Playboy Pulls The Plug On Facebook
The Playboy organization has pulled the plug and shut down all of it’s Facebook pages.
Playboy is the latest among thousands of Facebook users who are leaving the social media giant in the light of recent data sharing developments.
Here’s what happened:
The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, legally acquired the private data of roughly 50 million Facebook users, and used it to target voters on behalf of the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
What happened with Cambridge Analytica wasn’t technically a data breach, since this trove of personal information wasn’t stolen from Facebook’s servers at all. Rather, it was given away freely to the maker of a Facebook personality quiz app called “ThisIsYourDigitalLife.”
That app, which was developed by a University of Cambridge professor, collected data about the 270,000 people who installed it, along with data about their Facebook friends, totaling 50 million people in all. The professor, Aleksandr Kogan, then gave the data he had harvested to Cambridge Analytica… all legitimate and legal.
Third-party apps collect vast amounts of detailed personal information about Facebook users every day, including their ages, location, pages they’ve liked and groups they belong to. Users can opt out of Facebook sharing specific pieces of information, but it’s unclear how many do elect not to share. It is also unclear if any of the collected data was useful in electing President Trump at all. One can only wonder if there would be this kind of uproar if the data in question was collected and used by the opposing political party instead.
This kind of broad data collection is not only allowed but encouraged by Facebook, which wants to keep developers happily building on top of its platform. But in the wake of incidents like the data leak to Cambridge Analytica, some are questioning the costs of such loose policies on an influential platform with 2.2 billion registered users.
