Once upon a time less than five years ago every startup in existence pitched itself as the Uber of whatever it did. Nobdy frames their startup that way anymore. An ever unspooling series of scandals running the gamut from raunchy corporate culture to deliberately evading municipal regulators and alleged theft of trade secrets led to the ouster of Travis Kalanick, who now lives in exile and is remembered as the CEO who yells at his lowest-paid employees when they voice a complaint.
Facebook and its famously boyish founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appear to be spiraling toward the same branding calamity. The corporation and the man have consistently denied or downplayed Facebook’s role as a chief purveyor of Russian misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign. An avalanche of new problems is burying Facebook with revelations that its loosey-goosey privacy rules allowed Cambridge Analytica, the company at the center of the scandal surrounding clandestine Russian involvement in the 2016 election, to “harvest” data from up to 50 million people without their permission (or, in the vast majority of cases, their knowledge) to sharpen the 2016 presidential campaigns of, first, Ted Cruz, then Donald Trump.
The reporting on the Cambridge Analytica scandal is must reading no matter how burned out you are on politics and scandals. It reveals that Facebook operates a lot like a bar that doesn’t check ID — if you can pay for your drink, you get served and what happens after that is not their worry. In this instance, Cambridge Analytica — the data research firm owned by Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer, the same pair who brought us Breitbart News — hired a Cambridge University professor, Alexander Kogan, to entice Facebook users to download an app that vacuumed up their personal information as well as their Facebook friends.
The data was supposed to be used for academic research but, as we know now (and Facebook has known for a long time but told nobody), it was used to draw exquisitely detailed profiles of American voters to guide how they were pitched during the 2016 campaign. Facebook is defensively arguing what is looking like one of the largest data breaches ever is not, in the narrowest possible sense, a data breach. As they explain it, everyone who dowloaded Kogan’s app agreed to surrender their data, but Kogan used the data he acquired in violation of his agreement with Facebook.
That is something like telling a person who believes they have been robbed they are really victims of an embezzlement, so calm down and realize it isn’t Facebook’s fault. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s outgoing chief of security, seems to be among the many people skeptical of this explanation. According to The New York Times, Stamos has resigned from Facebook because of “internal disagreement rooted in how much Facebook should publicly share about how nation states misused the platform and debate over organizational changes in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.”
Stamos advocated disclosing more about how the Russians rigged Facebook and he advocates trying harder to keep them out of the upcoming elections. Zuckerberg, you will recall, in November 2016 dismissed as a “pretty crazy idea” that Russians had used Facebook to spread fake news. That was the same month Stamos’s team had already confirmed the Russians had done exactly that.
Stamos, who once oversaw 120 people, was all but fired in December and left to oversee a staff of three.
Zuck will be flushed from his comfort zone.
The…
