Facebook Is Dying – From a Self-Inflicted Wound
by Temerity Forthright
On March 12th, I published an article on Independent Sentinel entitled, “Is Facebook Dying?”
It now appears that Facebook is suffering from a self-inflicted wound. It was revealed over the weekend that Facebook was embroiled in a data harvesting scheme from 2007 to 2014 that potentially compromised “large amounts of information” from 50 million Facebook users.
It took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg an unbelievable five days to respond to outrage from users and calls for an investigation. An online petition of Facebook users calling for full disclosure has already yielded over 15,000 signatures.
Facebook promised in the future to place restrictions on the amount of profile data that can be accessed by third-party developers and data-sharing apps. But the horse is already out of the barn.
When Facebook was made aware of the misuse of profile data in 2015 by “The Guardian” Zuckerberg made no effort to inform its users of the problem.
Zuckerberg’s mea culpa sounded hallow. He apologized during a CNN interview and said that if Facebook can’t protect people’s data, then they “don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.”
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I agree with that observation, and apparently, I’m not alone. Facebook users are deleting or deactivating their accounts and calling for others to do the same. The only problem is that Facebook makes it very difficult to do either of these things.
If you delete your account it can take 90 days for your data to be deleted. Other things on your Facebook account may stay in Facebook’s database. Deactivating your account simply means you hit pause, in case you want to change your mind. Even still, some information may still remain visible.
Zuckerberg admitted in the same CNN interview that he (Facebook) hasn’t done a very good job of dealing with other problems, such as combating fake news. It sounds as if Facebook hasn’t done a very good job at anything.
Only time will tell if Facebook is on life support, and whether it can recover from this self-inflicted wound.
Image from: clipart-library.com
