Question

Facebook’s biggest problem isn’t ethics, hate or fake news. It’s Facebook. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal caught my eye: “Mark Zuckerberg Resolves to ‘Fix’ Facebook in 2018”

The article explains that the Facebook founder focuses on one major priority each year and Zuckerberg stated his current challenge in this way:

By any measure, Facebook is under attack. Facebook has been lambasted for allowing violent live videos, fabricated news articles, and Russia-backed advertising that disrupted the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

More recently, former executives and employees admitted they designed a platform meant to manipulate users into psychological dependence on Facebook.

The beloved social media platform built on cat memes and baby pictures has become a dark metropolis run by technologists determined to manipulate what we know and how we think.

Perhaps Facebook’s biggest mistake has been that it has never accepted the awesome responsibility that comes with being the biggest media channel in history. Is Mark Zuckerberg finally focusing on the right problem? Is he about to get ahead of the ethics curve?

I’m concluding that he cannot and will not fix Facebook’s core issues unless there is a threat of imminent and unavoidable government intervention. Allow me to explain.

It’s all about dwell time

The economic viability of every social platform is built on a simple formula: Attract users and hold their attention as long as possible (“dwell time”) so personal information can be collected that will fuel targeted ads.

We can view every Facebook problem through this lens. If a policy reduces dwell time, it will keep the company from attaining its never-ending goal of increasing quarterly profits.

Nearly every Facebook problem can somehow be connected to this simple economic truth. Dwell time increases through provocative posts and ads over dull ones. Dwell time will be enhanced through cunning psychological manipulators who make us addicted, over authentic and well-researched news stories. Controversy, sex, and violence drives dwell time more than truth and principled debate.

No tweak to algorithms, processes or policies can fix a problem that is the very foundation of Facebook’s economic success and rising stock price.

The self-service conundrum

The other economic issue at the heart of the company’s problem is the elegance of the Facebook self-service ad platform. When the controversy emerged about Russia manipulating public opinion through ads, I wasn’t surprised at all. I mean why wouldn’t somebody try this? On the other side, 60 Minutes reported how the Trump campaign used A/B testing to micro-manage ads in much the same way.

Anybody can advertise anything on Facebook as long as you have a valid credit card.

Accessibility and ease of use is a pillar that has made Facebook great.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that the majority of advertising purchased on Facebook is bought “without the advertiser ever speaking to anyone at Facebook.” His argument for this policy: “We don’t check what people say before they say it, and frankly, I don’t think our society should want us to.”

We don’t want Facebook to edit everything typed by our friends and family. But isn’t it reasonable for Facebook to review all of the content it gets paid (tens of billions of dollars) to publish and promote?

Facebook has demonstrated that it has the technology to do this. But it won’t, because it jeopardizes its economic model, which jeopardizes the quarterly number, which jeopardizes the stock price and individual wealth.

Remember, Facebook is running out of ad inventory. There is no way Facebook is going to take any meaningful action that would undermine ad sales in the forseeable future.

Facebook’s biggest problem

So here’s the situation.

• The economic foundations of Facebook are dependent on dwell time driven (at least in part) by provocative and controversial content.
• The company’s ad revenues are under pressure, meaning they can’t make any meaningful move that undermines dwell time or self-service ad sales.
• Historically, Facebook has not accepted its ethical responsibilities. The company has repeatedly demonstrated that it only responds to a problem after it has been caught.

In essence, Facebook’s biggest problem is … Facebook.

Can Mark Zuckerberg tackle these issues in the next year? No. In fact, the problems might become even worse because to truly solve the overwhelming ethical issues, the company would have to uproot its entire advertising model. Becoming more ethical hurts their bottom line.

Zuckerberg will not fix Facebook’s problems because he has no immediate economic incentive to do so.

The only thing that matters

The only thing that will force the company to change is an extreme threat to its reputation that could impact its stock price. If Zuckerberg believes that public opinion against Facebook is so bad that the government would consider regulation, he will take action to improve the company’s reputation and hold that off. The truth is, tech firms have enjoyed a hands-off approach from Washington but this is changing.

These data points indicate a growing alarm over the power of monopolistic and unresponsive tech firms. Is internet legislation and government oversight on the horizon?

I think this development could tip the economics of Facebook and drive a proactive response. If the cost of defending his firm from potentially harmful legislation is greater than the impact on ad revenues, Mark Zuckerberg may actually do the right thing and get ahead of the ethics curve.

Source: https://businessesgrow.com/2018/01/08/facebooks-biggest-problem/

Facebook is an internet dependent social network,and as stated in the article has violated consumer privacy frequently.

With regards to the above examine the technical challenges to privacy regarding internet based applications. .

Answer 1

In this modern era of data and computational power available, solving any kind of problem is not a big deal, in fact computers can solve better problem than a human. So, you name any services and you will find an internet based application regarding that, from simplest of things to most complicated tasks. So, to provide certain services these internet based applications ask us for a lot information, which they use in many ways possible. We are going to see some privacy issues that could arise due to providing such information to them:

1. Identity Theft - Most of the websites, requires us to fill up registration forms which takes information such as name, date of birth, email id, phone number and these things are enough for a professional hacker to breach into our bank accounts and other confidential affairs. Few social media sites could also manipulate our images for various purposes. So we should be really careful before entering any kind of information in the internet.
2. Tracking – “Cookies” is a very interesting yet powerful tool in the web applications. What it does is that it stores small chunks of information about our choices and preferences that we select or enter in a website and saves it in there server and when we visit that website again the cookie remember our information and auto fills the credential boxes. The problem here is that once we agree of accepting cookies, it saves all kind of information and sends to their servers which are a big privacy risk. Recently Facebook admitted that they could now even trace the non-Facebook users by seeing there activates from other websites with the help of collecting cookies stored in the like and dislike button in their content , so that they could show desired ads to the non-Facebook users.

Now information found in the websites could be categorized in 3 ways:

1. Personal information – Information such as a person’s name, age , email address, phone number , bank number etc could be kept under these category.
2. Online Behaviour – Information such as web activities, search patterns, shopping preferences falls under this category.
3. Communication – Information such as chat history , status update, email history , call records are counted in this category.

Now let us see some sources from where privacy breach could take place:

1. Unauthorized Websites – Websites which are not authorized by any government authorities or which do not follow certain http protocols falls under these categories. We should avoid entering our personal information in three kinds of websites.
2. Weak Security – These types of breaches mostly occur due to unauthorised access. Hackers nowadays could easily exploit us by our weak password patterns and security questions. The database of a particular website also plays a major role in these kind of glitches as most of the information available nowadays and open and accessible in many ways.
3. Data Collectors – Tool like cookies(as discussed earlier) , IP addresses, Trojan Horses, Software downloads anonymously collects many known and unknown data from us ,and which are later used by web agencies for various purposes.

So in conclusion, we are now living in a digitized world where information about anything and anybody is available   very easily and which are mostly exploited by the social media sites like face Facebook and others. So it is our sole responsibility to decide what to put and what not to put in a website.