Why Facebook can’t change
Your personal data is what social media uses to target you with advertising, where a single ‘like’ is enough to determine your psychological profile
Despite what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says about tightening privacy controls and preventing apps accessing users’ data, the platform’s very business model is predicated on taking advantage of its users for its own financial imperatives. Facebook is an opt-in service whose customers are not, in fact, its users but the advertisers who market to those users. What Cambridge Analytica did — by exploiting the personal data of 87m users, mostly US voters — may have been euphemistically dubbed "spinning an election", but it’s what used to be called "propaganda" before Facebook became the biggest media platform in the world. It’s no different to how Facebook has for years been harvesting our personal preferences to better target users for advertising. As Zuckerberg said in a conference call last week: "The vast majority of data that Facebook knows about you is because you chose to share it, right? It’s not tracking. There are other Internet companies or data brokers or folks that might t...
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