FB data leak is a warning

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is silent after a data harvesting scandal engulfed his social media platform. He must put on his thinking cap after the value of his 16 per cent Facebook stake dropped by Rs 36,000 crores in just a day’s NYSE trading. He must share with Facebook’s two million users what went wrong as the personal data of over 50 million users ended up in Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook gave access to its data to a researcher, which landed in the hands of Cambridge Analytics, that offers its services to businesses and entities desiring to change audience behaviour by combining data with behavioural science. It’s freely surmised that such tinkering may have helped Mr Trump win the presidency.

Big data breaches are unsettling given the power tech titans now exercise. How to rein them in is a huge challenge. A good example is Facebook, that offers its service free, but people then entrust it with every detail of their lives. It’s a myth that users own the data and content they post on Facebook, and control how it’s shared. The reality differs. Facebook will flog the data to enrich itself, which the Cambdrige Analytica case clearly demonstrates. In India, Aadhaar is a different story: it collects data compulsorily but poses as much of a grave threat in data leakage.