The latest disclosures about the nefarious ways that data being harvested from Facebook accounts are the infuriating last straw. Without our knowledge, mounds of data about not just us but also our friends, regardless of privacy settings, were being scattered around just for the asking. It’s time to ditch Facebook. The current mess and the debacle of Russian meddling in the 2016 election are not collateral damage. They are the end result of the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Did not Zuckerberg see this coming, surrounded as he is by genius technology wizards? Still, while much of the blame rests on his company’s shoulders, the burden falls squarely on all actors who seek to exploit the platform for personal or political gain as well. That includes the scams by fake cancer victims and fake charities, cyberstalkers, child molesters  etc. Unfortunately, because remorse is sadly absent in these groups, responsible change short of criminal prosecution is not likely.

Back in the day, a social network that connects friends and family, near and far, seemed like a great idea. But making the connections public created a host of difficulties, without safeguards for vetting identities. Spilling one’s guts publicly allows for a wider range of responses, each bringing a satisfying surge of dopamine to the brain’s pleasure center. Overtime, Facebook emerged as the place where people present their best always smiling selves to spark envy in one’s friends. A place to accompany people on their voyages through their lives, most recently in real time with live streaming. But it also allows unsuspecting bystanders enormous insight into those lives including where people are and when, and how they’re feeling about it. In this milieu, the solicitation of teens for molestation took on new dimensions; not quite the beneficent innovative application Zuckerberg had in mind.

Currently, Facebook collects all IP addresses used to log into the app, contacts, address books, advertisers that users interact with, including IP addresses from apps used to log into Facebook. The IP addresses provide a detailed map of a user’s movements across time. Beyond that, the company buys information from data brokers, including Equifax and collects data from other sites around the web. Recent disclosures show that Facebook until relatively recently, stored data on calls from Android phones (who was called and the length of the conversation) and even constructs family trees.  

However pressure to monetize the site and realize an ever increasing cash flow to sustain its growth and finally entry onto the NY stock exchange led the company to value advertising over social interactions. Advertising became its raison d’etre bringing the imperative to keep viewers on the site and clicking for as much and as long as possible. Not just commercial advertising, but personal and organizational advertising for podcasts, blogs, YouTube, videos, etc followed.

Companies in search of effective advertising strategies were wooed by Facebook’s access to its gigantic cache of  big data about its “friends”. And Facebook’s policy of allowing other entities including app developers, researchers and political organizations was equally enticing. This is not to say that collection of “big data” sets can’t be an amazing resource for research about behaviors, outside of shopping habits. Most scientific research though is done by removing personal identifiers from data files. In sharp contrast, this is information about you being passed onto third parties, without your knowledge of who they are and why they want to use it. Clearly, Facebook didn’t much care about any of that, given what now seems to be a policy based on good faith that the buyers would abide by the rules, without even a minimal check on credentials.

“what passes for personal preferences is driven by Facebook algorithms which narrow choices that do not necessarily reflect actual personal preferences, just statistically calculated ones.”

With big money dreams came big money ideas to get people to spend a maximum amount of time on Facebook. Enter the news feed, which can be tailored to personal preferences, as so much of Facebook purports to do. However, what passes for personal preferences is driven by Facebook algorithms which narrow choices to those that do not necessarily reflect actual personal preferences, just statistically calculated ones. What sounded like a good idea in the abstract, turned into a nightmare of political partisan silos, growing ever more narrow. This phenomenon was predictable by behavioral experts. Don’t some people at Facebook purport to be just that?

The human brain is lazy and takes the easiest route whenever possible. It resists ideas that challenge a person’s overview. Brain activity on fMRI scans show that when presented with new ideas, the areas of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, not intellectual activity are activated. The brain reshapes the idea so that it can be integrated into the old framework even if it is the exact opposite. And this just happens on autopilot in the blink of an eye, without our even knowing it.

