Behind Facebook’s baby step fixes: Defending its ad business
NEW YORK — Wondering why Facebook seems to be taking baby steps to address the biggest scandal in its history? Stronger safeguards on user data might damage Facebook’s core business of using what it knows about you to sell ads that target your interests.
Facebook is proposing only narrow countermeasures that address the specifics of the furor over Cambridge Analytica. That’s the data mining firm that worked for Donald Trump’s campaign, and now stands accused of lifting data from some 50 million Facebook users for the purpose of influencing voters.
Those measures, announced Wednesday by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, mostly involve new limits on what Facebook apps can do with the user data they collect. One such errant app was central to the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
But those steps don’t get at what many outsiders see as bigger problems at Facebook: its rampant data collection from users, its embrace of political ads that target individuals and small demographic groups with precision, and its apparent inability to end malicious use of its service by governments, shady corporations and criminal elements.