The EconomistApril 14th 2018 29For daily analysis and debate on America, visit
Economist.com/unitedstates
Economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica1“T
HEY ‘trust me’...dumb fucks,” Mark
Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook,
wrote in an instant message to a friend in
2004, after boasting that he had personal
data, including photos, e-mails and ad-
dresses, of some 4,000 of his social net-
work’s users. He offered to share whatever
information his friend wanted to see. Mr
Zuckerberg may use less profane language
today, but many feel he has not yet out-
grown his wilful disregard for users’ pri-
vacy. On April 11th he testified before testy
politicians in Washington about the firm’s
latest privacy controversy, first to a joint
hearing of two Senate committees that
lasted around four hours, and then again
on April 12th to a House of Representatives
committee. Not since the 1990s, when Mi-
crosoft was taken to task for its monopolis-
tic behaviour, has there been such “intense
public scrutiny” of a technology firm in
Washington, as Orrin Hatch, a Republican
senator, informed Mr Zuckerberg.
Some of his inquisitors appeared an-
noyed by Mr Zuckerberg’s rehearsed re-
sponses, but that did not stop many on-
lookers from being chuffed by his smooth,
slightly robotic, performance. Facebook’s
share price closed 5.7% higher after his two
days on Capitol Hill. Investors may be bet-
ting that the worst of “Facegate” could be
over, but it is too soon to count on it.shared with third parties, and promised to
audit suspicious third-party apps. But
these are things that many of its users
wrongly believed Facebook had long been
doing anyway.
Politicians and users want to know
more about how Facebook will adequate-
ly safeguard people’s privacy and offer
enough transparency about how it oper-
ates. While encouraging its users to over-
share minutiae from their own lives, the
firm has been guarded in the past about
sharing details of how its extensive data-
collection machine works and what it
tracks beyond the data users provide di-
rectly. The company’s business depends
on observing users’ online behaviour and
selling their attention to advertisers, who
pay money to reach specific groups of us-
ers based on minute details gleaned about
their identities, their interests and where
they are. This requires a delicate balancing
act between catering to users, whose atten-
tion Facebook must keep, and advertisers,
who pay the bills. To date the firm has
mostly favoured growth over careful
checks that its “community”, as it calls its
2.1bn users, is being properly protected.Sorry seems to be
Facebook’s corporate tradition of evasion
was on display on Capitol Hill. When
asked during the Senate hearing about
whether Facebook tracks users who have
logged out, Mr Zuckerberg said he did not
know and would have to supply the an-
swer at a later date (although many adver-
tisers believe Facebook does exactly that).
It has recently been revealed that Facebook
collected Android users’ call logs and mes-
sages without most users’ knowledge,
which offers another example of the firm’sThe immediate scandal is the most
acute and far-reaching crisis in Facebook’s
14-year history. Last month it was revealed
by Britain’sObserverand the New York
Timesthat a researcher from Cambridge
University, Aleksandr Kogan, had obtained
information about some 300,000 Face-
book users by encouraging them to down-
load an app and take a survey in 2012. He
then shared these data with Cambridge
Analytica, a political consultancy, which
reportedly made them available to others,
including Donald Trump’s campaign.
Some 87m Facebook users are affected, be-
cause Facebook’s policies at the time were
so loose that people using a third-party’s
app often shared details not only about
themselves but also about their friends
without their knowledge. Facebook
changed its policies in 2014.
These revelations are especially damn-
ing because Facebook first learned about
this problem in 2015 and did little to ad-
dress it. In fact, instead of focusing on Cam-
bridge Analytica’s bad behaviour, Face-
book threatened to sue the Guardian
Media Group, which owns the Observer, if
it published the exposé. Only after a media
backlash and public outcry did Facebook
begin to take action. It has started making it
easier for users to control their privacy set-
tings, reduced the amount of data that areMr Zuckerberg goes to WashingtonFace-off
SAN FRANCISCO
If Facebook will not fix itself, will Congress do it?United States
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33 School discipline
34 Lexington: The president and the law