What evolved on Facebook, feeding ever more extreme and therefore enticing bits, was the creation and amplification of intensely partisan media bubbles (less so on the left where there was sampling of both conservative and liberal opinions), that fed on itself and cross pollinated other platforms like Twitter, online commercial and political media sites and finally commercial news outlets. (read Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation:Online Media and the 2016 US Presidential Election http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3375925 for a fascinating study).

Russian cyberagents snuggled cozily into the bubbles, throwing fire and goosing each camp. Did they impact the election? There is no realistic way to know without trying to measure the effects of these barbs on each individual voter’s behavior, an impossible task when done through an increasingly distant, retrospective-colored glass now altered by subsequent events. Add to this the influence of numerous other human biases like confirmation bias which dopamine reward you for doing what you always do in the face new challenges. Or competence bias where we overestimate our own level of competence; for instance, 80% of people believe they have above average intelligence, which is of course, statistically impossible because only 49% can be above average in anything. Biases are the brain’s shortcuts, which allow us to make quick decisions without thinking too hard. And there is no more effective trigger than fear, the currency par excellence of  45, autocrats and yes, conservatives.

Back at Facebook, executives were slow to recognize the role of their baby in Russian election manipulation and even slower to investigate and respond. Unfortunately, that was not the only electoral dalliance that has tripped up the company. Revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s permitted use of Facebook data to allow customized political messaging have exposed a gapping problem with Facebook’s cavalier attitude toward your information, not the least of which is that the data likely remains in Cambridge Analytica’s hands (and some others like SCL). It turns out that this was not Facebook’s first rodeo with data mishandling. In fact, Facebook had signed a consent decree in 2011 with the FTC in response to violations of the tech giant’s assurances that third party applications had access only to data they needed to function, not, as it turned out, to almost all of a user’s personal information. Under the consent decree, Facebook agreed to obtain consent from users before sharing their data with third parties, to create a comprehensive privacy program and a prohibition against deceptive claims about its privacy practices. It appears that Facebook has continued to do what it pledged not to do.

This is not a winnable proposition, playing whack a mole in a virtual space that operates on the frequently false presumption that people are who they say they are.

The company’s response to the current crises has been less than stellar. The first response to Russian funded fake accounts and propagandizing during the elections was an “ah, highly doubtful”, stated with a smugness that was downright overbearing. More revelations…”ah, there may be something to that”. Then BOOM, caught thigh deep in a scheme that maliciously exploited so many aspects of what Facebook contended was not within their purview (we’re just the transporter of the message, not the messenger), then backtracked after revealing in a Senate hearing that the company had actually been paid in rubles for transactions (talk about red flags) to a position that has become a staple: we are doing everything to protect your security while maintaining the right to free speech. Now the company has hired thousands of people scouring the site for contents that are offensive, or crude or “fake news”, another word for propagated lies. This is not a winnable proposition, playing whack a mole in a virtual space that operates on the frequently false presumption that people are who they say they are.

Now Zuckerberg is once again contrite in his apology to his users and pledging to protect the privacy that the company has steadfastly left unguarded. Sheryl Sandberg, primary architect and strategist behind Facebook’s commercialization, remarkably has been able to fly under the radar, free from criticism and blame. But this week, the two began their apology campaign with a series of interviews with several media outlets. Facebook has now posted its data collection policy and allows users to view what they say is all their data; how would you know if that’s true?. The company has now rolled out a new user privacy controls page that allows users to see and set their privacy settings, announced new restrictions on data gathering, sharing and access for third parties. Because all of the previous breaches have studiously disregarded individual privacy settings, the tech giant will have to demonstrate that the future will be different. That will take some time. How will we know without another investigation? It’s unlikely they will just tell us, if their history is any indication? The company has previously promised change in its policy on data acquisition by third parties, but that was fictitious.

Facebook has a fatal flaw. Zuckerberg has said that the goal of making social connections free and available to everyone requires some funding mechanism. His chosen one is commercial advertising maximized by enchanting an audience to remain enthralled for as long as possible, enticed to like and comment and click and tag and in so doing, endlessly revealing their psyches. Thus advertisers are Facebook’s customers and users and their data are the product being marketed. User privacy is a casualty. Until Facebook alters its business model, there is no redress.

