As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.
But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been reported, raise concerns about the company’s privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
Last month, CreativeFuture asked you, our followers, what you thought about platform responsibility. Little did we know that, in the meantime, the issue would start taking over the front pages of our newspapers and websites!
In a nutshell, the issue is whether Google, Facebook, and their Silicon Valley peers should take responsibility for the ways their platforms are used to violate our laws and harm society.
Even before the House and Senate passed landmark legislation to demand accountability from the tech giants and even before Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica mess exploded, we asked your views on a few simple questions that came down to one thing: do you believe that Google and Facebook should be more responsible?
The answer, overwhelmingly, was that you do – and you had a lot to add in response. Here are just some of your comments:
“The organizations who own these platforms make enormous profits. They have a responsibility to make sure the platforms are not being used to harm others.”
“They have the greatest ability to do so. And a moral responsibility. Just because it’s a newer technology doesn’t exempt them.”
“Because if they are able to control it, and I believe that they can, then they should be held accountable and responsible if they don’t.”
“They are providing the service that is being used for these malicious acts. They are responsible! They need to find a solution and be held accountable!”
“Violations of the law should be prosecuted. To avoid prosecution, they should take proactive steps to prevent violations.”
“They created these platforms, they should be responsible for them. They are beyond wealthy from them and can afford to police them. U.S. laws should apply everywhere in the U.S., including [the internet]!”
“Times change, services change, service providers change. Rules must keep up with changes.”
“Hostile foreign governments are using internet social platforms to publish untrue propaganda in order to destabilize our nation … if they can’t or won’t [monitor their platforms], they should be heavily fined and shut down. It is their responsibility for doing business in this country.”
“Responsibility is part of having a business.”
“[Google and Facebook] are no different from any other corporation which has the responsibility not to enable breaking the law. They are complicit and just a guilty as those breaking the law.”
“I can’t believe we even have to ask this question. I am sick and tired of corporations bearing no responsibility for the effects of their services on people. If a crime is occurring and the corporation looks the other way, that cannot be allowed any longer.”
“They don’t want the responsibility of accountability because complying would eat into profits with no returns. So, it will NEVER happen unless it is legislated.”
“The internet has become perhaps the single most important source of information and communication in the world. It cannot just rake in profits and not be responsible for what they have created.”
This week, on April 10 and 11, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify twice before Congress on the issues facing his company, and Silicon Valley generally. We expect that Zuckerberg will be very well prepped by his army of lawyers. We anticipate that he will try to reassure Congress that Facebook is doing all it can to (1) protect the privacy of its users; (2) prevent foreign influence on its advertising networks; and (3) stop rampant violations of the law from being carried out on their platform.
But Congress should not settle for head-pats and platitudes. They need to ask some hard and direct questions. We hope they will include the following…
As early Facebook employees recently told my colleague Nick Bilton,the social network’s rapid evolution into a global power-player has come as a relative shock. “They look at the role Facebook now plays in society, and how Russia used it during the election to elect Trump, and they have this sort of ‘Oh my God, what have I done’ moment,” admitted one. “I lay awake at night thinking about . . . what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way,“ said another. Others in Silicon Valley described [and royalty deadbeat] Mark Zuckerberg as out of touch with reality, unaware of the damage his brainchild has done. While C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg’s indefatigable No. 2, recently acknowledged that “things happened on our platform that shouldn’t have happened,” she maintained that Facebook is not a news organization. “At our heart we’re a tech company,” she said in an interview last week. “We don’t hire journalists.”
[Editor Charlie sez: That’s straight outta The Circle, they don’t hire journalists, they get news feeds for free.]
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