Anderson, "Don’t blame academics like me for Facebook’s privacy crisis" (New Scientist, Apr. 13, 2018)

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166331-dont-blame-academics-like-me-for-facebooks-privacy-crisis/

NEW SCIENTIST

13 April 2018

Don’t blame academics like me for Facebook’s privacy crisis

Mark Zuckerberg wonders what is going on at Cambridge University – I can tell him, but he won’t like what privacy 
researchers have found, says Ross Anderson

By Ross Anderson

Mark Zuckerberg has tried to deflect blame for Facebook’s privacy crisis by pointing the finger at my university. “We 
do need to understand whether there was something bad going on in Cambridge University overall, that will require a 
stronger action from us,” he told the US Senate this week.

There is a short answer to that, and a deeper one. The short answer is that when Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher whose 
“This Is Your Digital Life” app is at the heart of the current row, applied to use the data collected by his company in 
university research, our ethics committees turned him down flat. The reason? While the people who installed his app had 
consented to their data being used in research, their Facebook “friends” had not.

The deeper answer goes back almost 10 years, to when I asked two PhD candidates to choose a topic. They said “Facebook 
privacy”. Seeing my astonishment, one of them said “We don’t expect a married guy like you to appreciate this, but in 
Cambridge all the party invitations come via Facebook, so if you’re not on Facebook you go to no parties, you meet no 
girls, you have no sex, so you have no kids and your genes die out. It’s a Darwinian imperative to be on Facebook. Yet 
you seem to have no privacy. We’re wondering if it’s possible to fix that.”

Six months later, they gave it up as hopeless. Facebook operates by providing users with a false sense of security, of 
being in a private and intimate space, so they puts lots of sensitive information online – which Facebook’s advertisers 
can then use to target them.

Opting out is made deliberately difficult. Yet thanks to a decade of data on students’ privacy preferences, we now know 
that as time goes by, ever more users discover Facebook’s privacy settings and figure out how to use them. Facebook 
responds with periodic redesigns that often reset people to “sharing” their data with advertisers by default. As a 
result, users have to learn new and often confusing privacy controls. Yet, after each reset, more people choose to opt 
out.

Academia has indeed got a lot to say about Facebook and privacy, but maybe not the things that Mr Zuckerberg wants to 
hear. Facebook is powerful not because it has great products, but because of network effects; people need to use the 
tools that everyone else uses. Competing firms such as Instagram and WhatsApp get bought out. And research shows that, 
although people often disregard privacy, they are starting to learn not to.


Ross Anderson is professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory





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