Since news broke over the weekend about Cambridge Analytica harvesting data from over 50 million Facebook users during the presidential campaign in 2016, Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has been quiet. However, that won’t be lasting much longer. According to NBC News, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg has said that he will be speaking in the next 24 hours, and will be focusing on “rebuilding the trust” of its users.
This isn’t the first time that Facebook or any other social media network has had a data breach, but it is the first of this magnitude, and Wall Street took notice. Facebook’s stock has lost over $50 billion in its market cap so far this week, and Zuckerberg has lost around $9 billion due to this data breach so far. And it likely won’t be getting better anytime soon for Facebook’s stock, as US Congress is expected to open an investigation into this whole issue, as to how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to breach its terms of service and not make it known to the public for over a year. Additionally, numerous attorneys general in many US States are also opening investigations. So things aren’t going to be getting pretty for Facebook anytime soon.
Cambridge Analytica used different quizzes on Facebook, to harvest information from users, and that quiz app would also ask for permission to view your friends, which helped the Trump Campaign figure out how to get votes from these people in the election. Now this isn’t the first time that an analytics firm has been used in a successful presidential campaign, in fact Obama’s campaign used one in both 2008 and 2012, but not to this extent. The analytics firm that Obama’s campaign used in his elections did not violate Facebook (or other social media sites’) terms of service, nor harvest a ton of data that it really doesn’t need and shouldn’t be able to get without the users explicit permission. Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are in hot water right now, though Facebook is obviously in deeper since it does have many more users – and is the largest social media site around right now. It’ll be interesting to see what Zuckerberg does say when he speaks in the next 24 hours, and how he plans to rebuild the trust of his users.