Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Backlash to Facebook revelations

This article deals with the ways politicians are reacting to the revelation that Cambridge Analytica stole personal date from over 50 million Facebook accounts to try to predict how people would vote and what could change how they vote. It is largely unlikely that the actions of one data firm or another were the sole factor that tipped a US Presidential election, but this news raises questions about how or if Facebook is preventing data breaches and what the ethical way to use personal data is. In the era of big data, when we're all posting our every move on Facebook, it's important to question how we think about how our information is used.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/19/angry-democrats-facebook-424456

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has just addressed this scandal. He apologized and is developing tools to make sure users privacy is protected.

Unknown said...

It is great that the CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed this scandal but I am still curious to find out where Facebook goes from after this scandal given a major drop in the Facebook stock. There has been estimated that $5 billion in annual revenue for Facebook might be a risk and the situation could create problems for other tech companies, especially Twitter and Alphabet’s YouTube unit.

Unknown said...

I am wondering if Mark Zuckerberg played a part in this scandal? And what repercussions, if any, Trumps team could face for its involvement.

Megan Klick said...

To me this scandal was not surprising considering how much Facebook and other social media sites are able to access personal information about us. I doubt that Facebook is the only social media company that personal data has been stolen from.

Unknown said...

Yes I agree. I wonder what other social media cites could be doing this. I also wonder how we as users can somehow be more conscious of this and think twice about the things we randomly click on online.. if we can even do anything at all. I have a bad feeling that this is beyond any of our capabilities to prevent it.

Anonymous said...

I think that the stock of Facebook would decrease in the short term but increase back in the future because customers are easy to forget. For example, after the United Airline beat their customer, their stock price dropped largely, but now, the stock still has a positive trend and the loss is already covered. I believe that Facebook could still maintain its position since it is too big. One scandal could not beat it, but I still hope that Facebook could do more for the security and be better in the future.

Unknown said...

People were worried when they heard a delayed response from Zuckerberg. With that said, it's important to note that Cambridge Analytica was the company that acted "in the wrong" and broke the data engagement policy. Due to this failure, it makes sense from Zuckerberg's perspective as the legal proceedings are probably in the works to not respond immediately.