From Blue Jeans & T-Shirt at Facebook, to Business-Blue Before Congress!

What’s so uncanny about Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook scandal is not simply how all-pervasive is the extent to which his firm  developed  a wide array of drill-down tools to data-mine virtually all of over two billion users’ personally identifiable information, but that Zuckerberg has also permitted third-party businesses to construct apps to access that information and to employ it for their own commercial purposes without user consent.

The tsunami behind this scandal has been building up in the depths of the Silicon Valley information ocean for years, but it finally hit the shores of the Washington D.C. Beltway with the revelation that Russian interests had wormed their way into Zuckerberg’s empire of data and used that source to meddle in the 2016 American elections.

The second tsunami unexpectedly crashed upon the tepid waters of the Tidal Basin after it was similarly discovered that Cambridge Analytica employed an app that also mined the personally identifiable information of 87 million persons for political purposes.

The best approach to understanding the reasoning behind Facebook’s thinking is not to speculate, but simply to consider some of the words in an internal Facebook memo dubbed “The Ugly,” written by Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, and circulated to all Facebook staff.

It was subsequently leaked to the public.  Here are excerpts from that document:  

It is “imperative” to “connect people . . . maybe someone finds love.  Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide. . .”

“So, we connect people . . . Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies.  Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.  But that doesn’t matter . . . " because Facebook’s imperative is to connect.

“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

In an Associated Press story on March 22, 2018, The Star-Ledger quoted Mark Zuckerberg as claiming in a Facebook post that developers' access will “generally be limited to user names, profile photos, and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval.”

However, similar data of all U.S. telephone customers  (name, phone number, address) is precisely what the National Security Agency had been obtaining from telephone companies before that practice was shut down. 

So how is it that a U.S. Federal Agency such as the NSA was forbidden to data-mine basic information critical to the protection of the American homeland against terrorist plots and attacks, while Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire is blithely permitted to go way beyond what the NSA was doing and for Facebook to do it for its own – shall I say, personal-corporate – advantage?

Go figure.  If you can.