PRESENTATION BY: SAMRIDDHA CHAKRABORTY
SUBHADIP PAUL
RIMPA MONDAL
TAUKEED UL HAQUE
PROVAT ROY
OVERVIEW OF FACEBOOK
Facebook is an American company offering online social networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University.
Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that
number were using Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.
Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the Web site. New
users can create profiles, upload photos, join a preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has many components,
including Timeline, a space on each user’s profile page where users can post their content and friends can post messages;
Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and News Feed, which informs users of
changes to their friends’ profiles and status. Users can chat with each other and send each other private messages. Users can
signal their approval of content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other Web sites.
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. It has over 200 million
users. Over 70% of Facebook’s user are outside of US. The average person has 120 friends on Facebook and more than 3.5
billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day.
FACEBOOK’S BUSINESS MODEL
Facebook also considered a subscription-based approach as a business model to overcome privacy issues
and in interest of its users. However, if this business model was adapted by Facebook it would require
Facebook to substitute the advertising revenue business model leading to a loss (amounting to $40 billion in
2017) with subscriptions.
To recover this loss, Facebook would have to charge each subscriber approximately 84.41 dollars, which was
the average revenue it was earning per user through the advertisement model.
Now the question arose that – How many Facebook users will be willing to pay this amount? An online
survey conducted on whether people would be willing to pay for Facebook without Ad’s, revealed that only
23% were willing to pay.
OVERVIEW OF THE CASE
THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL IS SUDDENLY A MAJOR
PROBLEM FOR FACEBOOK
April 10: Modify Privacy Policy
December 2013: Cambridge Analytica founded
March 2014: Facebook holds F8
June 2014: News Feed Experiment
July 2014: Christopher Wylie quits Cambridge Analytica
November 2014 to December 2014: Cambridge Analytica takes action against Christopher Wylie
2014 to 2015: Aleksandra Kogan builds app
Cambridge Analytica says Facebook and ther private firm, GSR to delete the data
November 2016: Donald Trump elected as The President of the United States of America
May 2017: Cambridge Analytica might have influenced voters in Brexit Referendum
16 March 2018: Facebook senses Data leak through media reports
17 March 2018: Cambridge Analytica found culprit
18 March 2018: Demands explanation from Facebook
20th March 2018: Cambridge Analytica fires Alexander Mic
27th March 2018: Christopher claims INC a client of their firm.
29th March 2018: Indian Government issued a notice to Facebook ,
PROCESS
Alexander Kogan, a Data Scientist at the Cambridge University developed an app called “This is your digital life”. He
provided the app to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica in turned arranged an informed consent process for research
in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey only for academic use.
However, Facebook’s design not only allowed this app to collect the personal information of people who agreed to take the
survey but also the personal information of all those people in those users Facebook social network, In this way Cambridge
Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.
IMPACT OF DATA SCANDAL
Humans have become more vigilant regarding their data privacy and organisations need to understand this notion and begin
to take data security seriously, especially with data protection laws coming into force like the European General Data
Protection Regulation. Richard Holmes, cyber services lead at CGI UK touched on this fact stating, “ GDPR demands the
organizations have a legal basis for processing the personal information. Individuals will increasingly demand to know how
their data is used and when it is shared. Terms and conditions of collecting and processing personal information will need to
be much clearer to meet this demand.
RESPONSE OF MARK ZUCKERBERG
Facebook Director Mark Zuckerberg first apologized for the situation with Cambridge Analytica on CNN, calling it a “issue”,
a “mistake” and a “breach of trust”.
Other Facebook officials argued against calling it a “data breach”, arguing those who took the personality quiz originally
consented to give their information.
Mark Zuckerberg wrote that they have a responsibility to protect the people’s data and if they are not able to do that then they
don’t deserve to serve the people i.e. us and they did a big mistake. He also said that there is more to do and they need to set
up and do it.
Mark Zuckerberg has apologized in front of US Congress for the data misused by the third party
RESPONSE OF CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
Cambridge Analytica says that the company has done nothing wrong so far and has appeared to cooperate with the
investigators.
Cambridge Analytica Said Christopher Wylie is misrepresenting himself and the company and strongly denies the claims made
by The New York Times. The Guardian and Channel 4 news
CONSEQUENCES
Due to the data breach the personal data of 267 million Facebook users were exposed online on a database for SMS and
phishing scams. Names were left exposed on the web for anyone to access without a password or any other authentication.
This allowed data brokers with the ability to browse users private messages and to see the names, contact details, and the
activities of their friends.
For starter Facebook is going to audit apps
Facebook is going to restrict developers access.
Facebook will show user tool to the user to help them see what apps are using their data and how they can stop them.
Stock Price dropped by 19% and the decline which erased about 129 billion market value.
Active Users grew just 22 million. The lowest such number since at least 2011.
CONCLUSION
Facebook, is a social media conglomerate which has connected billions of people across the globe and made
millions in the process through advertisement. However, by disregarding legal & ethical concerns, it became
vulnerable to the third parties which exploited private data of its users towards political purposes. Nevertheless
Facebook’s response to the scandal was quick and its administration evaluated the situation and took positive
measures to restore the confidence.
Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg have done a remarkable job by building a successful company. However, now that
privacy issues with Facebook are finally on their radar, they need to come up with a permanent fix of the problem.
The company must fix the growing privacy issues associated with it without in any way hampering the company’s
revenues in the process. Else, the organization shall be in the danger of wide open government-imposed solutions.
The danger with such a contingency is that when the government comes to fix a problem, it often acts as trying to kill
a mosquito with a nuclear weapon. The solution therefore is that Facebook must restrict itself and restrain third
parties from accessing or pulling out the personal and private data of its users without obtaining their explicit
consent.
SUGGESTIONS AND SOLUTIONS
Be Ethical
Be Vigilant
Be Active
REFERENCES
Search engine used: Google and Bing.
Sites from where the information's were accumulated:
www.ukessays.com
www.slideshare.net
