The social media behemoth Facebook was already in damage control by the time its 33-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before Congress in a pair of hearings which began on Tuesday, April 10.
The hearings were prompted after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica — a political consulting firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — psychologically profiled Facebook users by harvesting the data of an estimated 87 million personal accounts, according to The New York Times.
Lisa Low, assistant professor of practice in the Department of Public Relations at Texas Tech, said she felt Facebook was slow to respond.
“From a PR perspective they definitely did not do a good job in being forthcoming and transparent,” she said. “They were slow to share the information that they said they would share, so Facebook did not do a good job initially in response to this negative publicity.”
Photo Credit Carolyn Kaster/AP
However, from the perspective of a public relations consultant, she said Zuckerberg’s performance before Congress was stellar as he answered tough questions and did his best to explain the complex system of technologies employed by the social media platform to manage its users.
Facebook is a unique platform to advertisers because of its “Open Platform” policy of application development, she said. The app development tools made available to users are notable because anyone can utilize them.
“They just opened their doors and said, ‘Come on in,'” Low said. “No other major social media platform is that lenient when it comes to app development.”
One major issue with that leniency is that Facebook frequently would not follow through with enforcing its own established set of rules and guidelines for app developers to adhere to, she said.
Low suggested that until Facebook eliminates the “data scraping” initiatives being used by data firms like Cambridge Analytica, it should suspend its open app development platform. Data scraping is an information harvesting technique that can be used to extract and archive vast amounts of user’s data.
“We need to understand that it’s naive to think that (Facebook is) going to regulate themselves to the degree that we can feel comfortable with our privacy settings no matter what they do,” Low said. “And that is the issue that the general American at large didn’t understand until recently.”
Anytime a user logs in to a digital platform, they sacrifice part of their privacy, Bolanle Olaniran,
professor of communication studies at Texas Tech, said. This digital “trail of breadcrumbs” can sometimes make individuals vulnerable to identity theft.
“This generation in particular is more liberal when it comes to sharing their private life online,” Olaniran said. “If they have one social media app, they have them all. Whether it is Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram — they are quite eager to give away personal information.”
Information such as one’s driver license number, social security number and bank account information can easily be harvested and stored on the dark web, he said. Cloud data storage is also equally as susceptible to being hacked and stolen.
Whether it is banking, shopping or communicating, the convenience of the online world comes at a cost to the user. People in general need to be less willing to sacrifice their privacy for convenience if they are to protect their private information, he said.
“People are often more vulnerable to a cyber-attack when they are traveling or on-the-go in general,” Olaniran said. “Free Wi-Fi may seem favorable for you to use, but it is almost never secure. Your activity can be monitored and tracked by a tech-savvy individual who knows what to look for.”
As society integrates itself more online, it has become harder to completely remove one’s self from the digital world, said Randy Reddick — professor and Assistant Dean for Technology Services at Texas Tech. For example, virtual banking has become a mainstay of nearly every major banking organization in the world.
That type of societal mass-acceptance makes it harder to cover one’s tracks online. Minimizing the amount of information one is providing to any given platform is becoming increasingly hard, he said.
“Privacy concerns can’t be an afterthought for the institutions that we trust with our private data,” Reddick said. “The amount of effort required by the user to remain private in the digital world is huge. The only way to completely protect yourself from digital privacy threats is to not participate and permanently remain offline.”
Photo Credit Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
There is no system of technology that is “unhackable”, he said. Weaknesses can be found and exploited no matter how sophisticated the security measures of an institution is.
Two-factor authentication and overall awareness of how to fend off cyber threats have helped even the playing field in recent years, Reddick said. Still, caution and discretion are the most powerful tools to prevent personal data harvesting.
“The principles that the internet was founded on have evolved into an interesting paradox of sorts,” Reddick said. “It is impossible for the internet to be both open to the masses but still perfectly private to the individual. There still is no such thing as ‘open and private.'”
About Reece Nations: Undergraduate Managing Editor
