facebook today).
But, by its nature, that same data can also be used against you, exploited by marketers, advertisers, governments, etc..
So how do you get one without risking the other? How do you allow a social network to capture and analyze all this personal data about you - in order to return a valuable service - but then be totally (or reasonably) sure that your data will be protected and also not used against you?
Someone else mentioned HIPAA and other data protection laws that exist for medical data. I know regulation isn't a trendy topic in tech, but maybe there does need to be some clear codified rules about what companies can do with our personal/social data and what the consequences are for misuse or neglect.
There are plenty of decent business models between selling ads and pulling all stops to maximize ARPU [1]. Regulation could allow private social networks to flourish without abusing users or publishers.
Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.
If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.
Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.
We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.
Reference please?