Written by Umer Altaf
Tech giants such as Uber, Amazon, and Facebook are vastly different companies that sell obviously distinct products and services. Yet they and many others like them are increasingly sharing one notable trait in common: the defense of just being a tech company.
Uber has used this excuse whilst operating a worldwide cab service that doesn’t have to abide by the same regulations that all other cab services do. Amazon also claims to just be a tech company whilst building their logistical capacities in excess of most national postal services. Their CTO says “Amazon is a technology company. We just happen to do retail” Even Google — often touted as the most ethical of the lot — claims to be just a tech company whilst building a global media empire through outlets such as Youtube and Google News.
It seems that the message we are meant to hear is that none of these companies do anything other than hire teams of software engineers to make apps and sites for us to use. Putting it another way, none of these companies appear to want to take accountability for their actions. It seems Facebook is no different. Sheryl Sandberg — the company’s chief operating officer — says “at our heart we’re a tech company… we don’t hire journalists”
By now, the news of what happened with Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company, and the supposed tech company Facebook has made its hundredth round in the news cycle. Recode reports that Cambridge Analytica was given information collected from Facebook users by a third-party app, a personality quiz. By taking this information without express permission from participants, they violated Facebook’s terms and services, which forbides developers from transferring any data collected by their program to another party. Cambridge Analytica used this data to construct targeted psychographic profiles — impacting, among other things, the recent US Presidential elections.
Everyone is asking the same questions about accountability, and everyone seems to have the same opinion, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. He promises that “Going forward, we’re going to take a more proactive position on this, and do much more regular stock checks and other reviews of apps, as well as increasing the amount of audits that we do.”
This, I would argue, is a line of reasoning that obfuscates the true issue at hand. Namely, that a single private and functionally unregulated organization has the information of over two billion people worldwide, and it is allowed to utilize this information for financial gain by selling the associated metadata to other parties for targeted advertisements.
When one remembers this, it becomes apparent that the issue at hand is not simply that a company like Cambridge Analytica was able to utilize the data of Facebook users, but that Facebook had that data to begin with. The fact is that Facebook alone was responsible for making sure that third parties were not violating any rules, regulations or laws whilst interacting with them.
How can this be considered reasonable? If it hadn’t been for the whistleblowing on Cambridge Analytica, would Facebook have even bothered to come forward with their breach? We cannot know that for sure, but what we do know is that Facebook waited months before coming out. These hardly seem like the actions of a company that ought to be left to its own devices whilst handling the sensitive information of nearly a third of the world’s population.
This brings us back to the red herring of a defense that I cited earlier in this piece: of Facebook not being just a tech company. In all fairness, it isn’t particularly obvious what Facebook really is. Yet that cannot possibly be a defense of having that sort of power with next to no responsibility.
On more than one occasion now, we have been given reason not to trust companies to self-regulate when their ability to act ethically are in conflict with their goals to maximize profit. Whether they be financial conglomerates or oil cartels, we have learned enough lessons from giving corporations undue and unchecked capacities to self-regulate. The tech world, if we may still call it that, is no different.
[…] Source: Google News […]