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The Article is written by Shreya Pandey, from Banasthali University, Jaipur and Anindita Deb, a student of Symbiosis Law School, NOIDA. The article deals with the Facebook data scandal case.

Introduction

If Mark Zuckerberg’s 15-year-old “juvenile jottings” on privacy still exist, they’re about to be sifted through by attorneys.

A court-appointed referee has ordered Meta (earlier Facebook inc). to hunt for any personal notes by the company’s founder which haven’t been destroyed and could be relevant to a consumer lawsuit accusing Facebook of failing to protect privacy in the years leading up to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook Inc., the largest social media platform, developed by Marc Zuckerberg, was alleged to have been harvesting millions of people’s Facebook profiles to accomplish political goals. In March 2018, publications under The Guardian, and The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica had harvested about 50 million Facebook profiles, which was the biggest scandal of Facebook. Aleksandr Kogan, a scientist at Cambridge University was hired by Cambridge Analytica to develop an app to check the personality test of people through a survey where people had to answer a few questions. Facebook allowed this app to not only collect personal information of users but also information about the user’s friends. The information harvesting process was earlier informed many times in certain publications but the news gathered attention in 2018 where people expressed their rage and fury against Facebook and started a campaign called #deletefacebook which spread quickly all over the internet. The British Political Consultancy Firm, Cambridge Analytica used this information for carrying out its political agenda to influence the voters towards the US President Donald Trump.

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Background of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Facebook was founded by Marc Zuckerberg in 2004 during his studies at Harvard University. He was interested in computer programming. He in his college developed certain sites earlier like “Coursematch” for helping students, pursuing the same degrees interact with each other and “Facemash” where people could rate each other’s profile which is attractive. He developed Facebook in 2004 while studying psychology at Harvard University and as soon as he had developed it, within 24 hours 1200 Harward students joined it. They could create their profile and can upload their pictures, share their interests, and get connected to others. 

Cambridge Analytica(CA) was a London-based election consultancy firm. It was one of the best companies which had dealt with many big clients like Ted Cruz (Republican Candidate) and Ben Carson. The method used by CA was to test a person’s traits to understand their personalities. By understanding the personality of their targets they could convey their messages to people in the manner in which they could get affected and influenced easily. 

Facebook data scandal

Facebook made an update where it launched a platform for external developers called “Open Graph.” Here the third parties could connect to Facebook users and ask for their permissions to access their and their friends’ personal information. If Facebook granted permission then the external developers could easily access their personal information like name, sex, place of residence, religious beliefs, birth date, political preferences, online status, even their personal texts, etc. The company harvested around 87 million users’ profile to understand their personality and show them advertisements through which they could easily be affected and the firm could utilize it to fulfill their political and financial propagandas. Cambridge Analytica hired Aleksandr Kogan to develop a quiz app through which the personality of their target could be ascertained. He made an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” through which a person’s psychographic profile could be built. This app was based on the OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) personality model. The app asks for permission from the Facebook users to ask a few questions for academic purposes and as soon as the person agrees to it, the app gets access to the user’s private information as well as of their Facebook friends. According to researchers associated with Cambridge University, the app is effective and can predict sensitive personal attributes of the user. The firm worked with Donald Trump’s election team to influence the voters of the US to elect Trump in the ballot box. It was one of the biggest data breaches. 

A newspaper, The Observer revealed that CA harvested millions of user’s profiles in 2014 to provide them personalized political advertisements through which they could get influenced towards Trump and elect him as the President. Steve Bannon, the key advisor of Trump headed the firm at that time. Facebook allowed these apps to collect information from the users. When the users allow the apps to function, it notifies about its privacy policy and they accept it blindly. Then these information were used for political purposes. In a few weeks, a new revelation was made by Robert Mueller, a special counsel that the information was used to perpetrate “information warfare” against the US.

