Examining Facebook and the case for privacy | Rita Gunther McGrath

I got interested in Facebook. Oh, this is probably going back a few years now. When I proposed using Facebook as an example in the book, my editor actually said, “Whoa, you think Facebook is going to have a problem?” And I said, “I mean if you believe in early warnings, yes, because all the handwriting was on the wall. In the sense of, you have a very insular senior team. You have an addictive and very, very profitable business model that’s based on questionable respect for people’s privacy. You have many, many users who really don’t understand what their data is being used for. They don’t understand that Facebook owns it. I mean you think you own that baby picture you posted. You don’t. They do. And they’re basically asking you to sign away your rights for that kind of content that you create yourself.”

So, you’ve got this business model which I honestly think has run away with the founders. I don’t think the founders of Facebook and its senior team kind of expected the unintended consequences. So, the ability to use their targeting tools to influence elections, for example, or to flout laws like the Fair Housing Act. As a landlord, for example, you can post advertisements on Facebook that are actually illegal. But we haven’t figured out how to regulate them.

And I’m not saying Facebook is inherently an evil organization. I do think that they have in many cases abused people’s trust, and their willingness to do so is indicated very, very early on in one of the earliest investigations of Facebook’s practices. An email that I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg never intended to see the light of day was revealed, in which he said, “Oh, you know, if you want to know anything about students at Harvard, just ask.” And his counterpart said, “How do you get all this stuff?” He said, “They just gave it to me.” And then a few expletives after that. It’s indicative of an attitude about privacy that I think is only now coming to be commonly understood. I think it has the potential to get the company in real trouble...