The internet has been around now for a generation. I’ve been using it, on purpose and actively, since the early 1990s. I used a 2400 baud rate modem from work, a pre-owned IBM PS/2 from a friend, and his Prodigy account. At that time, there were around 10 million households that had computers with modems that were regularly used. Of the 25 million Americans that had ever been online, only 12 million of them used email more than once a week. Only 750 thousand people had been beyond the walls of their dial-up service and out onto the World Wide Web.[1]

Today there are over 247 million Americans online; more than 83 million of them say they are online constantly.[2] Remember, this is just in the U.S.

In the past 20 years billions of people all over the world have interacted trillions of times over the Internet. This has meant ample opportunity for data about you and what you do online to accumulate. This huge data pile is there for harvesting. By media companies, product companies, technology companies. By online retailers, offline retailers, mail-order retailers. By law enforcement, by criminals, by political interests.

No virtual location accumulates more data on people in a shorter period of time than Facebook. As of the last quarter of 2017, Facebook had some 2.2 billion people using it actively.[3] This rich bed of data is like eons of bat guano dropped in a cave, where every day is another eon.

Facebook like any other company has sought to monetize itself through the service it offers and the data it gathers. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who uses it. It is the “’you’ understood” of any interaction with a company, but certainly the default imperative for a company that is letting you use what it offers for free.

So, what is it about the recent matter involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data that has our hackles up? What did they do that’s so different than anything that any company acquiring data has done before and is doing now? If Cambrige Analytica hacked the data from Facebook, what’s Facebook’s responsibility?

As the saying goes, it’s never the crime, it’s always the cover-up.

First, it’s important to note that Facebook data wasn’t technically hacked. It was acquired legally through a personality quiz distributed on Facebook and willingly taken by some 300,000 people back in 2013. That data was extrapolated to some 50 million profiles on Facebook and ended up in the hands of the company Cambridge Analytica. The legality of their acquisition of this data from the professor who created the personality quiz is among the questions, but how they ended up with it was not through some kind of Facebook data breach.

Second, it is important to note that, once established as NOT a data breach, there have been a LOT of data breaches in just the last year alone. There were some 44 in 2017, including hundreds of millions of personal user records. Equifax, Yahoo, Uber, and a GOP data firm, to name just a few, have left hundreds of millions of asses hanging out in the wind, bared for examination.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, should have come out loud and strong, even if only with some pabulum, about how Facebook values its role in the world and the people who use it. Truth is, they didn’t do anything wrong; four years ago, Facebook technically fixed what made this kind of data acquisition by app developers possible. But whatever the facts, it’s all about framing.

The real issue here is bigger than our data, how it’s acquired, and how it is used. It is that the sneaking suspicions about the potential for nefarious use and abuse of personal data and, so it follows, the manipulation of our thinking and behavior, are blossoming into full-blown distrust. Distrust of authority and its institutions, businesses, media. This distrust is already present; stories like the possible manipulation of our behavior at the hands of an unseen malevolent enterprise just serves to reinforce a belief already present in the zeitgeist.

It isn’t that Facebook had done anything that any other company doesn’t try to do in one way or another — and something media companies have done in very rudimentary forms for decades — but that:

1. The seemingly mysterious nature of technology is at play in ways that feel distant and beyond our control. The sense that an invisible hand is moving us without our knowing it leaves us feeling helpless and so, afraid.

2. The narrative about social media has largely been one-sided, framed as more insidious than inspiring. Control of this narrative has been almost entirely ceded by Facebook, Twitter and others; whether because of arrogance or fear of more attention, the biggest players have let the framework be created without their input. An interesting exception, though not a very loud voice, has been Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman (I recommend Andrew Marantz’s recent piece in the 3/19/18 issue of the New Yorker).

3. Our relationship with Facebook and social media is far more intimate than it is with nearly every other product or medium. It surrogates large swaths of community; people outsource significant aspects of their identity to the network. But this intimacy is born not just by the network onto which we place so much of ourselves, but by the means of access. It’s that all this occurs through our mobile devices. Remember, Facebook available to everyone and the iPhone both hit the scene at nearly the same time (September 2006 and January 2007, respectively); mobile is social and social is mobile. The channel of access is not just some technological “other,” it’s an extension of the self; an appendage of our bodies.

The reason I ask has less to do with Cambridge Analytica and more to do with what our collective sense of value exchange is. Do you derive more value and meaning from your social media engagement than what you might be doing with that time in other ways? The fact that your engagement is being weaponaized is almost beside the point. Is our collective activity in the space — our outsourced identity, relationships, desperate quests for affirming existence — met with a net gain?

The most important outcome of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook kerfuffle will probably be people asking themselves about that value exchange relative to a variety of engagements with media and technology. The accentuation of the law of unintended consequences in this case could lead to people being more aware of what they’re doing and doing it more deliberately. Not a bad thing. Though I suppose an unintended consequence of thinking about unintended consequences is slowing down action in cases where slower action isn’t necessary.

Or, because our collective attention span isn’t terribly long, and we will all move on to a new distraction.

[1] Pew Research Center, “Americans Going Online… Explosive Growth, Uncertain Destinations,” October 16, 1995; http://www.people-press.org/1995/10/16/americans-going-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/

[2] Pew Research Center, “About a quarter of U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” March 14, 2018; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/14/about-a-quarter-of-americans-report-going-online-almost-constantly/

[3] Logged on some time in the last 30 days

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