The app worked in such a way that the company (Analytica) would get to know whether the users are trump supporters or not. If the user is a trump supporter then they show them the policies or areas where Trump would make changes but if the user is non-supporter of Trump then they would show them that in what ways Trump is better than other candidates and what were the defects or scandals done by the opposition candidate in order to attract the user towards Trump.

There were many instances that proved that Facebook does not have sufficient privacy policies to protect the data of users. In 2005, MIT researchers downloaded almost 70000 users’ public posts. In 2007, Beacon indicated the title of videos in the users’ Facebook newsfeed that users rented from Blockbuster Video. This indication was in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act. In 2009, The New York Times reported that private information of users was shared publicly. In 2013, a bug was disclosed that harvested almost 6 million profiles in a year. A phenomenon known as “shadow profiles” was observed by the users. 

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal started from 2014, February when Aleksandr Kogan developed an app known as “thisisyourdigitaallife” which offered money in exchange for completing questions of the survey. The review requested the users to agree and add this app to the Facebook account so that they could get access to the users’ likes, friend list, and some private messages. In 2015, it was realized by Facebook that the app developed by Kogan was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, stated that when he got to know that the information of users was shared by CA, then he immediately banned the app from Facebook and also demanded from Kogan and CA to delete all the information of users which were inadequately acquired. On 17th March, 2018, The Guardian and The New York Times exposed that around 50 million users’ information was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. This scandal was exposed by Christopher Wylie who was an employee in SCL elections, creator of “thisisyourdigitallife” app. It was later revised that a total approx 87 million people’s accounts were harvested through this app as the app not only accessed the user’s account but also the user’s friends’ accounts. Wylie claimed that CA used the app to develop psychographic profiles of the users through which they target people to pro-Trump advertisements. This claim of Wylie was denied by the Cambridge Analytica. Facebook threatened The Guardian to sue it for the allegations and reports made by the newspaper publishing the story. Facebook announced “unsend capability’ feature where users could unsend their messages. It was added ten months later where a person can unsend their texts in ten minutes after they send the texts. On April 4, 2018, Facebook announced that almost 2 billion users’ public profile informations are harvested. 

These continuing events of breach of policy led 61% of Americans to approach Congress to take certain steps to regulate social media and tech companies. In a CBS News interview, Box CEO Aaron Levie said that in the era of the internet there are still loopholes in regulating or controlling the protection of the users. 

Facebook updated its privacy policy on 18th April 2018. The SCL Company that owned Cambridge Analytica dissolved on 2nd May, 2018 as due to all the news regarding the data scandal done by the firm, all its customers were driven away due to which ultimately the company had to wind up. In The New York Times, it was reported that Facebook was in a data-sharing partnership with some mobile companies like Apple, Blackberry, Amazon, etc, where the manufacturers could gather information of the user and even his friends’ information who had declined to share their information with third parties. Later on 5th June 2018, it was reported that Facebook allowed Chinese mobile companies to access their users’ accounts and since China is an enemy State, it can pose a serious national security risk. 

The UK imposed a fine of 500,000 Euros on Facebook for its data scandal. Facebook announced that there is a fall in the users’ count in Europe and in the US and Canada the increase in users is stagnant and it also suffered a 19% or $19 billion decrease in single-day market value. 

