How to Fix Facebook | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-to-fix-facebook
Adrian, I think you’re exactly right that this is both a technical problem and a human problem, and that Zuckerberg is pushing the narrative of bad actors who exploited a loophole. But if we can call it a loophole at all, then it’s a policy loophole: Facebook was operating exactly as it was intended to. It was and is an ad network. The scope of the metadata that developers could harvest (and retain) probably isn’t surprising to anyone who has worked in ad tech, or at any tech company, really. Facebook trusted developers to do the right thing, and I think this reliance on good faith—a phrase that gets a lot of exercise in the tech industry—tracks with a sort of tech-first, developer-is-king mind-set.
In some ways, this trust in developers is a product of carelessness, but it’s also a product of a lack of imagination: it rests on the assumption that what begins as a technical endeavor remains a technical endeavor. It also speaks to a greater tension in the industry, I think, between technical interests (what’s exciting, new, useful for developers) and the social impact of these products. I don’t know how software is built at Facebook, but I imagine that the engineering team working on the Graph A.P.I., a developer tool that enables interaction with the platform’s user relationships, probably wasn’t considering the ways in which metadata could be exploited. It’s not necessarily their job to hypothesize about developers who might create, say, fifteen apps, then correlate the data sets in order to build out comprehensive user profiles. That said, maybe it should be the job of the product-management team. I don’t mean to lean too heavily on conjecture; Facebook is a black box, and it’s nearly impossible to know the company’s internal politics.
In any case, the underlying issues aren’t specific to Facebook. The question of good faith is an industry-wide problem. Data retention is an industry-wide problem. Transparency is touted as a virtue in Silicon Valley, but when it comes to the end user, transparency is still treated as more of a privilege than a right.
Anna Wiener: Nathan, I think your point about Facebook’s commercial orientation is really important. Facebook’s customers are not its users. It’s a developer-oriented attention magnet that makes its money from advertisers based on the strength of its users’ data. For Facebook to truly prioritize user privacy could mean the collapse of its revenue engine. So when Zuckerberg says, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” it’s very strange, because it assumes that Facebook’s primary orientation is toward users. Zuckerberg runs a business, not a community; my understanding is that Facebook sees itself as a software company, not a social institution, and behaves accordingly.