Mark Zuckerberg Can Still Fix This Mess

The news about Facebook is not getting better. The company has sharply increased the number of users whose data was improperly shared with an outside company connected to President Trump’s campaign, to possibly 87 million. Amid an outcry, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday.

There is a dog-eared playbook for industry titans called before lawmakers: Apologize repeatedly, be humble, keep it boring. Mr. Zuckerberg can and should toss that playbook. He’s got $60 billion to his name, 99 percent of which he has said he will donate to charity. And he controls Facebook — is Facebook — in an unusual way: He controls 60 percent of its shareholder votes. So he doesn’t have to worry about next month’s subscriber count or how to deflect a hardball question from a committee chairman. He can contemplate posterity with big ideas geared to a public interest. Given Facebook’s domination of social media, anything the company does — including a devolution of its power — will serve as a model for others.

To get a sense of the new approaches he should take, consider why Congress is calling hearings. The core offenses begin with classic and now pervasive online privacy violations.

In 2014, 270,000 people were paid by an outside developer to install a Facebook app and answer questions like “Do you panic easily?” and “Do you often feel blue?” They weren’t told that their answers would become part of a psychological profile used by a voter profiling company, Cambridge Analytica — first to assess how they might vote and second to design personalized advertising for the purpose of changing their political views or their likelihood of voting, all to favor the agenda of Cambridge Analytica’s funders and clients. The app also scooped up information from the typically nonpublic profiles of the quiz-takers’ friends — turning 270,000 people into 87 million.

The violations are a big deal, even though this type of profiling is still hit and miss. Incentives push toward keeping and copying data rather than deleting it — and using it to, say, quietly target the credulous with ads for snake oil, limit the groups who see certain real estate ads or serve African-American voters with ads designed to depress Election Day turnout.

Currently there is no way for us to retract information that previously seemed harmless to share. Once tied to our identities, data about us can be part of our permanent record in the hands of whoever has it — and whomever they share it with, voluntarily or otherwise. The Cambridge Analytica data set from Facebook is itself but a lake within an ocean, a clarifying example of a pervasive but invisible ecosystem where thousands of firms possess billions of data points across hundreds of millions of people — and are able to do lots with it under the public radar.