Key companies involved in the data privacy scandal

  • Facebook is not the only one, other companies are also connected to this data privacy scandal. Though it has operated primarily through subsidiaries, SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) sits in the centre of the privacy scandal. SCL was behavioural research and strategic communication firm based in the United Kingdom. On May 1, 2018, the firm was dissolved.
  • Cambridge Analytica and SCL USA are SCL Group subsidiaries based in the United States. The pair were formally established in 2013, according to registration documents. On May 1, 2018, the duo, like SCL Group, was dissolved.
  • From 2014 till 2017, Global Science Research was a market research organisation situated in the United Kingdom. The app thisisyourdigitallife was created by it. Cambridge Analytica purchased personal data collected from the app (but not the app itself) for use in campaign messaging. 
  • Emerdata is the successor of SCL and Cambridge Analytica in terms of functionality. It was established in August 2017, with registration documents naming many people connected to SCL and Cambridge Analytica, and also the same location as SCL Group’s London headquarters. 
  • AggregateIQ is a consultancy and technology firm based in Canada that was created in 2013. Ripon, the software platform used by Cambridge Analytica for political campaign operations, was discovered in an unsecured GitLab bucket and exposed to the public.
  • Cubeyou is a data analytics organisation based in the United States that also ran Facebook polls and collaborated with Cambridge University from 2013 to 2015. Following a CNBC investigation, Facebook suspended it in April 2018.
  • Six4Three was a firm based in the United States that developed an app that used image recognition to detect photographs of women in bikinis that were shared on Facebook friends’ pages. In April 2015, the company sued Facebook after the app was deemed inoperable after access to this data was revoked when the old version of Facebook’s Graph API was discontinued.
  • Onavo is a mobile app development business that specialises in analytics. They developed Onavo Extend and Onavo Protect, which are data protection and secure VPN services, respectively. The startup was purchased by Facebook in October of 2013. Facebook uses Onavo data to track the use of non-Facebook apps on smartphones.
  • The Internet Research Agency is a Russian intelligence-linked agency situated in St. Petersburg. Across English-language social media, including Facebook, the organisation engages in politically charged manipulation. 

Challenges

The data scandal unleashed outrage and anger amongst the people towards Facebook for which they initiated a movement of #deletefacebook on Twitter. People lost their trust on Facebook which was the biggest challenge before Facebook as their users declined rapidly. Facebook apologized for this fault to all its users, advertisers, and investors but still the apology could not mend the broken trust. According to a poll in the US, there were a very few number of people who trusted facebook while others trusted other tech apps. Zuckerberg announced that the company would investigate all third-party apps that had access to data of users before 2014. Facebook promised to ban all the app developers who did not comply with a full audit. Zuckerberg also announced that he won’t allow app developers anymore to access the user’s data after 3 months of inactivity. The company assured that it would reduce the amount of information required to be given to the third party. 

Responses

Facebook and other companies

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the data scandal and called it a mistake and also assured that he would take steps for avoiding such incidents to happen in the future, in an interview. Later, he published apology articles in newspapers for apologizing to all the users, investors, companies, etc. Amazon too suspended CA from using the Amazon Web Services after being informed that their services were the medium through which data were collected. In August 2018, UniCredit, an Italian Banking Company, also refused to advertise or market on Facebook.

Governmental actions

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office fined Facebook $663000 for the data breach. The Government of India and Brazil asked CA to report about how they had used the data in political campaigns. In March 2019, the US Attorney General for District of Columbia alleged that Facebook already knew about the scandal months before it got published in 2015 but Facebook didn’t take any adequate step to protect users’ data.

Users and investors

The number of likes, shares, and accounts decreased on the app, and people were filled with anger as they got to know about the data scandal in 2018. They initiated a movement of #deletefacebook to boycott Facebook, which was tweeted almost 400,000 times by people within a month of the news of the data scandal had gone viral. Later a new hashtag #yourowndata was coined by Brittany Kaiser which insisted on increasing transparency on the platform. Through this campaign, it was asked that the users should get more power and control over their data. Facebook stock noted a serious fall of 24% which would approximately amount to $134 billion. 

The flaw in the system yet continues

Another data scandal was found by an engineer of Facebook in July, 2020 where it had mistakenly shared some users’ personal data (the number of users yet not been disclosed). The data was shared with outside developers for a longer period of time than promised. It was agreed that the developers wouldn’t be allowed to access the users’ details if the user does not interact with the developer’s app for 90 days and the developer needs to seek permission from the user again to re-access his account. But this didn’t happen and the developers were able to access the users’ data for a longer period of time. Also, the data of the users’ friends, even though his friend has not even opened the app, was also accessible by the developers. 