As for me, I have always been what I call a Facebook voyeur. Periodically, I respond to a notification and check in on a few people, inevitably regretting the hour or perhaps two that has flown by as a waste of time. I seldom comment or like, except on family posts. I logged into only other site through Facebook mainly because I couldn’t remember the password, but not anymore. At one point, I thought it was a place to showcase my photos, but found Instagram better with less collected data baggage  or at least it was until Facebook acquired it. Recently, I linked this blog post to Facebook as well, making me one of those personal advertisers. While I don’t believe that I exposed any of my friends to random data leakage, there is no way I can determine if any of them may have inadvertently exposed me. But the odds of either transfer are pretty high, given the latest revelation that data on 87 million people, 25% of the population in the US were swept up by Cambridge Analytica, twice the original disclosures.

 I have never looked at a Facebook newsfeed. Even so, I can’t imagine that I would have been susceptible to the fear mongering, rumor baiting tactics being used by bots and fake accounts. But that maybe my competence bias at work. Still, I try to be deliberative in my opinions, counteracting and overriding my biases when I sense them crop up. I fully acknowledge my liberal philosophical approach to social and political issues but am always willing to engage in discussion and try to grow as a result. My opinions must evolve as conditions and information change. I am acutely aware of the sources from which information emanates and try to verify facts from multiple sources, accounting for inherent biases of each source. Having said that, I don’t need to watch Infowars or Fox News to know that neither is reliable or journalistic or anything other than alternative facts, the latest nicety for lies. My exposure to ultra right/ supremacist and the white privilege embedded conservative media comes from late night comedy news shows, an appropriate venue because if people didn’t take that crap seriously, it would be funny.

I heard someone say recently that it’s impossible to live without Facebook, a remark I find patently absurd. If that’s true, we may all be doomed. Or perhaps there’s interest in an alternative social network freed from advertising chains. Maybe some mechanism like PBS subscription drives and philanthropic giving, where the wealthy subsidize the less affluent. Of course, there are many who don’t care about privacy or secured data and want to “put themselves out there” on Facebook.

Others would say that the privacy genie is out of the bottle and we have to learn to live with it. We have to be proactive about trying to maintain personal security and hope that we are too small a fish for any bad actors. I can’t do anything about Equifax, there are no options; it is a necessary evil if you want to purchase insurance or anything without cash. My credit card data surely must have been pilfered from Target, Home Depot, City of Atlanta, Emory Hospital, CVS, or any of the other sites that have been breached or haven’t yet told us they have. Google may be collecting even more data than Facebook; Amazon is a data grabber as well, even more so now that Alexa is listening in, just like Google, linked as it is to all of our other apps and devices. Microsoft must have a treasure trove of Edge/Bing data. But Google is essential to my daily activities; Facebook is not.

Facebook may yet crumble under international investigations into privacy violations or federal regulation. International actions may be more damaging and costly to the business model, as the EU has already enacted tougher rules on internet privacy, including the option to remove previous posts from all websites. This kind of approach to the web’s wild west has had no traction in this country. Congressional legislation or regulation is unlikely to be too severe in the corporate friendly atmosphere of a Republican Congress allied to the Celebrity President. While both have a natural enmity toward liberal tech giants, the marching orders from the conservative oligarchs are less regulation, never more. After all, this is a platform that has been enormously helpful in the party’s seizure of the government. The company will probably end up with a monetary slap on the wrist and perhaps, oversight more resembling chicken wire than a security blanket.  

This may be a perfect window for a new disruptive company to create a social network where friends and family can mingle securely. Or maybe Instagram (a Facebook subsidiary), Twitter, Snapchat, etc are delivering what the vast majority of people want.

After weeks of deliberation, I have decided to delete my Facebook account. If I have exposed any of my friends to privacy breaches, I apologize.