Facebook – the world’s largest social media company is in a tight spot from last one week, after the alleged Facebook Cambridge Analytica Data Leak Scandal. It’s shares suffered the biggest one- day drop and it is still tumbling like jack n jill fell from the Hill. The most heinous scandal of the breach of trust resulted in huge a carnage at the wall street, which eroded nearly $40 billion of FB’s market value. In fact IT investors are still not happy with the carnage. They want to decimate FB shares even further!
How it all Happened?
It is being alleged that personal data of 50 million profiles have been secretly leaked and later used for political interest a year ago. The data was inappropriately used by a British Data Analysis Company- Cambridge Analytica in the course of activities surrounding US President Donald Trump Presidential Campaign 2016 and Brexit Referendum. The main business of this data analysis firm is to come out with online political campaigns, and to influence political voters online. For all these, it combines data from multiple sources.
Now after 2 years, no second thoughts, it has become a BIG STORY. In the midst of all these, as per IANS, Facebook’s Chief Information Security officer Alex Stamos, is planning to get down. All this happened through a personality quiz named “this is your digital life” held on FB in which somewhere 3,000,000 users participated. Not only this, it extracted the personal data of user’s friends also and finally managed to get through till 50 million FB profiles. Interesting thing is that all these is thoroughly against FB’s guidelines. The leaked data of users was later used for targeted political advertising.
Cambridge Analytica received the data from a Facebook App. First of all the firm was not allowed to take that data. It’s is being reported that the leaked date was used in President Trump’s Campaign during primary elections but not the general elections. But what difference does it makes. User’s data is a confidential information which should have never been used for any other purpose. The Firm got $5.9 million in lieu of that secret service from Mr. Trump’s Campaign in 2016.
On the other side Cambridge Analytica is continuously denying the allegations that it has misused the data and has sticked to its point that it deleted all the data in 2014 when it learnt that doing so will violate the data protection rules.
From last one week World’s most popular social media giant and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing severe condemnation for data breach, from all sides- center, left and right.
What was Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Reaction to all these?
Now let’s go into how Mark reacted to the greatest breach of trust in the history of FB. As much expected, he wrote a post on his personal page, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.”
He wrote further, ““the whole incident of data breaching is a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We will do everything to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
So finally he accepted that the wrong has been done, user’s trust has been breached,
How India Reacted To all These?
The controversy has resulted in a huge uproar among the political environment of India standing on the threshold of the next general elections in 2018- hardly in a time span of less than one year. After all, it’s the largest democracy of the world. Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad- Minister of Information and Technology has said that Facebook will have to face the biggest legal action if it’s data misadventures cause any disturbance in India’s electoral process. He said,” “If need be, strong action will be taken. Let me make it very, very clear, we fully support freedom of press, speech and expression; we fully support free exchange of ideas on social media. But any attempt, covert or overt, by social media, including Facebook, of trying to influence India’s electoral process through undesirable means will neither be appreciated nor be tolerated,”.
He further added,” the government could also summon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if needed. “Mr Mark Zuckerberg, you better note the observation of the IT Minister of India. We welcome Facebook in India, but if any data theft of Indians is done through the collusion of Facebook’s system, it shall not be tolerated. We have got stringent powers in the IT Act, we shall use it, including summoning you to India,”