Connection of 2016 US Presidential election with the scandal 

The Guardian reported in December 2015 that Ted Cruz’s campaign for the Republican presidential primary had hired Cambridge Analytica. Despite Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix’s claim in a TechRepublic interview that the company is “fundamentally politically agnostic and an apolitical company,” Cambridge Analytica co-founder Robert Mercer is the primary financier of the Cruz campaign. The Mercer family began backing Donald Trump after Cruz dropped out of the race in May 2016.

In January 2016, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told investors that the election was a huge deal in terms of ad spending and that by using “Facebook and Instagram ads,” one could target by congressional district, interests, demography, or any combinations of all those.

Facebook announced improvements to its advertising platform in October 2017, requiring identity and location verification as well as prior authorization before running electoral ads. Further limits were implemented in April 2018 as a result of the data privacy scandal’s impact, making “issue ads” about current events similarly prohibited.

In secretly recorded conversations by a Channel 4 News undercover team, Cambridge Analytica’s Nix claimed the firm was behind the “defeat crooked Hillary” ad campaign.  According to the same exposé, Chief Data Officer Alex Tayler believes that the likelihood that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes yet won the electoral college vote is attributable to data and study.

Reasons why Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from its service

Facebook and Kogan both said Cambridge Analytica “certified” it had erased the data three years ago. However, Facebook has received complaints that not all of the user data was removed since then. At least some of the disagreement, according to the New York Times, is still going on. 

Cambridge Analytica stated in a statement that it has erased all of the data and is working with Facebook to resolve the situation. Meanwhile, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who outlined how Cambridge Analytica allegedly misused Facebook data, has had his Facebook account suspended, according to his Twitter account. He held a press conference a few days later to discuss his condition and the bigger controversy.

What role does Mark Zukerberg’s notebook play in the consumer privacy litigation against Facebook

The lawyers suing Facebook stated in a court filing that a 17-page section of Zuckerberg’s notes contained in journalist Steven Levy’s 2020 book, “Facebook: the Inside Story,” sparked their curiosity in his notes from 2006 when he was 22 years old and Facebook was 2 years old.

According to the petition, the notebooks address problems that are at the heart of this case: did Facebook, under Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, violate its privacy commitments to users with the aim of monetising the data they provided? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been at the forefront of the drive to reassure users that the company is concerned about their privacy. 

Facebook responded by pointing out that according to Levy, Zuckerberg claimed that he destroyed those notebooks on being asked to do so by his lawyers because they feared that the notebooks would be used as evidence in future litigation. While certain notebooks may still exist, any attempt to link the issues in the case to what Zuckerberg’s ideas were such a long time ago is “not just a stretch,” according to the company. It’s absurd.”

Based on Levy’s assertion that the notebooks conveyed a detailed version of Zuckerberg’s product vision, including a privacy “mixer” that allows users to control who gets to see a product about them, the special master appointed to settle disputes over pretrial information sharing concluded the notebooks may be relevant. 

Conclusion

The Facebook-Cambridge data scandal was one of the biggest online scandals. Facebook allowed an app to make a survey. When people agreed to give the answers in the survey, they unknowingly allowed them to access their accounts. The survey was used to target people according to their political preferences to show them personalized advertisements and influence them to carry out their political agenda. It was a negligence of Facebook where it allowed a third party to get access to millions of people’s accounts which meant that Facebook was not at all concerned for its users’ security. Such instances show the reality of the virtual world where we think that the personal information or chats are safe and private but actually a third party can anytime have access to these pieces of information. Thus, it is necessary for the social media sites developers to maintain the trust of people and keep their privacy protected. An online video chat antitrust hearing was organized where Zuckerberg testified before Congress on 29th July, 2020. Amon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai were also a part of the hearing. The regulators have also been looking into the acquisition of the competing companies like WhatsApp and Instagram.

References

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