Facebook's week of shame: the Cambridge Analytica fallout
Facebook’s week of shame: the Cambridge Analytica fallout
Mark Zuckerberg kept his silence – then did little to assuage the anger in a week that laid bare the worst of Silicon Valley
Tim Adams
Sat 24 Mar 2018 17.11 EDT
The first act in this drama was a legal challenge by Facebook, an attempt to suppress Carole’s interview with the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie the day before it appeared. They must have known a little of what was coming.
When Zuckerberg did eventually come out to try to explain this, his crafted statement was another effort to make the exploitation of the 50 million profiles seem like a technical problem, a glitch. His tone was the default position of T-shirted Silicon Valley plutocrats who insist that they are on our side, while squirrelling away their billions. What had happened was not a data breach “but a breach of trust”, he suggested, a sentiment he repeats in a personal advertisement in today’s newspapers, including the Observer.
This appeal to Facebook users’ faith in its better nature recalled an infamous recorded exchange from the early days of Facebook at Harvard, when Zuckerberg was in conversation with a friend.
Zuck: “Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.”
Friend: “What? How’d you manage that one?”
Zuck: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks!”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/24/facebook-week-of-shame-data-breach-observer-revelations-zuckerberg-silence