In April 2010, a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision for the future of Facebook. And it all relied on one tool: Open Graph. It is a decision that, eight years later, threatens to irreparably tarnish Facebook’s reputation.
“Our goal is to use the Open Graph so people can have instantly social experiences wherever they go,” Zuckerberg said. It was an incredibly powerful tool. But few realised it at the time. The Graph API v1.0, as it is also known, didn’t just collect people’s personal information on an unprecedented scale and with little to no oversight; it also turned clicks and likes into a searchable psychological profile covering tens of millions of people. It was a blindly beautiful creation.
The API, the core values of which underpin Facebook’s business model to this date, was a disaster. Unless you wanted to track and target people without their knowledge. The Facebook personality quiz at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was not an isolated incident. For five years, the Graph API left a gaping hole in Facebook’s defences. When it was announced, the social network was valued at around $23 billion. When it was quietly shuttered in April 2015, Facebook was worth $245 billion. Even now, despite the ongoing crisis wiping around $49 billion from its valuation since Friday, Facebook’s market cap is $488.5 billion.
Facebook’s issue with the use of the term “data breach” over the last week is warranted. This was the mass leaking of data by design to maximise Facebook’s profits. While Graph API v1.0 was still active, apps could get access to not just information about individual users, but also all of their friends. So when anyone you were connected to installed an app that sought to hoover up this data, your entire profile was also exposed.
The dataset, in full, was: the about me section of your profile, actions, activities, your birthday, check-ins, history, events, games activity, groups, hometown, interests, lives, location, notes, online presence, photo and video tags, photos, questions, relationship details, relationships, religion, politics, subscriptions, website and work history.
So lax were Facebook’s privacy controls at the time that developers could create as many apps as they liked and link all the results they collected. So if you filled in one quiz from Company X and then did another from Company X a few weeks later, it could match those results based on your unique Facebook user ID. Think back to your Facebook feed circa 2011 – how many times did you see a friend sharing their results or score in a facile quiz or personality test? Now be concerned. And remember, you never gave consent for your data being collected when your Facebook friends completed quizzes and personality tests.
Facebook knew the huge value of Graph API v1.0. So much so that when it announced its closure in April 2014, any apps already using it had a full year to continue collecting data under the old rules with impunity. At Facebook’s 2014 F8 developer conference, Zuckerberg said the decision to shutter Graph API v1.0 was all about “putting people first”. In the same breath, he announced an even more comprehensive ad targeting and tracking tool.
The Facebook Audience Network allowed Facebook’s hunger for user data to be satiated by the entire internet. “The power of Facebook ads, off Facebook,” was how Facebook pitched it at the time. Advertisers could activate it with just one click and suddenly, wherever a Facebook user went online, Facebook followed. Unlike Graph API v1.0, the Audience Network has never been shut down. “This is the first time we’re going to help you monetise in a serious way on mobile,” Zuckerberg said during his F8 keynote in April 2014. In other words: when Facebook closes a door, it opens a window.
As the somewhat tired saying goes, if you’re getting something for free, you are the product. But Facebook’s misuse of user data goes far beyond this. It’s born of a naivety that there is nothing inherently troubling about carving up and monetising not just our personal data, but our social interactions and our personalities. For the publications and academics that have been closely following Facebook for years, this isn’t news. For everyone else, it is timely wake-up call.
Connecting everyone in the world has always felt like something of a personal mission for Zuckerberg. Take Internet.org, the Facebook-led plan to bring affordable internet services to less developed countries. When it launched in April 2013, Zuckerberg published a ten-page whitepaper titled Is Connectivity A Human Right? (tl;dr: yes, but only if Facebook provides that connectivity). “I’m focused on this because I believe it is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. We believe everyone deserves to be connected,” he wrote at the time.
But Zuckerberg and Facebook’s response to his self-proclaimed great challenge is blind to the damage it causes. And, when Facebook’s rapacious desire for data leaks out from beneath its slick corporate messaging, the public reacts with alarm. In February 2016, Indian regulators banned Free Basics – the Facebook-developed app that provides the services developed under the Internet.org initiative – citing major net neutrality concerns. One editorial published at the time derided Internet.org as little more than “a Facebook proxy targeting India's poor”.
Undeterred, Zuckerberg said that while he was disappointed, he remained committed “to keep working to break down barriers to connectivity in India and around the world”. It seems people taking to the streets to protest Facebook’s perceived data grab was not enough to make Zuckerberg think again. “Connecting India is an important goal we won't give up on,” he concluded in a Facebook post. “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. That mission continues.”
Read more: We were warned about Cambridge Analytica. Why didn't we listen?
And that’s the fundamental problem with Facebook and Zuckerberg. The mission. It never changes. It is a steadfast, ignorant belief that achieving the goal of the mission is an inevitable force for good. As recently as January, presiding over an increasingly controversial yet still hugely profitable business, Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook was making “too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools”. Two paragraphs later, he was back to the mission: “The first four words of Facebook's mission have always been “give people the power’,” he explained.
The growing scandal around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica isn’t the real story. It is merely a particularly eye-catching case study for Facebook’s very successful business model. “The entire company is outraged we were deceived,” Facebook said in a statement. But that deceit isn’t the story either. The real story is Facebook’s mission. Facebook was designed to do this. Its mission is to make the world more open and more connected, and to monetise our every moment. For Zuckerberg, the mission is everything.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
